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disruptor? pseudo-populism?

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Fighting Fascists Together with Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor

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that was when we started to see the first like contractor run cities, I had a little part of the shock doctrine about about um Sandy Springs. And then

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of course there's this continuity where it's actually Milton Freriedman's grandson um who um uh has been partnered with

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Teal for a long time on these various sort of mostly failed attempts to start their own countries like Seasteading. Um

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naomicle.org or and just the contact page because that will go to Jackie Joiner who is working is on the tour in

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Our analysis focuses on the three strands that make up this unprecedented apocalyptic alliance:

1. The religious end timers who want to accelerate Armageddon in the middle east so the messiah will arrive. 2. The tech end timers, determined to incinerate our world to build their AI data centers and digital gods. 3. And the ethno-nationalist end timers, busy prepping for collapse by hoarding resources and fortressing the border.

The reading list that follows is by no means a complete list of sources, and it does not address the much broader topic of fascist history and ideology, though it goes without saying that a great many excellent and essential works exist on that topic. Instead, we wanted to lift up just some of the texts (and one podcast) that we found particularly useful as we explored various aspects of these reactionary tendencies and the bunkered mentality that unites them.

This list is far from exhaustive. There are many other excellent resources that we don’t have space to recommend and there’s also much more to our book, including a positive vision of an anti-fascist earth-bound politics. Maybe we’ll even do a Fighting End Times Fascism reading list next. But first we need to understand the treacherous forces we’re up against, and any one of these texts are good places to start.

BUNKER ONE: The Religious End Timers

Daniel G. Hummel, Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations

Tal Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism

Matthew Taylor, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy

Across the Divide podcast

BUNKER TWO: The Tech End Timers

Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres , “The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence,” First Monday

Sarah T. Roberts and Mél Hogan, “Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth,” boundary 2

Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI

Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed

BUNKER THREE: The Ethno-Nationalist End Timers

Robin D. G. Kelley, “Between the Fires in Los Angeles and Fascism in America,” Hammer & Hope

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

Kenneth D. Rose, One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture

Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization

Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis

Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

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Naomi Klein: AI is a fascist idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEf-MNsyUiE

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DENIAL BC AI NEEDS MAX ELECTRICAL POWER COAL NUKE PEDDLE AS AGW SOLUTION MAGICAL THINKING NAOMI? HAO?

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An alliance between the far right and Silicon Valley oligarchs has given rise to a form of “end times fascism,” says journalist Naomi Klein, who details in a recent essay co-authored with Astra Taylor how many wealthy elites are preparing for the end of the world even as they contribute to growing inequality, political instability and the climate crisis. Klein says that while billionaires dream of escaping to bunkered enclaves or even to space, President Donald Trump and other right-wing leaders are turning their countries into militarized fortress states to keep out immigrants from abroad and ramp up authoritarian control domestically.

“There’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but fascism of the 1930s and ’40s had a horizon” for a utopian future, says Klein. Today, by contrast, “we’re up against people who are actively betting against the future — not just actively betting against it, but fueling the fires that are burning this world.”

IFrame Content

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We spend the rest of the hour with award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein. She has a major new piece out, co-authored with Astra Taylor, for The Guardian newspaper. It’s headlined “The rise of end times fascism.” It looks at the apocalyptic fervor of the far right.

In it, they write, quote, “[T]he most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating. That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the [hard] right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers,” Naomi Klein writes.

She is also professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice. Her latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.

Naomi, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. If you can start off by talking about your piece and what exactly you mean by talking about the end times, fascism?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, it’s very good to be with you, Amy.

This isn’t the most cheerful piece I’ve ever written, with Astra Taylor, a very close collaborator, founder of the Debt Collective. And we were trying to kind of map what is similar and what is different about the type of far-right politics that we’re seeing today. And I should say, the piece is not only grim. It also looks at what this can mean for a response to this particular form of fascism, because we can’t fight it if we don’t understand it. So, I think a lot of very good scholarship attempting to understand authoritarianism today, whether it’s Trump or figures like Duterte or Modi, have looked at similarities between these far-right figures and, say, Mussolini or Hitler, and have taken a kind of a checklist approach of looking at what is similar to the past, right? And I think there’s a lot of value in that. But the risk of it is that it doesn’t look at what is new and what is particular to our time.

Fascism always is an attempt by the right to resolve a crisis of its own era. Right? So, in the 1930s, they were attempting to resolve, you know, in Germany, the humiliations of the First World War, the impacts of the Great Depression, and to propose a unity in the face of that for the in-group. But our moment is different, and one of the things that makes it different — I mean, if you think about fascism in the 1930s, this is before the atomic bomb. It’s before they understood climate change. And we are in a moment where our elites, whether they admit it or not, do understand that our economic model — and I’ve written books about this and talked about it with you in the past — is at war with life on Earth, right? And they are barreling down this road of more and more extraction of fossil fuels, of all kinds of — you know, basically, anything they can extract from this Earth and turn into energy and money, particularly now with AI, which is a energy and resource hog — water, LNG, critical minerals, all of it.}:

So, we’re trying to understand how this is informing the kind of fascism that we’re seeing, and also we’re trying to understand what unites this kind of strange Frankenstein coalition that Trump represents, where he’s bringing together these — you know, the richest people in the world who have ever existed with many working-class people, so what binds the vision, right?

:{:{And what we cope with in this piece, or what we propose in this piece, is that they all have given up on this world. Like, they all have bought into a kind of apocalyptic fever — right? — whether it’s Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and their investments in outer space and sort of writing off this planet, whether AI, which is willing to sacrifice this animate world in order to build an artificial world, or whether it’s the more populist MAGA vision of the fortress nation-state — right? — which is thinking, “OK, we know more and more people are going to be coming. }:

We know that disaster is on the horizon.” I’ve listened to a lot of Steve Bannon for — you know, when I was writing Doppelganger, and it’s all very survivalist, right? You know, all of the commercials, pretty much, are selling, you know, gold, because the economy is going to collapse, you know, ready-to-eat meals for 90 days, because you never know what’s going to happen. So, it sees the nation and the in-group as being inside the bunker, and then it’s exiling the out-group to all of these lawless territories that you’ve been covering on the show. So, it’s not the same vision, but what it shares is this apocalyptic fever.}:

And then, of course, all of it is following a similar structure, like narrative structure, to the biblical Rapture. And, of course, you have people who believe in that within the Trump coalition, who are, you know, Christian Zionists, like Mike Huckabee and Pete Hegseth, who believe that the actual end times is coming, and they think it’s all going to go down in Israel. And all of the horror that you report on so well and so committedly on the show, these are all good signs if you believe in the Rapture, right? Because it means that the end is coming, and the faithful are going to be lifted up to a golden city in the sky. So, you know, what we’re looking at is like the religious version of that story, the the fundamentalist religious version of that story, where you literally believe you’re going to be saved and taken up to heaven, but also the secular vision, where your wealth protects you, or your citizenship protects you, and you get your own version of that golden, bunkered city.

:{:{AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned Gaza, and you just came from the Jewish Voice for Peace conference in Baltimore, where several thousand people gathered from around the country. Our latest headline, the Israeli military calling up tens of thousands of reservists as Israel’s security cabinet unanimously approved plans this weekend to expand its assault on Gaza, where Israel has already killed over 52,000 Palestinians — and that’s by far an undercount — in the last 18, 19 months. Israel has killed more than 2,400 Palestinians just since it shattered the ceasefire in March. This comes as Israel’s devastating blockade in food aid has entered its third month. Palestinian health officials say 57 Palestinians have already starved to death.}:

According to UNICEF, more than 9,000 children have been admitted for treatment for acute malnutrition so far this year. And aid groups, like Norwegian Refugee Council, blasting a new Israeli proposal to take control in distribution and put U.S. security contractors in charge. If you can talk, as you so often do, about what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank and what the centrality of Israel in President Trump and the current U.S. government — although it was also the past, President Biden’s worldview and approach to foreign policy?}:

NAOMI KLEIN: So, I don’t think there is a single answer to understanding what the driving forces are. And this is what we’re trying to get at, is that there’s a kind of an overlap of these different apocalyptic worldviews. Some of them are religious, and some of them are secular, right? So, I think that people who subscribe to this, like, literalist version of the Rapture believe that all of this is good news, in the sense that, according to the story that they believe in, that the Israelites have to return to Greater Israel. Those are the preconditions for the return of the Messiah. They have to rebuild the Third Temple. So you have this convergence of interests between the religious extremists and the Netanyahu government, who are absolutely committed to rebuilding the Third Temple. They really want to do it. They want to destroy Al-Aqsa. This is why so much attention is focused on it.

But then, you know, does Trump believe that? I don’t think Trump believes that. I mean, what he views for Gaza is he sees resources. He sees money. He sees a private, you know, resort.

AMY GOODMAN: Resort.

NAOMI KLEIN: Exactly. But this is something I’ve been saying from the beginning. I think the interests have been fairly consistent in terms of what the end goal is, which is a depopulation of Gaza, pushing Palestinians out, whether through death or whether through forced exile, whether through ethnic cleansing. And under the Biden administration, there was a denial that that was what was going on. And under the Trump administration, it’s all out in the open. So, you know, this is what is going on.

Now, what the reason for that is, I think, differs. But this is what — part of what we’re getting at in the piece, Astra and I, is that there is a confluence of interests in terms of what Israel represents. Some of the supporters of the Trump administration in the tech industry are talking about wanting freedom cities, for instance, these privatized, corporate cities. And they talk about this as tech Zionism. They have a lot of admiration for the idea that Israel was created, they say, you know, from a book, Theodor Herzl’s books. And they said, “Well, why can’t we start our own country, our own private countries? Why do we have to — you know, why do we have to abide by the rules of the nation-state?”

So, I think part of the support for Israel isn’t just our classic understandings either of Jewish Zionism or Christian Zionism, although that’s absolutely going on. It’s also this idea of a very technologically advanced startup country, right? Israel has marketed itself that way. And a lot of these tech companies want to do that in San Francisco. They want to push everybody out who doesn’t agree with them, who’s poor, who have more needs, and create their kind of corporate, privatized utopia. So, you know, I’m not saying this is a coherent agenda. I’m saying that there’s a lot of overlapping stories that follow a similar structure and share similar goals, if that makes sense.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, yes, I mean, the overall issue, obviously, is hard to make sense of.

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And most Trump’s supporters are neither wealthy nor are they Christian Zionists. So, why are they backing this whole approach?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, it’s not clear the extent to which they actively back it, but I think that they see a kinship in the ethnostate — right? — because a lot of Trump supporters are becoming increasingly Christian nationalist about the United States. And this has been carefully fostered by figures like Steve Bannon. And so, when they look at Israel, they see a country that is openly an ethnostate that is fortressing itself in a sea of its enemies, you know, and they want to do something similar. And they’re sharing technologies. They’re sharing, you know, legal precedents, tools. So, there’s a — you know, there’s a kinship. And, you know, we’re seeing this now with India with its attacks on Kashmir, following us, you know, using similar techniques that, you know, Israel has used in Gaza. So, there is a kind of a solidarity of the ethnostates. And they are sharing — you know, they’re even trading trinkets of golden pagers and swapping chainsaws. You know, this is something that we — I think, you know, when you’re inside the crucible of it here in the United States under Trump, it’s hard to see the extent to which this is an international project on the right, and they are influencing one another.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does unite them, you know, this whole fortress mentality, is this hatred of immigrants. You have —

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — President Trump just saying he doesn’t even know — he’s not a lawyer, so he doesn’t know if he has to uphold the Constitution, he said.

