Everything that you think you know about global warming is a lie.
This Changes Everything is as much about the psychology of denial as it is about climate change. “It is always easier to deny reality,” writes Naomi Klein, “than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of diehard Stalinist at the height of the purges as of libertarian climate deniers today.”As a result of human activities, large-scale climate change is under way, and if it goes on unchecked it will fundamentally alter the world in which humans will in future have to live. Yet the political response has been at best ambiguous and indecisive. Governments have backed off from previous climate commitments, and environmental concerns have slipped down the policy agenda to a point at which in many contexts they are treated as practically irrelevant.The first of the book’s three sections details how the environmental movement has been derailed by the financial crisis and the aftermath of austerity, together with the corporate promotion of climate denial. In the last of the three Klein deals with the movements that are springing up in a wide variety of contexts to challenge the neoliberal order. The second section, dealing with what Klein calls “magical thinking”, is in many ways the core of the book. Here she considers technical fixes for climate change, including schemes of geoengineering. In one of the more grandiose schemes, dimming the rays of the sun with sulfate-spraying helium balloons has been proposed in order to mimic the cooling effect on the atmosphere of large volcanic eruptions. The risks of such technical mega-fixes are obvious. As any climate scientist will tell you, we simply don’t know enough about the Earth system to be able to re-engineer it safely. Yet as Klein notes, such madcap schemes will surely be attempted if abrupt climate change gets seriously under way.
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 sulfuric 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.
Excellent points made in your last paragraph! One could quibble about whether capitalism is not inseparable from "the expanding demands of humankind," but the finitude of the world is inarguable... as is the world's capacity to keep on spinning without US. Climate change is often framed as an affront to the planet. It's really an affront to the sustainability of our form of life (and of the forms of life we've compromised) on a planet we've plundered. It'll keep on keeping on, long after we're gone. The issue is: will we stil be here?
ReplyDeleteExactly! will the Earth still have humans on it as time goes?
DeleteIt seems like you are arguing that the Earth will be alright regardless of what destruction we bring as a species to it, though the life itself may not be so lucky. Am I on the right track? If so, I agree with your thoughts and would love to hear an elaboration of it.
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