This Changes Everything

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate is Naomi Klein's fourth book. Published in 2014, it explores the issue of climate change from an anticapitalistic political perspective and considers whether contemporary market-driven policies are adequate for responding to the global crisis. The book won the 2014 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and was adapted into a documentary by Avi Lewis.

Klein is a Canadian author, filmmaker, and activist whose work centers on anticapitalist critique and leftist political perspectives. She rose to fame with her first book, No Logo (1999), which critiqued global manufacturing and marketing practices for perpetuating exploitation and labor inequality. Other works of hers include The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) and On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019). She won the Sydney Peace Prize in 2016.

Summary

Klein bases her argument on the scientific consensus that at projected rates of carbon emissions, the world is heading toward an environmental catastrophe that will irreparably damage the natural world, destroy lives, and destabilize human society. She asks why so little has been done when the stakes are so high and argues that the answer is political. While the technology and ideas required to significantly reduce carbon emissions exist, there is little political will to shift economies to renewable-energy-based models. This is because the sweeping changes required to avoid a climate catastrophe run against the grain of the existing profit-based economic model and do not serve the financial interests of the wealthy and powerful elite who dominate politics and shape mainstream political discourse.

To cut carbon emission levels sufficiently, society must be prepared to change everything. In other words, people must think outside of the dominant economic and ideological model of free-market capitalism, carbon-intensive lifestyles, and deeply engrained cultural assumptions that humans can control and exploit nature as an endless resource. What’s required, in effect, is a new worldview. Klein also argues that the struggle against climate change is intimately linked to struggles for economic and social justice. To drive change, she argues that a grassroots mass movement is required to draw together various strands of existing social and political struggles.

Klein develops her position by looking at the political obstacles to climate change, including the climate change denial movement, the rise of neoliberalism, and the network of international free-trade agreements established in the ’80s and ’90s. She looks closely at the fossil fuel industry—its political power and the latest phase of expansion into destructive activities like fracking and tar-sand oil extraction. She also looks at the history of environmentalism, the pro-corporate stance of big green organizations, and the possibilities of large-scale technological solutions.

Klein considers alternative values and policies that could help combat climate change, from democratically controlled renewable energy infrastructure in Germany and eco-agriculture to international regulations and tax models that could direct funds from polluting industries into green public projects.

Finally, she looks at the emerging mass movement that she hopes has the power to lead these policies and repel the expansion of the fossil fuel industry. She sees the first stages of this movement in the loose coalition of local struggles around the world that is referred to as “Blockadia.” This movement, which sprang out of resistance to fossil fuel companies expanding in local areas, is drawing together people of different generations, races, and backgrounds. It unites Indigenous people and other populations in a shared struggle to save their communities and shape alternative ways of living that can collectively save the planet.

Klein organizes her book into three large parts, each containing three to five separate chapters. There is also a separate Introduction and Conclusion.

Part 1, “Bad Timing,” explores the political context in which the battle against climate change has been fought, along with the political dimensions and implications of climate change policy. By “bad timing,” she means that the need for collective action on climate change came into public awareness just as neoliberalism became the dominant political force on the planet.

Part 2, “Magical Thinking,” explores the various attempts to address climate change that Klein argues haven’t worked: large green groups partnering with big business to find market-based solutions; billionaires and philanthropists attempting to solve the problem on their own terms; and geoengineering and imagined future technologies. This is what Klein refers to as “magical thinking.”

Part 3, “Starting Anyway,” contains six chapters that explore forms of grassroots resistance to the expansion of the fossil fuel industry and community-led solutions to climate change. Klein considers the kind of mass movement she believes is required to drive real change and the integral role that Indigenous peoples and local struggles have in this wider movement.