NAOMI KLEIN: Right. I mean, this is what I’m trying to get at about the awareness that we are in an age of consequences, that when you don’t act in the face of the climate crisis for decades, when scientists have been warning you, that more and more of the world becomes uninhabitable, and, lo and behold, people move to try to find safety in the face of wars, in the face of economic deprivation and in the face of ecological disasters.

And so, that fortressing of the nation-state — and this is what I think, you know, Israel’s come to represent, just as a very small nation that is extremely fortressed — right? — whether it’s with the high-tech walls, the Iron Dome. Trump says now, “I want not an Iron Dome, but a golden dome.” Right? That —

AMY GOODMAN: Here.

NAOMI KLEIN: Here. That all of this is, whether it’s stated explicitly or not —

AMY GOODMAN: And a military parade that’ll cost tens of millions —

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — of dollars, even as he slices and dices the government, on his birthday, in June.

NAOMI KLEIN: Right. So the pattern is protecting the in-group and exiling and cleansing the out-groups. Right? And so, that, I think, is — you know, if there is support among the MAGA base for Israel, it’s less out of a love for Israel than more out of an identification, like they are doing what we want to do here.

AMY GOODMAN: You write many things in your piece, and I just want to go to one of them. You say — in talking about Musk’s apocalyptic vision, you talk about, and also detailing the end times fascism, this whole issue of the rise of the city state, the corporate city state. I think this is a new concept for many. They’re not going to know what you’re talking about.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: In southern Texas, Starbase, just this group of people, who are mainly workers at SpaceX, have just voted to make a city right there?

NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, yeah. And we’ve had sort of — I mean, the idea of a company town is not entirely new, right? And Disney had Celebration, Florida, and there are lineages to this, right? Colonial lineages to this. You know, I live in Canada, which started as the Hudson’s Bay Company, right? So it was a company before it was a country. So there is some precedent for this.

But I think what this is — I’ve been following this out of the corner of my eye, Amy, because this is where libertarians have been going for a while. There was an — Peter Thiel has been obsessed with this idea. It’s increasingly being called exit, so exiting the nation and just starting your own country, where you can set your own tax level, you can make your own regulations.

AMY GOODMAN: Or not.

NAOMI KLEIN: Or not. And countries — and these little corporate countries will compete with one another to try to attract capital, right? So, in a way, it’s an extension of the free trade zone — right? — where this is, in a way, like a denationalized country within a country. But Trump started to float this in 2023, the idea that he would create 10 freedom cities, on the campaign trail. I don’t think his base much knew what he was talking about. But now you have all these lobbyists who fully intend to take him up on it. And we’re starting to see the beginning of this with this SpaceX city.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you also write about El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, the notorious prison, CECOT, where so many hundreds of people have been sent from the United States, and at the same time, in the last 24 hours, President Trump saying he wants to reopen the notorious Alcatraz —

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — an island in San Francisco. If you can talk about the prison as a model for what Trump wants to put forward, and particularly in relation, as we see motivating so much, to immigrants?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, this is an incredibly bleak vision. So, repression is always a huge part of any kind of fascist project, right? You need to contain the out-group. You need to disappear the out-group. So this part of it is not new. But I think what is so worrying to me is that Trump was elected promising all kinds of things to his base, right? He promised to eliminate inflation. He promised to bring these great jobs home. He’s not delivering on any of that. So the sadistic part of his project is really all he has to offer, right?

I think one of the most chilling things I’ve ever seen in the United States was Trump sharing that video at his hundred-day rally of just pure sadism, of just looking at prisoners, as entertainment, being shaved, being shackled, being paraded. And he’s not delivering on the price of eggs. And he’s not delivering on the jobs, by the way, because he’s throwing all in— he’s going all in on AI. So the jobs that are coming back seem to be mainly for robots. It’s not actually for his base. And so, this scales up the need for the sadism and these spectacles, right? And I think that that’s what something like Alcatraz represents. He’s a TV producer, first and foremost, right? He’s producing spectacles. And the less he has to offer economically, tangibly, materially, the more he leans on the sadism.

AMY GOODMAN: You write, “The governing ideology of the far right … has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. … Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them.” What would that movement look like, or what do you see is being formed right now?

NAOMI KLEIN: You know, what we’re doing in this piece by laying out the bleakness of the vision — and when I say “bleakness,” you know, I think it’s beyond something we’ve seen before, because there’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but fascism of the 1930s and '40s had a horizon. Like, after the apocalypse, people were being promised a future, a pastoral, peaceful little piece of land where they could live out their lives, you know? Even though Trump talks about a golden age, there really isn't a future that the base believes in, you know? And this is what I’ve learned by consuming far too much MAGA media, Amy. They envision a future of endless war, right? And this is why they’re bunkering down. This is why they’re buying ready-to-eat meals to last. This is why they’re buying gold and crypto. They think the whole thing is going down. So —

AMY GOODMAN: And why Elon Musk is trying to have so many children, at least 14 at this point. But he’s actually explicitly texted it, saying, “We’ve got to do this much faster,” as he proposed to one of the women he has children with, saying, “We’ve got to start using surrogates.”

NAOMI KLEIN: So, they don’t believe in the future, is the bottom line. And that is — you know, I think I’ve been in a lot of progressive spaces in recent months where we’ve talked about building these very broad coalitions, including with people who we don’t entirely disagree with. I’ve never encountered a potential coalition more broad than the idea of: How about if we believe in this world? How about if we believe in the future? Because we’re up against people who are actively betting against the future, right? Not just actively betting against it —

AMY GOODMAN: Twenty seconds.

NAOMI KLEIN: — but fueling the fires that are burning this world, actively fueling it. So, I think that if we have the courage, really, to look at the bleakness of what they believe in, which is an apocalyptic future, then we have our work cut out for us of being the people who actually believe in this realm, in this world, in the beauty of creation and of each other.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning journalist, author, columnist. We’ll link to your piece with Astra Taylor, “The rise of end times fascism.” I’m Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now!

NOW READ:Trump’s clown car cabinet is driving off a cliff

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Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor tell The Guardian that corporate city-states are back in fashion thanks to Trump politics indulging tax-hating millionaires and billionaires to start their own high-tech fiefdoms.

A “glorified gated communit[ies]” like Próspera on a Honduran island and Elon Musk’s distant proposal of “a handful of people and robots eke[ing] out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars) appear to be catching on with ultra-wealthy members of the Trump circle.

End-time communities were on the rise in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 “freedom cities” on federal lands. And since election, “would-be country starters have been on a lobbying blitz, determined to turn Trump’s pledge into reality.” Próspera Chief of Staff Trey Goff called the new energy in DC “absolutely electric, and legislation “paving the way for a bevy of corporate city-states” complete by the end of the year, Klein writes.

It’s a fantasy word evolved from the “doom-prepping” movement of the first Trump administration, only now fueled by ultra-wealthy “religious end-timers.” It also hastens the degradation of the only world humanity realistically has, Klein and Taylor say.

IFrame Content

“Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s right-wing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them,” says Klein, a Canadian author.

There is no second planet to occupy, however, and reducing humanity to a tiny dome on a distant island or mountain peak requires a commitment to letting a huge swathe of humanity die. So, how do you break the apocalyptic fever?

“… We help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries,” Klein writes. “We must first understand … [that] we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.”

Second, Klein advises countering “their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.”

Read the full Guardian article at this link.

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https://www.alternet.org/Bank/rfk-jr-2661316163/

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https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/03/04/grijalva-warns-against-fossil-fuel-lobbys-drilling-push-amid-ukraine-war

Grijalva Warns Against Fossil Fuel Lobby's Drilling Push Amid Ukraine War

"We can't let the fossil fuel industry scare us into a domestic drilling free-for-all that is neither economically warranted nor environmentally sound," said the U.S. congressman.

JULIA CONLEY

March 4, 2022

U.S. House Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl Grijalva on Friday warned that days into Russia's war on Ukraine, the U.S. fossil fuel industry has launched a misinformation campaign aimed at promoting even more oil and gas drilling as the key to ending the conflict and aiding Ukrainians.

In an opinion piece[GUK]at The Guardian, the Arizona Democrat pointed to a list of demands the American Petroleum Institute—the largest lobbying firm for the U.S. oil and gas sector—released just before Russian forces invaded Ukraine last week, including "Release permits for energy development on public lands" and "Accelerate energy infrastructure permitting."

Such demands wrongly portray a fossil fuel industry "hobbled" by President Joe Biden and suggest the U.S. must flood the global market with oil and gas to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin, Grijalva wrote."I feel duty-bound to set the record straight," wrote the congressman. "We can't let the fossil fuel industry scare us into a domestic drilling free-for-all that is neither economically warranted nor environmentally sound."

"Much to my deep disappointment and protest, this administration actuallyapproved more U.S. drilling permits per month in 2021 than President Trump did during each of the first three years of his presidency," the congressman said.

The fossil fuel industry has already laid claim to at least 26 million acres of public land, he wrote, and has more than 9,000 approved drilling permits that companies have yet to use, as well as federal offshore oil and gas leases covering more than eight million acres.

"With the facts laid bare, we see the fossil fuel industry's crocodile tears for what they are—the same old demands for cheaper leases and looser regulations they've been peddling for decades," wrote Grijalva. "These pleas have nothing to do with countering Putin's invasion or stabilizing gas prices, and everything to do with making oil and gas development as easy and profitable as possible."

As Fossil Free Media director Jamie Hennwrote at Common Dreams earlier this week, API, the fossil fuel giants it represents, and right-wing lawmakers who count the industry among their major donors believe "they can fool the public into thinking that more U.S. fossil fuel production will help Ukraine and harm Putin."

"API likes to pretend that more infrastructure will allow the U.S. to somehow flood the global market with enough oil and gas that Putin won’t sell any of his, but that's not how markets work," Henn wrote. "As long as the world is still reliant on fossil fuels, money will be flowing into the Putin regime."

The fossil fuel lobby has been joined by Republicans and anti-climate Democrats in Congress in its push to capitalize on the crisis in Ukraine, which has so far displaced more than a million people and killed more than 2,000 people, according to the Ukrainian emergency service.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who has opposed his own party's proposals to shift toward renewable energy as part of the Build Back Better Act, this week called on the U.S. to "ramp up domestic energy production," while Republicans claimed in a letter to Biden on Wednesday that the halting of the Keystone pipeline project left the U.S. and its allies "vulnerable to the malicious maneuverings of Vladimir Putin," urging him to approve more pipeline and offshore drilling permits and loosen environmental regulations.

