Naomi Klein to Degrowth Conference: Climate Change Can Deliver 'People's Shock' [View all]

[GliderGuider]

Naomi Klein to Degrowth Conference: Climate Change Can Deliver 'People's Shock'

"The premise from which my book begins is one that I think we all pretty much agree on," Klein said, "that when it comes to addressing the climate crisis, we ... have failed catastrophically."

The "status quo is not an option," Klein said. "Radical change of some kind, whether physical or political, are our only options left. This is why the climate crisis challenges centrist liberals most of all because they subscribe to an ideology that is so resistant to the idea of radical change, to the idea of anything but incremental, reformist change."

As she argues in This Changes Everything, she said in her address that "our failure, most of all, has to do with the tragic, bad timing of this particular crisis." Scientific consensus on emissions-drive carbon crisis has been in for over 50 years, yet it took until the late 1980s when noted climate scientist James Hansen testified before Congress about the link between emissions and warming for it to hit a turning point in North America, she explained. Yet, she said, this same moment in time marked a so-called triumph of "liberal ideology." It was the time of the rise of "free trade" and WTO trade tribunals, austerity policies that clash with measures that could prevent and deal with climate disruption, the global north's refusal to own up to climate debts it owes the global south, and the privatization of energy sector fueled by profit motive. These liberal triumphs "systematically sabotaged the actions that were needed to respond to this crisis," she charged.

At the core of this, she said, is the notion that the climate crisis "is a civilizational wake-up call, a powerful message spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts and extinctions, telling us that we need an entirely new economic model, a new way of sharing the planet, telling us that we need to evolve."

An entirely new economic model, a new way of sharing the planet, and we need to evolve...

Is that all? Hey, we'll get right on it! The 20 or 30 years we have left should be enough for that, right?