Guardian: John Gray reviews Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything"

[GliderGuider]

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate review – Naomi Klein’s powerful and urgent polemic

Klein is a brave and passionate writer who always deserves to be heard, and this is a powerful and urgent book that anyone who cares about climate change will want to read. Yet it is hard to resist the conclusion that she shrinks from facing the true scale of the problem. When I read The Shock Doctrine (Guardian review headline: “The end of the world as we know it”), I was unconvinced that corporate and political elites understood what they were doing in promoting the wildly leveraged capitalism of that time, which was already beginning to implode. The idea that corporate elites are in charge of the world is even less convincing today. The neoliberal order has recovered, and in some countries even achieved a spurious kind of stability, but only at the cost of worsening global conflicts. The fantasy of a global free market has given way to the murky struggles of geopolitics, with great powers jostling for control of natural resources. This is a dangerous world, but not because an all-powerful elite is in charge. None of the states contending for power in the Middle East, Ukraine or the South China Sea can control or predict the consequences of their actions. No one is in charge in the world’s conflicts.

Another problem with pinning all the blame for climate crisis on corporate elites is that humanly caused environmental destruction long predates the rise of capitalism. As Klein herself observes in an interesting chapter on what she calls “extractivism” – the economic model that treats the Earth as a bundle of resources waiting to be exploited – human activity was already changing the climate centuries ago. “We started treating the atmosphere as a waste dump when we began using coal on a commercial scale in the late 1700s and engaged in similarly reckless ecological practices well before that.” Moreover, though Klein doesn’t explore the fact, it’s worth bearing in mind that the extractive model was applied on a vast scale in the centrally planned economies of the former Soviet Union and Mao’s China, where some of the largest and worst 20th-century environmental catastrophes occurred.

Along with most environmentalists nowadays, Klein doesn’t discuss overpopulation. But there can be little doubt that population pressure has been a powerful driver of environmental crisis. The extractive economy began with the invention of agriculture, which may itself have been a response to rising human numbers. Even before the spread of farming, migrating hunter-gatherers were implicated in a number of great extinctions. Population growth is slowing in many countries at the present time, but there will still be 8 or 9 billion human beings on the planet within the lifetime of many now living and pressures on resources can only increase.

Though she identifies the prevailing type of capitalism as the culprit in the climate crisis, Klein doesn’t outline anything like an alternative economic system, preferring instead to focus on particular local struggles against environmental damage and exploitation. In many ways this makes sense, but in a global environment of intensifying scarcities, giving priority to local needs is unlikely to be a recipe for harmony. Whether in the Congo in the 1960s or Iraq at the present time, internecine conflicts – exploited and aggravated by the geopolitical stratagems of great powers – have led to a condition of endemic war.

Throughout This Changes Everything, Klein describes the climate crisis as a confrontation between capitalism and the planet. It would be more accurate to describe the crisis as a clash between the expanding demands of humankind and a finite world, but however the conflict is framed there can be no doubt who the winner will be. The Earth is vastly older and stronger than the human animal. Even spraying sulphuric acid into the stratosphere will not trouble the planet for long. The change that is under way is no more than the Earth returning to equilibrium – a process that will go on for centuries or millennia whatever anyone does. Rather than denying this irreversible shift, we’d be better off trying to find ways of living with it.

Gray puts his finger squarely on what I believe to be the salient blind spots in Klein's analysis.

[pscot]

1. Just based on reviews and comments

I thought the way she framed the issue was too narrow. At this point I doubt it makes much difference.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. " No one is in charge in the world’s conflicts. " ???????

Really?

Sheesh.

[The2ndWheel]

3. You can't fix the problem

The issue is our success as a species, in whatever aspect you wish to talk about. People want to dance around that, because of all the implications of it.

Or, maybe it isn't success that's the issue, but our self awareness of the downsides of it. If a bunch of lions eat too many zebras, then there won't be as many lions around. The lions die, and then there are more zebras. The cycle goes on.

We seem to think that we can regulate ourselves, without having to give anything up. That's never going to happen.