Naomi Klein, author of "The Shock Doctrine," suggested on Twitter that the right's push for more drilling amid Ukraine's deadly crisis is an example of "disaster capitalism."[twit manchin

right-wing lawmakers are also exploiting Americans' struggles with rising prices on essential goods, Grijalva said, claiming increased oil and gas extraction will lower the cost of fuel.

"But if that's true, why hasn't record oil extraction from both federal and non-federal lands over the last decade done anything to consistently lower, or at least stabilize, prices at the pump?" asked Grijalva.

Rather than ramp up oil and gas drilling, the congressman said, the U.S. must choose "a path forward that simultaneously cuts the lifeline to fossil fuel despots like Putin, stabilizes energy prices here at home, and creates a safer, more sustainable planet."

"We must wean ourselves off our oil and gas dependence and make transformational investments in cleaner renewable energy technologies, like those in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Build Back Better Act, and the Competes Act, and we must do it now," he wrote.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/green-new-deal/

Author and environmentalist Naomi Klein argued in a New York Times column Sunday that Republicans rushed to attack the Green New Deal as disaster struck in Texas because the popular push for a sweeping transformation of the U.S. energy system poses a genuine threat to the deregulated, fossil-fuel dependent status quo that left the Lone Star State vulnerable to extreme weather driven by the climate crisis.

"Texans are living through the collapse of a 40-year experiment in free-market fundamentalism, one that has also stood in the way of effective climate action," Klein wrote. "Fortunately, there's a way out—and that's precisely what Republican politicians in the state most fear."

Klein characterized the ongoing power, water, and food crises in Texas as the consequence of "an energy-market free-for-all" stemming from "a fateful series of decisions [that] were made in the late-'90s, when the now-defunct, scandal-plagued energy company Enron led a successful push to radically deregulate Texas' electricity sector."

"As a result, decisions about the generation and distribution of power were stripped from regulators and, in effect, handed over to private energy companies," Klein wrote. "Unsurprisingly, these companies prioritized short-term profit over costly investments to maintain the grid and build in redundancies for extreme weather. Today, Texans are at the mercy of regulation-allergic politicians who failed to require that energy companies plan for shocks or weatherize their infrastructure (renewables and fossil fuel alike)."

In the aftermath of Winter Storm Uri, ordinary Texans are beginning to see the direct impact of the deregulatory push on their material wellbeing as electric companies hit them with bills topping $17,000—"a consequence," Klein argued, "of leaving pricing to the whims of the market."

Alluding to her previous work on "the shock doctrine"—a term she coined to describe how the right has exploited past disasters to force through unpopular privatization and austerity agendas—Klein noted that "large-scale shocks... become ideal moments to smuggle in unpopular free-market policies that tend to enrich elites at everyone else's expense."

"I often quote a guru of the free market revolution, the late economist Milton Friedman," Klein wrote. "In 1982, he wrote about what he saw as the mission of right-wing economists like him: 'Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."[gop sez BO cos chic guy]

The difference between past shocks such as the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial crisis and the current emergency in Texas, Klein argued, is that "Republican ideas are no longer lying around—they are lying in ruin."

Texas' Republican Gov. Greg Abbott attacked the Green New Deal—a proposal that has not even been implemented—in an appearance on Fox News last week because he knows its promise to "create millions of union jobs building out shock-resilient green energy infrastructure, transit, and affordable housing" is "extremely appealing" to Texans as they "suffer under the overlapping crises of unemployment, houselessness, racial injustice, crumbling public services, and extreme weather," Klein wrote.

"All that Texas' Republicans have to offer, in contrast," Klein added, "is continued oil and gas dependence—driving more climate disruption—alongside more privatizations and cuts to public services to pay for their state's mess, which we can expect them to push in the weeks and months ahead." [death spiral]

As The Houston Chroniclereported last week, Republican members of the Texas state legislature are already signaling that "one of the most immediate reforms they will push for is recalibrating the state's electricity grid to ensure more fossil fuels are in that mix and fewer renewables."

But Klein contended that "unlike when the Republican Party began deploying the shock doctrine, its free-market playbook is no longer novel."

"The horrors currently unfolding in Texas expose both the reality of the climate crisis and the extreme vulnerability of fossil fuel infrastructure in the face of that crisis," Klein wrote. "So of course the Green New Deal finds itself under fierce attack. Because for the first time in a long time, Republicans face the very thing that they claim to revere but never actually wanted: competition—in the battle of ideas." twt

in recent days, as Common Dreams has reported, progressive advocacy groups such as the youth-led Sunrise Movement and Greenpeace USA have made the case that—contrary to the GOP's bad-faith attacks—a Green New Deal is precisely what's needed to help Texas equitably recover from the present emergency and build the resilience necessary to withstand future climate-driven disasters.

"Many people across the country are realizing for the first time that fossil fuels are not only polluting, they are unstable. Millions of Texans are being let down by coal, oil, and gas right now," Greenpeace climate campaigner Ashley Thomson said last Thursday.

On Monday, activists with the Sunrise Movement of Texas are expected to rally at the state capitol in Austin to demand immediate relief for struggling Texans, the resignations of Abbott and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas.), and passage of a Green New Deal that would "make our state and country more resilient to future disasters, and create millions of good union jobs in the process of transforming these necessary structures."

"Texas is the perfect example of what happens when our politicians cater to fossil fuel executives instead of the young people who have been shouting from the rooftops for years, warning of an impending climate emergency like this," said Chante Davis, a 17-year-old Sunrise Movement leader and Houston resident.

"I've survived three once in a lifetime storms in my 17 years of life," added Davis, whose family moved to Texas in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. "We need change, and the Green New Deal is the obvious, urgent solution. As our communities come together to fill the void of our government, our leaders must invest in us to provide jobs that directly address the crises we face."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Foreclosure King’ Steve Mnuchin tells Greta Thunberg to go study economics

Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

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Fascist and militaristic reactions to the climate breakdown are on the rise, Naomi Klein writes, and present a likely endgame for climate denialism as our coastal cities sink into the sea, storms intensify, and ever larger portions of the planet become uninhabitable.

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ONLY A GREEN NEW DEAL CAN DOUSE THE FIRES OF ECO-FASCISM

Naomi Klein

September 16 2019, 3:00 a.m.

ORGANIZERS ARE EXPECTING huge numbers to turn out for the Global Climate Strike, beginning on September 20 and continuing through September 27. It builds on the first global climate strike, which took place on March 15, and attracted an estimated 1.6 million young people, who walked out of class at schools on every continent.

But this week’s strike will be different. This time, young organizers have called on adults from all walks of life to join them in the streets. So in addition to schools in over 150 countries, almost 1,000 workers at Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle have pledged to walk out, as have some faculty unions, Britain’s Trades Union Congress, and many others. There is a plan to shut down Washington, D.C. on September 23.

This diversity of the groups involved may well prove to be a new stage in the climate movement, with many more movements and constituencies seeing themselves in the struggle against climate breakdown — as well as in the emerging vision for an intersectional justice-based Green New Deal.

And it’s a good thing too, because as Donald Trump spews racist hate at Bahamian refugees fleeing the wreckage of Hurricane Dorian and growing numbers of far-right killers cite environmental damage as a justification for their rampages, there is a pressing need to confront the ways in which the fires of climate breakdown are already intersecting with the fires of white supremacy and surging xenophobia globally.

These are themes I explore in-depth in my new book, “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal,” from which this essay is excerpted.

An Eco-Fascist Massacre

In Christchurch, New Zealand, the March 15 School Strike for Climate started in much the same way as in so many other cities and towns: Rowdy students poured out of their schools in the middle of the day, holding up signs demanding a new era of climate action. Some were sweet and earnest (I STAND 4 WHAT I STAND ON), some less so (KEEP EARTH CLEAN. IT’S NOT URANUS!).

By 1 p.m., about 2,000 kids had made their way into Cathedral Square, at the city center, where they gathered around a makeshift stage and donated sound system to listen to speeches and music.

There were students of all ages there, and an entire Maori school had walked out together. “I was so proud of the whole of Christchurch,” one of the organizers, 17-year-old Mia Sutherland, told me. “All of these people had been so brave. It isn’t easy to walk out.”

Just as Sutherland was psyching herself up to deliver the final testimony of the day, one of her friends gave her a tug and told her, “You have to shut it down. Now!” Sutherland was confused — had they been too loud? Surely that was their right! Just then, a police officer walked onto the stage and took the mic away from her. Everyone needs to leave the square, the officer said over the sound system. Go home. Go back to school. But stay away from Hagley Park.

A couple hundred students decided to march together to City Hall to keep the protest going. Sutherland, still confused, went to catch a bus — and that’s when she saw a headline on her phone about a shooting 10 minutes away from where she was standing.

It would be several hours before the young strikers grasped the full horror of what had transpired that day — and why they had been told to stay away from a park near the Al Noor Mosque. We now know that at the very same time as the students’ climate strike, a 28-year-old Australian man living in New Zealand drove to that mosque, walked inside, and, during Friday prayers, opened fire. After six minutes of carnage, he calmly left Al Noor, drove to another mosque, and continued his rampage. By the end, 50 people were dead, including a 3-year-old child. Another would die in the hospital weeks later. An additional 49 were seriously injured. It was the largest massacre in modern New Zealand history.

The killer was not driven by environmental concern — his motivation was unadulterated racist hate — but ecological breakdown was one of the forces that seemed to be stoking that hatred.

In his manifesto (posted to multiple social media sites) and in inscriptions on his weapon, the killer expressed admiration for the men responsible for other, similar massacres: in downtown Oslo and at a Norwegian summer camp in 2011 (77 people killed); at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 (nine people murdered); at a Quebec City mosque in 2017 (six people dead); and at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 (11 people murdered). Like all these other terrorists, the Christchurch shooter was obsessed with the concept of “white genocide,” a supposed threat posed by the growing presence of nonwhite populations in majority-white nations, which he blamed on immigrant “invaders.”

The horror in Christchurch was part of this clear and escalating pattern of far-right hate crimes, but it was also distinct in a couple of ways. One was the extent to which the killer planned and executed his massacre as a made-for-the-internet spectacle. Before beginning his rampage, he announced on the message board 8chan that “it’s time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post,” as if a mass killing were merely a particularly shocking meme waiting to be shared.

The hypermediated nature of the Christchurch massacre, with the killer’s obvious bid to game-ify his “real life effort post,” made for an unbearable contrast with the searing reality of his horrific crime — of bullets tearing through flesh, of families stricken by grief, and of a global Muslim community sent a terrorizing message that its members were safe nowhere, not even in the sanctity of prayer.

It also made for a wrenching contrast with the youth climate strikers who had gathered at the exact same time for such a different purpose. Where the killer gleefully toyed with the lines between fact, fiction, and conspiracy, as if the very idea of truth were #FakeNews, the strikers painstakingly insisted that hard realities like accumulated greenhouse gases and carbon footprints and spiraling extinctions really did matter, and demanded that politicians close the yawning gap between their words and their actions.

When I spoke to her six weeks after that terrible day, Mia Sutherland was still having trouble prying the strike and the massacre apart; they had somehow fused together in her memory. “In no one’s mind are they separate,” she told me, her voice just above a whisper.

[Related

The El Paso Shooter Embraced Eco-Fascism. We Can’t Let the Far Right Co-Opt the Environmental Struggle.]

When intense events happen in close proximity to one another, the human mind often tries to draw connections that are not there, a phenomenon known as apophenia. But in this case, there were connections. In fact, the strike and the massacre can be understood as mirror opposite reactions to some of the same historical forces. And this relates to the other way that the Christchurch killer is distinct from the white supremacist mass murderers from whom he openly drew inspiration. Unlike them, he identifies explicitly as an “ethno-nationalist eco-fascist.” In his rambling manifesto, he framed his actions as a twisted kind of environmentalism, railing against population growth and asserting that “Continued immigration into Europe is environmental warfare.”

To be clear, the killer was not driven by environmental concern — his motivation was unadulterated racist hate — but ecological breakdown was one of the forces that seemed to be stoking that hatred, much as we are seeing it act as an accelerant for hatred and violence in armed conflicts around the world. My fear is that, unless something significant changes in how our societies rise to the ecological crisis, we are going to see this kind of white power eco-fascism emerge with much greater frequency, as a ferocious rationalization for refusing to live up to our collective climate responsibilities.

Much of this is due to the hard calculus of global warming. This is a crisis overwhelmingly created by the wealthiest strata of society: Almost 50 percent of global emissions are produced by the richest 10 percent of the world’s population; the wealthiest 20 percent are responsible for 70 percent. But the impacts of those emissions are hurting the poorest first and worst, forcing growing numbers of people to move, with many more on the way. A 2018 World Bank study estimates that by 2050, more than 140 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America will be displaced because of climate stresses, an estimate many consider conservative. Most will stay in their own countries, crowding into already overstressed cities and slums; many will try for a better life elsewhere.

In any moral universe, guided by basic human rights principles, these victims of a crisis of other people’s making would be owed justice. That justice would and should take many forms. First and foremost, justice requires that the wealthiest 10-20 percent stop the underlying cause of this deepening crisis by lowering emissions as rapidly as technology allows (the premise of the Green New Deal). Justice also demands that we heed the call for a “Marshall Plan for the Earth” that Bolivia’s climate negotiator called for a decade ago: to roll out resources in the global south so communities can fortify themselves against extreme weather, pull themselves out of poverty with clean tech, and protect their ways of life wherever possible.

When protection is not possible — when the land is simply too parched to grow crops and when the seas are rising too fast to hold them back — then justice demands that we clearly recognize that all people have the human right to move and seek safety. That means they are owed asylum and status on arrival. In truth, amid so much loss and suffering, they are owed much more than that: They are owed kindness, compensation, and a heartfelt apology.

In other words, climate disruption demands a reckoning on the terrain most repellent to conservative minds: wealth redistribution, resource sharing, and reparations. And a growing number of people on the hard right realize this all too well, which is why they are developing various twisted rationales for why none of this can take place.

The first phase is to scream “socialist conspiracy” and flat out deny reality. We’ve been in that phase for quite some time now. That was the tack taken by Anders Breivik, the sociopath who opened fire at the Norwegian summer camp in 2011. Breivik was convinced that in addition to immigration, one of the ways that white Western culture was being weakened was through calls for Europe and the Anglosphere to pay its “climate debt.” In a section of his manifesto titled “Green Is the New Red — Stop EnviroCommunism!,” in which he cites several prominent climate change deniers, he casts demands for climate financing as an attempt to “‘punish’ European countries (US included) for capitalism and success.” Climate action, he asserts, “is the new Redistribution of Wealth.”

But if straight-up denial seemed a viable strategy then, nine years later (with six of those years among the 10 hottest ever recorded) it is less so today. That does not mean, however, that onetime deniers are suddenly going to embrace a response to the climate crisis based on agreed-upon international frameworks. It is far more likely that many who currently claim to deny climate change will simply switch abruptly to the sinister worldview espoused by the Christchurch killer, a recognition that we are indeed facing a convulsive future and that is all the more reason for wealthy, majority-white countries to fortress their borders, as well as their identities as white Christians, and wage war on any and all “invaders.”

The goal of this fortification around Europe and the Anglosphere is all too clear: Convince people to stay where they are, no matter how miserable it is, no matter how deadly.

The climate science will no longer be denied; what will be denied is the idea that the nations that are the largest historical emitters of carbon owe anything to the black and brown people impacted by that pollution. This will be denied based on the only rationale possible: that those non-white and non-Christian people are lesser than, are the other, are dangerous invaders.

In much of Europe and the Anglosphere, this hardening is already well under way. The European Union, Australia, and the United States have all embraced immigration policies that are variations on “prevention through deterrence.” The brutal logic is to treat migrants with so much callousness and cruelty that desperate people will be deterred from seeking safety by crossing borders.

With this in mind, migrants are left to drown in the Mediterranean, or to die of dehydration in the rugged Arizona desert. And if they survive, they are put in conditions tantamount to torture: in the Libyan camps where European countries now send the migrants who try to reach their shores; in Australia’s offshore island detention camps; in a cavernous Walmart turned child jail in Texas. In Italy, if migrants do make it to a port, they are now regularly prevented from disembarking, held captive in rescue boats under conditions a court has ruled to be tantamount to kidnapping.

Canada’s prime minister, meanwhile, tweets pictures of himself welcoming refugees and visiting mosques — even as his government makes massive new investments in militarizing the border and tightening the noose of the Safe Third Country Agreement, which bars asylum-seekers from requesting protection at official Canadian border crossings if they are coming from the supposedly “safe” country of Trump’s United States.

The goal of this fortification around Europe and the Anglosphere is all too clear: Convince people to stay where they are, no matter how miserable it is, no matter how deadly. In this worldview, the emergency is not people’s suffering; it is their inconvenient desire to escape that suffering.

That is why, just hours after the Christchurch massacre, Trump could shrug off the surge of far-right violence and immediately change the subject to the “invasion” of migrants at the United States’s southern border and his recent declaration of a “national emergency,” a move meant to free up billions for a border wall. Three weeks later, Trump tweeted, “Our Country is FULL!” This followed Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini, responding to the arrival of a small group of migrants rescued at sea by tweeting, “Our ports were and remain CLOSED.”

Murtaza Hussain, an investigative reporter who studied the Christchurch killer’s manifesto closely, stresses that it is filled with ideas that are anything but marginal. His words, Hussain writes, are “both lucid and chillingly familiar. His references to immigrants as invaders find echoes in the language used by the president of the United States and far-right leaders across Europe. For those wondering where [he] was radicalized, the answer is right out in the open. It is in our media and politics, where minorities, Muslims or otherwise, are vilified as a matter of course.”

Toxic Ideologies

The drivers of mass migration are complex: war, gang violence, sexual violence, deepening poverty. What is clear is that climate disruption is intensifying all these other crises, and it’s only going to get worse as it gets hotter. But rather than helping, the wealthiest countries on the planet seem determined to deepen the crisis on every front.

They are failing to provide meaningful new aid so poorer nations can better protect themselves from weather extremes.When impoverished and debt-ridden Mozambique was pummeled by Cyclone Idai, the International Monetary Fund offered the country $118 million, a loan (not a grant) it would somehow have to pay back; the Jubilee Debt Campaign described the move as “a shocking indictment of the international community.” Worse, in March 2019, Trump announced that he intended to cut $700 million in current aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, some of which was earmarked for programs that help farmers cope with drought. In an equally explicit expression of its priorities, in June 2018, at the start of hurricane season, the Department of Homeland Security diverted $10 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is tasked with responding to natural disasters at home, and moved it over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to pay for migrant detention.

Will we share what’s left and try to look after one another? Or are we instead going to attempt to hoard what’s left, look after “our own,” and lock everyone else out?

Let there be no mistake: This is the dawn of climate barbarism. And unless there is a radical change not only in politics but in the underlying values that govern our politics, this is how the wealthy world is going to “adapt” to more climate disruption: by fully unleashing the toxic ideologies that rank the relative value of human lives in order to justify the monstrous discarding of huge swaths of humanity. And what starts as brutality at the border will most certainly infect societies as a whole.

These supremacist ideas are not new; nor have they ever gone away. For those of us in North America, they are deeply embedded in the legal basis for our nations’ very existence (from the Doctrine of Christian Discovery to terra nullius). Their power has ebbed and flowed throughout our histories, depending on what immoral behaviors demanded ideological justification. And just as these toxic ideas surged when they were required to rationalize slavery, land theft, and segregation, they are surging once more now that they are needed to justify climate recalcitrance and the barbarism at our borders.

The rapidly escalating cruelty of our present moment cannot be overstated; nor can the long-term damage to the collective psyche should this go unchallenged. Beneath the theater of some governments denying climate change and others claiming to be doing something about it while they fortress their borders from its effects, there is one overarching question facing us. In the rough and rocky future that has already begun, what kind of people are we going to be? Will we share what’s left and try to look after one another? Or are we instead going to attempt to hoard what’s left, look after “our own,” and lock everyone else out?

In this time of rising seas and rising fascism, these are the stark choices before us. There are options besides full-blown climate barbarism, but given how far down that road we are, there is no point pretending that they are easy. It’s going to take a lot more than a carbon tax or cap-and-trade. It’s going to take an all-out war on pollution and poverty and racism and colonialism and despair all at the same time.

The message coming from the school strikes is that a great many young people are ready for this kind of deep change. They know all too well that the sixth mass extinction is not the only crisis they have inherited. They are also growing up in the rubble of market euphoria, in which the dreams of endlessly rising living standards have given way to rampant austerity and economic insecurity. And techno-utopianism, which imagined a frictionless future of limitless connection and community, has morphed into addiction to the algorithms of envy, relentless corporate surveillance, and spiraling online misogyny and white supremacy.

“Once you have done your homework,” the young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg says, “you realize that we need new politics. We need a new economics, where everything is based on our rapidly declining and extremely limited carbon budget. But that is not enough. We need a whole new way of thinking. … We must stop competing with each other. We need to start cooperating and sharing the remaining resources of this planet in a fair way.”

Because our house is on fire, and this should come as no surprise. Built on false promises, discounted futures, and sacrificial people, it was rigged to blow from the start. It’s too late to save all our stuff, but we can still save each other and a great many other species, too. Let’s put out the flames and build something different in its place. Something a little less ornate, but with room for all those who need shelter and care.

Adapted from “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal,” published by Simon and Schuster.

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets that aims to strengthen coverage of the climate crisis.

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‘A goddamn terrifying time to be alive’: Naomi Klein explains what ‘increasingly barbaric political figures’ like Trump have figured out about the future

Written by John Queally / Common Dreams September 17, 2019

The new book warns that “by far the biggest obstacle we are up against is hopelessness,” but its author—journalist and activist Naomi Klein—says that when it comes to the planetary climate emergency, hope is something humanity will have to earn.

Available in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada on Tuesday, Klein’s book—titled “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal“— is not just a collection of reporting and columns she’s written over the last decade, but a plea to readers across the globe to recognize the “all hands on deck moment” we are now living in.

In a conversation with Common Dreams ahead of the book’s release, Klein explained that only bold, collective action worldwide—led by an international movement dedicated to social justice and antagonistic toward supremacist ideologies—will be enough to stave off the worst of the geophysical threats of a hotter planet and battle the related politics of cruelty espoused by fascist leaders like Donald Trump in the U.S., Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, and Matteo Salvini in Italy.

“What is terrifying is the intersection of these two different kinds of fires,” said Klein. “That the literal fires of the climate crisis and the political fires of this barbaric worldview that is not so gradually preparing people for a world in which millions are left to die.”

The word “gradually,” Klein noted, is key “because we are already at a point where people are going about their daily business in European capitals as thousands and thousands of mostly African migrants die in the Mediterranean. This has been going on for years now.”

The same could be said of migrant families and refugees victimized by Trump’s policies along the U.S.-Mexico border and his broader mistreatment of vulnerable people inside the country and across the world.

“I don’t think it is a coincidence,” she continued, “that increasingly barbaric political figures like Trump and Salvini, Bolsonaro, Modi are emerging in this moment where people—whether they deny it or not—do understand on some level that we have entered a period where there is going to be less land that it’s fit for humans to live on.”

For Klein, there isn’t a choice between whether the increase of extreme storms like the recent Hurricane Dorian which slammed the Bahamas or the fires ravaging the Amazon in Brazil are scarier than the kind of dehumanizing border policies and racism exemplified by Trump, Salvini, and others.

“It is the combination that is terrifying,” she said. “For me, the climate crisis has never just been about things getting hotter and wetter. It’s about the intersection of that extreme weather with the barbarism of white supremacy and supremacist ideologies of all kinds, including Hindu supremacy in India, and what it looks like when those forces intersect.”

Remember: The Global Green New Deal Must Be… Global

While she first came to recognize the idea “eco-apartheid” when she reported on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans—where poor, predominantly black residents suffered the most and received the least relief from the storm’s devastation—”now we are seeing it on a global scale.”

In fact, she added, “we have been seeing it on a global scale for a very, very long time. But now what we’re seeing is an intensification of it.”

Trump’s decision last week to block victims of Dorian in the Bahamas from receiving Temporary Protection Status (TPS), Klein warned, is a telling signal that Trump—whether he states it publicly or not—knows full well what the implications are if the designation of protection was available to the world’s growing population of climate refugees. Currently, TPS designation is reserved for those fleeing “natural” disasters and war zones, but does not have a classification for people fleeing homelands or regions forever lost to climate destruction.

“I think that the Trump administration understood very early on that this was dangerous to their very anti-immigrant agenda,” Klein explained, “which is why they attacked TPS for Haitians, Salvadorans, and on and on.”

While making such a move in the middle of the evacuation of the Bahamas seemed particularly horrific, Klein pointed out that this is nothing new to the administration, but “absolutely consistent” with what Trump has been doing since taking office.

And it’s all the more reason, she explained, why people interested in the book and the demand for the Green New Deal must understand that justice stands as its key component and that it must be a truly global Green New Deal for all people, not one based on nationalism, jingoism, or the siloed concerns of elites.

“I believe we aren’t talking about the global nature of our lens enough,” Klein said.

In the United States, she continued, “I think Bernie [Sanders’] campaign has done a very good job of articulating what the U.S. piece of a global Green New Deal would look like, because he’s talking about huge levels of international financing, of economic transfers to help the Global South leapfrog over fossil fuels and also prepare themselves for the climate shocks that are inevitable.”

By upholding those kinds of principles, Klein said, what Sanders is offering “is the precise opposite of the kind of barbarism we’re seeing from Trump.”

Setting that example aside—and the book repeatedly takes an international perspective—Klein said she has serious concerns that many of the Democratic candidates running to oust Trump in 2020 are not talking about the Green New Deal in terms of international obligations or solidarity with others around the globe.

“We need to be talking more about immigration and what the future of the border looks like in the context of a crisis that was created in wealthy countries,” she explained, “but is impacting the poorest people in the world first and worst. And those connections, I think, are still not being made nearly enough.”

In addition to candidates pushing half-measures that are not actually up to the task of lowering greenhouse gas emissions, Klein also highlighted why many “highly nationalist” proposals are deeply problematic as well.

“We’re going to help the Global South by making them buy our solar panels?” she said. “That is just more economic imperialism.” To Klein, that kind of thinking fails to embrace the “sweeping spirit” at the heart of the climate justice movement.

Klein explained that in the book she quotes Angélica Navarro, Bolivia’s then ambassador to the World Trade Organization, but who was also part of Bolivia’s climate negotiation team at the 2009 U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen. “Exactly 10 years ago,” she said, “Navarro called for a Marshall Plan for planet earth. She was building on a concept of ecological debt that comes from social movements in Ecuador, in Nigeria, in frontline African-American and Latino communities in the United States. So that’s the origin of this idea. It was never a nationalist plank.”

Welcome to the (Very Mature) Climate Justice Movement

As both a member of the global climate justice movement and one of its most popular and widely-read chroniclers, Klein says there have been many prophetic voices over the thirty years since the crisis of global warming and climate change became known—many of them from frontline communities in the Global South.

These are people like Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner from the Marshall Islands, Klein recounted to Common Dreams, “Who stood at the podium in New York at the U.N. [in 2014] holding her nine-month-old baby and read a poem to her, saying we’re not drowning.”

Or, she said, “think about, Yeb Saño from the Philippines who was on the Philippines climate negotiating team at the U.N. Climate Summit when Typhoon Haiyan hit his family’s home and he broke down and wept.”

The clamor for climate justice and for action, Klein remarked, is nothing new. And while the book’s release comes just days before global Climate Strikes are set to kickoff in countries around the world on Friday—promoted as the largest series of climate protests ever—the demand for something like a Green New Deal is not new either.

The question now—and the central question explored in the book—is whether or not the urgent demands can be realized in the amount of time that scientists say is necessary. Can humanity wrap its head around a problem that we as a species have been intensely programmed away from confronting, let alone solving?

As another more recent voice in the climate justice movement, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg of Sweden, has said, “We’ve had thirty years of pep-talking and selling positive ideas. And I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work. Because if it would have, the emissions would have gone down by now—they haven’t.”

Like Jetnil-Kijiner and Saño, Klein says that Thunberg has also emerged as a prophetic voice for the global movement, bringing unique perspective as both a young person and someone who identifies as being on the Autism spectrum.

“I think the message for me,” said Klein, “is just our movements are strongest when we embrace diversity and difference of perspective. And Greta has that, as somebody on the Autism spectrum who has shared her story with so much courage and candor and has become a role model for young people around the world. But particularly for neuro-atypical people.”

One of the other things Thunberg has said is, “We do need hope. Of course we do. But the one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere.”

Klein agrees.

“I think that hope is something that we earn,” she said. “It isn’t something static. It isn’t something that you have. It’s something that is earned with action and the space for hope is enlarged the more active we become.”

Forces Coming Together

Ultimately, the global movement clamoring for bold climate action cannot be—and should not be—whittled down. It is not just a series of demands or policy proposals, but neither is it a fixed call for hope or change.

“It is a spiritual project. It is a narrative project. It is a movement project. It is a political project,” Klein explained. “And it is all of those forces coming together. We have a long way to go to build the political power required to turn the vision of the boldest, most justice-based Green New Deal into policy. But it is absolutely extraordinary to think how fast we have moved already.”

She credited people like Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, and the broader youth climate justice movement for all their work.

“They have done so damn much to move the political needle and create this extraordinary context where CNN felt the need to devote seven hours to the climate emergency. And the vast majority of candidates on that stage had to profess their fealty to the Green New Deal, whether they meant it or not,” Klein said.

But still, she continued, “we have a long way to go to build the kind of multi-racial, working-class movement that sees itself in the future articulated in the Green New Deal. That sees hope and a better world, not just better than a future of climate breakdown, but better than the present.”

It is for this reason, Klein explained, that earlier this year—in partnership with artist and activist Molly Crabapple and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)—that she helped produce a short animated video trying to offer a vision of the kind of “beautiful world” the Green New Deal could create.

The response to the video was amazing. “We had something like 10 million views in a week,” Klein said.

But it is that very excitement that helps show why half-measures or partial political gestures from lawmakers don’t qualify as the Green New Deal.

“We obviously need a candidate who embraces this vision, puts it the center of their platform, not one item to tick on the laundry list,” Klein said. “Because that’s the exact opposite of the whole idea of a Green New Deal, is that it’s not an item on a laundry list. It is a vision for the next economy that is holistic.”

And what’s exciting, she continued, is that with a candidate like Sanders in the race—and other Democratic candidates now forced to at least pretend they have serious plans to address the crisis—there’s at least a pathway.

“We need that person to kick Donald Trump’s ass,” Klein said. “And we need a movement outside pushing and pushing for that vision, pushing every step of the way. Because, my God, the backlash from the fossil fuel industry, from the banks, from every elite sector is going to be so fierce.”

The change in the political landscape, “is not in the fact that there are people talking about this vision,” argued Klein. “The change is that there is now a political pathway to power, where we could imagine it actually being implemented.”

But the pathway is a narrow one, she added, “So the question is how do we enlarge that pathway? How do we improve our chances? How do we earn the hope that we could actually do this? That’s the only discussion that matters.”

In the book, Klein writes:

For decades, the biggest barrier to winning climate legislation has been a vast power mismatch. Opposition to action from fossil fuel companies was ferocious, creative, and tenacious. But when it came to the kinds of weak (and very often unjust) market-based climate policies that made it into the political agenda, support was tepid at best.

The Green New Deal, however, is already showing that it has the power to mobilize a truly intersectional mass movement behind it—not despite its sweeping ambition, but precisely because of it.

So with a beautiful vision and a political pathway—albeit a narrow one—to attaining power, is there a flip side to this climate emergency? Is it possible that this is a good moment to be alive in order to wage these crucial fights and create this better future?

“It’s a goddamn terrifying time to be alive,” responded Klein. “My friend, Elizabeth Paredo in Bolivia, was one of that country’s prominent feminists and environmental voices, said to me 10 years ago, ‘We have never negotiated so close to death before.’ And she was talking about Bolivia’s melting glaciers and the fact that Bolivia was negotiating for its life.”

And now, Klein said, “that’s where we all are. As a species, we’ve never been so close to death and we have this narrow pathway that is the path to life, right? And it’s like, which side are we on? It is all hands on deck.”

The final question is this, she said: “What are we going to do to fight for life right now?”

new bk essay ANTHOL

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/a-goddamn-terrifying-time-to-be-alive-naomi-klein-explains-what-increasingly-barbaric-political-figures-like-trump-have-figured-out-about-the-future/

https://www.alternet.org/naomi-klein-explains-how-gops-increasingly-savage-racial-and-gender-politics-will-lead-insidious-new

hen Nikki Haley resigned this week as the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations, seemingly the political press’ first question was whether Donald Trump would name his daughter Ivanka as her replacement. Trump did little to discourage this speculation. “[It’s] nothing to do with nepotism,”he told reporters at the White House, barely concealing a smile. “But I want to tell you that the people that know, know that Ivanka would be dynamite.”

For “The Shock Doctrine” and “No Is Not Enough” author Naomi Klein, that the president’s offspring would even be considered for such a post is evidence enough that we’ve entered a frightening new era of capitalism—one in which the 1 percent so dominate our institutions that they consider political power to be their natural birthright. In her latest essay for The Intercept, she dubs it the “Age of the Pampered Princeling”:

The Koch brothers were raised in luxury and inherited Koch Industries from their father (who built his fortune constructing refineries under Stalin and Hitler). [Richard Mellon] Scaife was an heir to the Gulf Oil, Alcoa Aluminum, and Mellon Banks fortunes and grew up in an estate so lavish it was populated with pet penguins. [The late John M.] Olin took over his father’s weapons and chemicals company.

And so it goes, right down to Betsy DeVos, who was raised by billionaire Edgar Prince and married into the Amway fortune—and who has devoted her life to dismantling public education, now from inside the Trump administration. And let’s not forget Rupert Murdoch, who inherited a chain of newspapers from his father and is in the process of handing over his media empire to his sons. Or relative newcomer Rebekah Mercer, who has chipped off a chunk of her father Robert’s hedge fund fortune to bankroll Breitbart News, among other pet projects. In short, these people are Downton Abbey lords and masters, playacting as Ayn Rand heroes.

Klein urges her readers to consider the mental gymnastics required for our nation’s scions to convince themselves not just that they’re self-made, but that their attacks on the social safety net are inherently righteous. Whether implicit or explicit, she concludes, it comes down to a belief in their own fundamental superiority: “better values, better breeding, a better religion, or as Trump so often claims, ‘good genes.’ “

“And of course the even darker side is the often unspoken conviction that the people who do not share in this kind of good fortune must possess the opposite traits—they must be defective in both body and mind,” Klein continues. “This is where the Republican Party’s increasingly savage racial and gender politics merge seamlessly with its radical wealth-stratifying economic project. Convinced that people belong where they are on the economic and social ladder, the party can keep redistributing wealth upward to the … families that fund their movement, while kicking the ladder out of the way for those reaching for the lower rungs.”

Alarmingly, money and influence are only growing more entrenched. As part of the Trump administration’s latest tax plan, the mega-rich will be able to pass up to $22.4 million to their children without paying a cent in taxes, effectively locking in another generation of dynastic wealth. The consequences will be grave for the health of our society and the planet at large, especially as climate change threatens civilizational collapse.

“This is an intensely hierarchical worldview that is completely comfortable with a minority making decisions for a majority in a rigged electoral system, just as it feels no need to reconcile two totally different visions of justice—’innocent until proven guilty’ when it comes to Brett Kavanaugh’s job application and, as Trump told a gathering of police chiefs on Monday, ‘stop and frisk’ for anyone seen as a possible criminal in Chicago (obvious code for a black person walking down the street),” Klein concludes. “This is not seen as a contradiction: There are simply two classes of people—us and them, winners and losers, people deserving of rights and everyone else.”...

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/6/6/the_battle_for_paradise_new_intercept

https://www.noisnotenough.org/

2017

https://www.amazon.com/No-Not-Enough-Resisting-Politics/dp/1608468909

https://YYY.theguardian.com/books/**2017/jun/**22/no-is-not-enough-naomi-klein-donald-trump

no lnx

Lately the pace of news has felt so fast and its volume so overwhelming that the very idea of a political book seems quaint, a relic of the gentler and more carefree time before we were all pinned to the floor by the social media firehose. Naomi Klein has written No Is Not Enough at near internet speed, a warning of the enormous toxic potential of the Donald Trump presidency and a call to oppose it. As the title suggests, Klein wants her readers to move from refusal to resistance, from a passive stance of opposition to engagement in a programme of action. If the convulsions of the last year have taught us anything, it’s that we can’t wait for the dust to settle and clarity to emerge. Turbulence is, at least for the foreseeable future, our new condition, and we must learn to function within it. We have to teach ourselves to stand upright on a moving deck.

Klein emerged as a star of the 1990s social movements that were trying to frame a politics of opposition to capitalist globalisation. Was exchange value the only kind of value? What about the environmental, social and cultural formations that were being reorganised (and in some cases damaged or destroyed) by the logic of the market? Klein’s widely-read 2000 book No Logo packaged and synthesised ideas that had been circulating in anti-capitalist circles during the previous decade, helping a general readership to understand changes taking place in corporations, which had begun to outsource many of their functions and view themselves primarily as “brands”, deployers of intellectual property that did not need, for example, to do their own manufacturing or distribution. It was, as she puts it in No Is Not Enough, “a race toward weightlessness; whoever owned the least, had the fewest employees on the payroll and produced the most powerful images as opposed to things, won the race”.

Klein points out that Trump’s business has followed that trajectory. As a property developer, the future president was (by Manhattan standards) only moderately successful, his primary distinction being an above average appetite for seeing himself in the media. His innovation, helped by his position as host of The Apprentice, was to brand high-end real estate – not just hotels and resorts, but office towers, apartment buildings and golf courses. Klein dissects the values of the Trump brand, noting that it doesn’t stand for quality or innovation or taste, but for “richness” itself, associating the consumer with wealth in its most direct and uninflected form.

In Trumpworld there are only two existential categories: winners and losers.Trump stands for winning, and if you oppose him, you are a loser. His support is curiously immune to scandals and failings that would have sunk other politicians, a curious fact that Klein ascribes to the migration of branding into politics. Trump has shown that “you don’t need to be objectively good or decent; you only need to be true and consistent to the brand you have created”. Trump’s brand is that he’s the boss and part of being the boss is that the rules don’t apply to him. One strategy for opposing him is to attack the brand. It’s why, for example, a red line for interviewers has always been any suggestion that his fortune is not as large as he claims.

‘Trump’s unselfconscious reaction to 9/11 was to see it as a marketing opportunity …’

The most consequential part of Klein’s analysis stems from personal experience. The social movements were gaining traction when 9/11 happened.“The era of the so-called War on Terror pretty much wiped our movement off the map in North America and Europe,” she writes. Intimidated (or seduced) by the rhetoric of the “clash of civilisations” and the harsh new security environment, many participants withdrew their support. “Antiglobalisation is so yesterday,” ran a headline in Canada’s National Post, a few days after the attacks. The shock of 9/11 was exploited by various actors to inaugurate a “security bubble”, in which police and security powers were extended and vast resources were diverted from other uses to fight the war on terror. In The Shock Doctrine (2007), Klein argued that there is a playbook for exploiting shock events such as 9/11 and the Iraq war. As she puts it in No Is Not Enough: “Wait for a crisis (or even, in some instances, as in Chile or Russia, help foment one), declare a moment of what is sometimes called ‘extraordinary politics’, suspend some or all democratic norms – and then ram the corporate wish list through as quickly as possible.”

This wish list may include the seizure of land and resources, increased military spending, privatisation of public goods and economic deregulation. The “shock doctrine” doesn’t require the machinery of conspiracy to function. It is a collection of political techniques and impulses, the dark underside of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “creative destruction” and the Silicon Valley injunction to “move fast and break things”. The result is “the decimation of the public sphere and the public interest”, and the tendency to move wealth rapidly upwards into the hands of a tiny minority.

Klein notes that Trump’s cabinet is packed with “masters of disaster”, men whose careers have been based on exploiting shock. Secretary of state Rex Tillerson’s Exxon profited handsomely from the spike in the oil price after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and has done more or less everything in its power to ensure global inaction on climate change. Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin is known as “the foreclosure king”. Vice-president Mike Pence played a particularly ignominious role in the aftermath of Katrina when, as chair of a group of conservative lawmakers called the Republican study committee, he promoted a slate of what Klein terms “pseudo relief policies”, including reduction of labour standards, “making the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone” and (staggeringly) repealing environmental regulations along the Gulf Coast.

Trump’s unselfconscious reaction to 9/11 was to see it as a marketing opportunity, remarking to a journalist that he now had the tallest building in Manhattan. Intentionally or not, he has shown himself adept at creating instability, not least in his own workplace, and the fear, as Klein underscores, is that he will be tempted to deliver the ultimate shock in the form of another war. Then, perhaps, he will be able to test out his armchair quarterback opinion about Iraq, that America “should have taken the oil”. Go to war, take the oil. It’s a foreign policy of a sort.

‘Rex Tillerson’s Exxon profited handsomely from the spike in the oil price after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.’]pix

If you spend your days glued to your phone and have 30 political tabs open on your browser, much of the material in No Is Not Enough will be familiar. The book’s chief value lies in synthesis. Klein’s particular background and expertise allow her to pull together the disparate threads of what it would be misleading to call “Trumpism”, if only because of the unwarranted suggestion of system and control. How you view her political proposals will depend on your politics, particularly on the value one ascribes to what used to be called “the extraparliamentary left”. She insists, rightly in my view, that there is a need to promote a positive alternative social vision, and that ostensibly “utopian” aims and proposals are a way to avoid being caught in a politics that is merely reactive or timidly reformist.

Partly, I think, because she believes (again, I’d argue correctly) that a lightly greenwashed version of the status quo will never save us from the catastrophic consequences of climate change, Klein skims over the terrain of legislative politics. She has little practical advice for people engaged in the sort of dull, incremental political action – lobbying, attempting to influence legislation – that is aimed at turning the oil tanker that is the US Congress. Nor does she advocate particular aims or tactics for organisers. The book ends with a document called The Leap Manifesto, drawn up by Canadian activists in 2015, a “platform without a party”, which is a powerful statement of alternative principles that feels as though it needs a thread to connect it to today’s largely defensive struggles.

Leaving aside the thorny issue of electoral subversion, it is notable that Russia provides a possible model for the Trump administration. Its rulers are men who profited from the cataclysmic shock of the end of communism, reaping fortunes in the violent, turbulent 1990s.The order they have imposed has brought about the near destruction of politics as a public activity. This is not an easily reversible condition, and its spread to the US would be a catastrophe. The supreme court has, in its wisdom, decided that corporations are people and money is speech, and free speech cannot be limited. In an environment where the amount of money in politics is truly staggering, the only safeguard left to the public is rigorous transparency. If public scrutiny is ended, Trump and his “masters of disaster” may also be able to put an end to ordinary people’s ability to shape the forces governing their lives. Klein’s book is ultimately optimistic, because she believes the power to make change lies in the popular will. She calls on us to recognise that this will has enemies, and they are making havoc.

• No Is Not Enough is published by Allen Lane.

http://www.ecowatch.com/no-is-not-enough-naomi-klein-2346149398.html

Naomi Klein: 'No Is Not Enough'

By Andrea Germanos

How did a man like Donald J. Trump get to be president? And how on Earth can his dangerous agenda be fought?

For those burning questions, a forthcoming book described as "the toolkit for shock resistance" could well be an indispensable resource.

Authored by award-winning author and investigative journalist Naomi Klein, the book, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, will publish in the U.S. on June 13.

"Trump is extreme, but he's not a Martian," wrote Klein. "On the contrary, he is the logical conclusion to many of the most dangerous trends of the past half century. He is the personification of the merger of humans and corporations—a one-man megabrand, with wife and children as spin-off brands."

A website for No Is Not Enough says the book:

Reveals, among other things, how Trump's election was not a peaceful transition, but a corporate takeover, one using deliberate shock tactics to generate wave after wave of crises and force through radical policies that will destroy people, the environment, the economy and national security. This book is the toolkit for shock resistance, showing all of us how we can break Trump's spell and win the world we need.

In the wake of Trump's election, Klein, while accepting the 2016 Sydney Peace Prize, also offered her thoughts on the factors that paved the way for the real estate mogul's rise to power and the strategies needed for a movement to rise against Trump (as well as other Trump-esque figures).

"If there is a single overarching lesson in the Trump victory, perhaps it is this: Never, ever underestimate the power of hate, of direct appeals to power over the 'other' ... especially during times of economic hardship," she said.

Another takeaway, she continued, is that "four decades of corporate, neoliberal policies and privatization, deregulation, free trade and austerity" have ensured ongoing economic pain and in turn, enabled the rise of faux-populists like Trump.

An additional lesson is that "only a bold and genuinely re-distributive agenda has a hope of speaking to that pain and directing it where it belongs—the politician-purchasing elites who benefited so extravagantly from the auctioning off of public wealth, the looting of our land, water and air and the deregulation of our financial system."

"If we want to defend against the likes of Donald Trump—and every country has their own Trump—we must urgently confront and battle racism and misogyny in our culture, in our movements and in ourselves. This cannot be an afterthought, it cannot be an add-on. It is central to how someone like Trump can rise to power."

Klein, whose other works include No Logo, This Changes Everythingand The Shock Doctrine, also recently joined The Intercept as a senior correspondent. There, she is tasked with monitoring the "shocks of the Trump era." Days after Trump's inauguration, she wrote that his administration:

Can be counted on to generate a tsunami of crises and shocks: economic shocks, as market bubbles burst; security shocks, as blowback from foreign belligerence comes home; weather shocks, as our climate is further destabilized; and industrial shocks, as oil pipelines spill and rigs collapse, which they tend to do, especially when enjoying light-touch regulation.

All this is dangerous enough. What's even worse is the way the Trump administration can be counted on to exploit these shocks politically and economically.

TCE discussion docs

https://thischangeseverything.org/studyguide/#book has video clips

Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything(an excellent 2016 video documentary), excerpt, reviewed by Sandra Steingraber. Colbert interview; extensive interview(2 parts) 9/14.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/naomi-klein-dont-shut-down-post-offices-reinvent-them

http://www.c-span.org/video/?328719-1/book-discussion-disaster-capitalism

erik p frontier mining concessions

wiki

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is a2007 book by the Canadian author Naomi Klein, and is the basis of a 2009 documentary by the same name directed by Michael Winterbottom.^[1] The book argues that libertarian free market policies (as advocated by the economist Milton **Friedman**) have risen to prominence in some developed countries because of a deliberate strategy by some political leaders. These leaders exploit crises to push through controversial exploitative policieswhile citizens are too emotionally and physically distracted by disasters or upheavals to mount an effective resistance. The book implies that some man-made crises, such as the Iraq War, may have been created with the intention of pushing through these unpopular policies in their wake. Some reviewers criticized the book for making what they described as incorrect claims, while others praised it as a compelling and important work.

Synopsis

The book has an introduction, a main body and a conclusion, divided into seven parts with a total of 21 chapters.

Part 1 begins with a chapter on psychiatric shock therapy and the covert experiments conducted by the psychiatrist Ewen Cameron in collusion with theCentral Intelligence Agency. The second chapter introduces Milton Friedman and his Chicago school of economics, whom Klein describes as leading a laissez-faire capitalist movement committed to creating free markets that are even less regulated than those that existed before the Great Depression.

Part 2 discusses the use of "shock doctrine" to transform South American economies in the 1970s, focusing on the coup in Chileled by General Augusto:{Pinochet and influenced by a prominent group of Chilean economists that had been trained at the University of Chicago in the Economics department, funded by the CIA, and advised by Milton Friedman. Klein connects torture with economic shock therapy.}:

Part 3 covers attempts to apply the shock doctrine without the need for extreme violence against sections of the population. Klein says that Margaret Thatcher applied mild shock "therapy" facilitated by the Falklands War, while free market reform in Bolivia was possible due to a combination of pre-existing economic crises and the charisma of Jeffrey Sachs.

Part 4 reports on how Klein thinks the shock doctrine was applied in Poland, Russia, South Africa and to the tiger economies during the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Part 5 introduces the "Disaster Capitalism Complex", where the author claims that companies have learnt to profit from disasters.[brownie fema halliburton shaw contractors?]

Part 6 discusses the use of "Shock and awe" in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation of Iraq, which Klein describes as the most comprehensive and full-scale implementation of the shock doctrine ever attempted.

Part 7 is about winners and losers of economic shock therapy – how small groups will often do very well by moving into luxurious gated communities while large sections of the population are left with decaying public infrastructure, declining incomes and increased unemployment.

Conclusion is about the backlash against the "shock doctrine" and economic institutions which, in Klein's view, encourage it - like the World Bank and IMF. South America and Lebanon post-2006 are shown in a positive light, where politicians are already rolling back free-market policies, with some mention of the increased campaigning by community-minded activists in South Africa and China.

shock doc extensive summary 45 pp

ggl edit

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SjhBqIxETVkviPpZUrKTGzjxiEKBiZAlQ_RefoLzfNs/edit

https://www.aardeboerconsument.nl/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/The-Shock-Doctrine-1.pdf

http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/02/naomi-klein-people-planet-first/

...

It’s also a real honour to be here supporting and indeed celebrating the historic publication of the Pope’s encyclical.

Pope Francis writes early on that Laudato Si’ is not only a teaching for the Catholic world but for “every person living on this planet.” And I can say that as a secular Jewish feminist who was rather surprised to be invited to the Vatican, it certainly spoke to me.

“We are not God,” the encyclical states. All humans once knew this. But about 400 years ago, dizzying scientific breakthroughs made it seem to some that humans were on the verge of knowing everything there was to know about the Earth, and would therefore be nature’s “masters and possessors,” as René Descartes so memorably put it. This, they claimed, was what God had always wanted.

That theory held for a good long time. But subsequent breakthroughs in science have told us something very different. Because when we were burning ever larger amounts of fossil fuels—convinced that our container ships and jumbo jets had leveled the world, that we were as gods—greenhouse gases were accumulating in the atmosphere and relentlessly trapping heat.

And now we are confronted with the reality that we were never the master, never that boss—and that we are unleashing natural forces that are far more powerful than even our most ingenious machines. We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature—respecting and harnessing its intrinsic capacity for renewal and regeneration.

And this brings us to the core message of interconnection at the heart of the encyclical. Whatclimate change reaffirms—for that minority of the human species that ever forgot—is that there is no such thing as a one-way relationship of pure mastery in nature. As Pope Francis writes, “Nothing in this world is indifferent to us.”

For some who see interconnection as a cosmic demotion, this is all too much to bear. And so—actively encouraged by fossil-fuel funded political actors—they choose to deny the science.....

Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything, excerpt, reviewed by Sandra Steingraber. Colbert interview; extensive interview(2 parts) 9/14.

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything (2014) is an important contribution to the discussion of strategy

and tactics for climate action. Klein has covered a lot of bases in her description of the importance of

climate change as an issue demanding concerted action, the social forces which are contributing to the

problem or demanding climate action, the weaknesses of frequently touted remedies, the state of the

environmental and climate action movements, and possibilities for organizing an effective mass

movement.}:

:{Klein does not go into details about our climate change emergency, expecting that her readers are

already familiar with the causes and magnitude of the problem. Instead she focuses on an argument in

favor of organizing a mass movement for climate action that fights for big changes in our economic

system, representing a conflict between the reigning neoliberal ideology and an alternative worldview

"embedded in interdependence rather than hyperindividualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and

cooperation rather than hierarchy." She recommends a strategic alliance between climate activists and

activists in the various movements for social justice, based on their common interests and the

galvanizing effect of climate emergencies. She recognizes the great difficulties that a movement for

climate action faces, but is hopeful that effective action can be forced before it becomes too late to

avoid catastrophe.}:

:{These notes are taken from my reading of the book. They are organized by chapter, with an additional

section at the end containing my interpretation of Klein's worldview as presented in the book. Excerpts

from the book are shown with page references in parentheses. Quotations from online articles by Klein,

and quotations from other about the book, are also given. Texts not in quotation marks are my own

paraphrasing of the book.}:

:{My own opinions differ, particularly about the practicality of Klein's approach: I am afraid that the

dominant worldview and resulting political inertia that form an impediment to effective climate action

cannot be overcome. However, I have tried to represent her book without bias and without introducing

my own ideas. If there is an opportunity for effective climate action, I believe Klein's approach may offer

the best chance of achieving it.}:

:{Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

Contents

Introduction: One Way or Another, Everything Changes .......................................................................... 2

The Right is Right: The Revolutionary Power of Climate Change ........................................................... 4
Hot Money: How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat the Planet ...................................... 5
Public and Paid For: Overcoming the Ideological Blocks to the Next Economy ...................................... 6
Planning and Banning: Slapping the Invisible Hand, Building a Movement ........................................... 7
Beyond Extractivism: Confronting the Climate Denier Within............................................................... 8
Fruits, Not Roots: The Disastrous Merger of Big Business and Big Green ............................................ 10
No Messiahs: The Green Billionaires Won't Save Us ........................................................................... 11
Dimming the Sun: The Solution to Pollution Is … Pollution? ............................................................... 11
Blockadia: The New Climate Warriors ................................................................................................ 12
Love Will Save This Place: Democracy, Divestment, and the Wins So Far .......................................... 13
You and What Army? Indigenous Rights and the Power of Keeping Our Word ................................. 14
Sharing the Sky: The Atmospheric Commons and the Power of Paying Our Debts ............................ 14
The Right to Regenerate: Moving from Extraction to Renewal ......................................................... 15

Conclusion: The Leap Years: Just Enough Time for Impossible................................................................ 16

Naomi Klein's Worldview ....................................................................................................................... 20}:

Introduction: One Way or Another, Everything Changes

:{Climate change is a crisis leading toward disaster. Everything will change, whether by force of nature or

by our choice. :{We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth, a mass movement. We need to deal with a

"savagely unjust economic system." We need a comprehensive vision and serious strategies.

Deregulated capitalism is rampant. Its ideology of neoliberalism (market fundamentalism) is dominant.

The ideology fetishizes centrism (incrementalism), and has been a key force against climate action. The}:

ideas of materialism have led to extractivism.}:

:{"The resources required to rapidly move away from fossil fuels and prepare for the coming heavy

weather could pull huge swaths of humanity out of poverty, providing services now sorely lacking, from

clean water to electricity." (7) [restore democ] 7

:{"And there are plenty of signs that climate change will be no exception [to The Shock Doctrine]—that,

rather than sparking solutions that have a real chance of preventing catastrophic warming and

protecting us from inevitable disasters, the crisis will once again be seized upon to hand over yet more

resources to the 1 percent." (8) ram thru dereg, austerity, pvtization 8 weather futures; 5x 2005-6 10 to 45B$}:

~ ppl shock from brlpw 10, needs to get at root causes

Raytheon says big $ b/c of change in consumer demands 9

:{2008-9 261 patents on "climate-ready" crops 80% by 6 co incl syngenta and mons. 9

:{"… opposition movements … will need a comprehensive vision for what should emerge in the place of

our failing system, as well as serious political strategies for how to achieve those goals." (9-10) we kno how eg New deal and gt soc}:

:{2 deg C picked to avoid econ damage, not to ppl; already .8 is showing problems 12; risk of nonlinear tip pts/cascades; on track for 4 deg says world Bank.

:{"… we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things

fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology …" (18)}:

:{"A different kind of climate movement [not led by Big Green] would have tried to challenge the extreme

ideology that was blocking so much sensible action, joining with other sectors to show how unfettered

corporate power posed a grave threat to the habitability of the planet." (20)

"… our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is

at war with many forms of life on Earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse

is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is

unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature."

(21)

"… even more powerful than capitalism … is the fetish of centrism—of reasonableness, seriousness,

splitting the difference, and generally not getting overly excited about anything. This is the habit of

thought that truly rules our era …" (22)

We need a shift in political "power—specifically … a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations

and toward communities, which in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are

getting a rotten deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social force

to change the balance of power." (25)

"But I have never said that we need to “slay,” “ditch” or “dismantle” capitalism in order to fight climate

change. And I most certainly didn’t say we need to do so first. Indeed I say the opposite, very early on in

the book (page 25), precisely because it would be so dangerous to make such a purist claim."1

"Some say there is no time for this transformation; the crisis is too pressing and the clock is ticking. I

agree that it would be reckless to claim that the only solution to this crisis is to revolutionize our

economy and revamp our worldview from the bottom up—and anything short of that is not worth

doing. There are all kinds of measures that would lower emissions substantively that could and should

be done right now. But we aren’t taking those measures, are we? The reason is that by failing to fight

these big battles that stand to shift our ideological direction and change the balance of who holds power

in our societies, a context has been slowly created in which any muscular response to climate change

seems politically impossible, especially during times of economic crisis (which lately seems to be all the

time). (25)

"So this book proposes a different strategy: think big, go deep, and move the ideological pole far away

from the stifling market fundamentalism that has become the greatest enemy to planetary health. If we

can shift the cultural context even a little, then there will be some breathing room for those sensible

reformist policies that will at least get the atmospheric carbon numbers moving in the right direction.

And winning is contagious so, who knows? Maybe within a few years, some of the ideas highlighted in

these pages that sound impossibly radical today—like a basic income for all, or a rewriting of trade law,

or real recognition of the rights of Indigenous people to protect huge parts of the world from polluting

extraction—will start to seem reasonable, even essential." (26)

1 "No, We Don’t Need to Ditch/Slay/Kill Capitalism Before We Can Fight Climate Change. But We Sure As Hell Need

To Challenge It" by Naomi Klein http://thischangeseverything.org/no-we-dont-need-to-ditchslaykill-capitalismbefore-

we-can-fight-climate-change-but-we-sure-as-hell-need-to-challenge-it/

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

PH 12/20/2014 Page 4

"… the thing about a crisis this big, this all-encompassing, is that it changes everything. It changes what

we can do, what we can hope for, what we can demand from ourselves and our leaders. It means there

is a whole lot of stuff that we have been told is inevitable that simply cannot stand. And it means that a

whole lot of stuff we have been told is impossible has to start happening right away." (28)

The Right is Right: The Revolutionary Power of Climate Change

Many do not believe in climate change's high risk, especially those on the right, those with strong

"hierarchical" views. They resist the call for strong measures, and they fear undermining faith in

capitalism, and in humans' project to dominate the Earth. Many believe they will be protected through

their wealth. Moderate environmentalists try to make emissions reduction more palatable to the right,

with little effect. Many people cannot imagine an alternative. Deliberately strengthen egalitarian and

communitarian values.

"The Yale researchers [of Yale's Cultural Cognition Project] explain that people with strong 'egalitarian'

and 'communitarian' worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice,

concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific

consensus on climate change. Conversely, those with strong 'hierarchical' and 'individualistic'

worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support

for industry, and a belief that we all pretty much get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the

scientific consensus."

"… the tight correlation between 'worldview' and acceptance of climate science [is attributed] to

'cultural cognition,' the process by which all of us … filter new information in ways that will protect our

'preferred vision of the good society.' If new information seems to confirm that vision, we welcome it

and integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain immediately gets to work

producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the unwelcome invasion.

"… In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered …

"This kind of defensive reasoning helps explain the rise of emotional intensity that surrounds the climate

issue today." (36-37)

"It’s nearly impossible to convince people to abandon their core worldview."2

Climate change calls for "heavy-duty interventions", not "a few gentle market mechanisms." (39) "And

there will obviously need to be substantial transfers of resources and technology to help battle poverty

using low carbon tools. … a Marshall Plan for the Earth. … [a] sort of wealth redistribution …" (40)

"A belief in a system that vilifies collective action and declares war on all corporate regulation and all

things public simply cannot be reconciled with a problem that demands collective action on an

unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that are largely responsible for

creating and deepening the crisis." (41)

The deniers remain strong because "… they are protecting powerful political and economic interests …"

(44)

2 Reddit comments by Naomi Klein, 11/20/2014

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2mw0nf/im_naomi_klein_author_of_this_changes_everything/

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

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"Basically we’re up against those who benefit most from the status quo and would see their profits eroded

if climate action became a reality. That’s not just fossil fuel companies, but all the large corporations that

benefit from a culture of deregulation, low taxes, free trade, etc, that is standing in the way of a robust

response. And of course we’re up against the intellectuals they pay to think."3

"… the real reason we are failing to rise to the climate moment is because the actions required directly

challenge our reigning economic paradigm (deregulated capitalism combined with public austerity), the

stories on which Western cultures are found (that we stand apart from nature and can outsmart its

limits), as well as many of the activities that form our identities and define our communities (shopping,

living virtually, shopping some more). They also spell extinction for the richest and most powerful

industry the world has ever known—the oil and gas industry …" (63)

Hot Money: How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat the

Planet

How free market fundamentalism helped overheat the planet. Free trade is pitted against climate

action. As manufacturing moves offshore, those other countries are blamed for climate change. Some

Big Green groups supported free trade agreements. Indiscriminate economic growth is fetishized at the

expense of climate action, yet we need managed degrowth. Green capitalism won't be sufficient, we

must consume less. We cannot merely rely on lifestyle decisions; we need policy changes remaking our

economies. There will be benefits, including strengthened safety nets and reduced inequality: "a just,

equitable, and inspiring transition".

"Climate change demands that we consume less, but being consumers is all we know. Climate change is

not a problem that can be solved simply by changing what we buy—a hybrid instead of an SUV, some

carbon offsets when we get on a plane. At its core, it is a crisis born of overconsumption by the

comparatively wealthy, which means the world’s most manic consumers are going to have to consume

less.

" ... The problem is the inflated role that consumption has come to play in our particular era.

Late capitalism teaches us to create ourselves through our consumer choices: shopping is how we form

our identities, find community and express ourselves. Thus, telling people that they can’t shop as much as

they want to because the planet’s support systems are overburdened can be understood as a kind of attack,

akin to telling them that they cannot truly be themselves. …"4

"I always tell people that the most important thing they can do is join groups of other people taking

action. And that action depends on where they can have the most influence. If they’re university students,

that may mean divestment. If they live somewhere in the path of a pipeline, it may mean stopping that

pipeline. If they’re a brilliant economist, it may mean working with colleagues on policy approaches that

movements can champion.

"What’s important is to break out of the mindset that climate change can be tackled by invidual [sic]

action. Those actions are important when they model change, but they do not substitute for organizing."

3 Reddit comments by Naomi Klein, 11/20/2014

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2mw0nf/im_naomi_klein_author_of_this_changes_everything/

4 "The Change Within: The Obstacles We Face Are Not Just External" by Naomi Klein

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2014/04/change-within-obstacles-we-face-are-not-just-external

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

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"We should definitely all fly less (particularly the richest of us who do it the most often). Many people I

know would fly less often if we had better rail systems in North America."5

"Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age—privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of

the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public

spending—are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe

levels." (72)

"… wealthy countries need to start cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by something like 8 to 10

percent a year—and they need to start right now." (87)

"The truth is, if we want to live within ecological limits, we would need to return to a lifestyle similar to

the one we had in the 1970s, before consumption levels went crazy in the 1980s." (91)

"… as we remake our economies to stay within our global carbon budget, we need to see less

consumption (except among the poor), less trade (as we relocalize our economies), and less private

investment in producing for excessive consumption. These reductions would be offset by increased

government spending, and increased public and private investment in the infrastructure and

alternatives needed to reduce our emissions to zero. Implicit in all of this is a great deal more

redistribution, so that more of us can live comfortably within the planet's capacity." (91)

Public and Paid For: Overcoming the Ideological Blocks to the Next

Economy

Shift from privatization to community ownership and control. Wealthy countries and regions can shift

their energy infrastructure to renewables in 20-40 years (101), but it requires public (governmental)

action which is resisted by the dominant ideology. Disasters reveal the need for universal health care,

decentralized energy production, remediation of inequity. Austerity and anti-government campaigns are

pushing in the wrong direction. We need large public sector investments for emissions reduction: shift

to renewable energy, smart grids, light rail and other mass transit, composting, building retrofits, urban

redesigns for reduced auto use, preparation for storms and other emergencies, etc. Revenues should

come from polluters, such as high royalties, or a steep carbon tax with redistribution to those who

cannot afford higher prices. The auto, arms, shipping, and air transport industries should pay too. There

are a variety of tax schemes available. The mechanisms must seem fair, socially just, and not protective

of corporations and the wealthy. Bold, long-term public planning is needed, in the face of resistance

from powerful corporations.

"If you live in the U.S., check out The Solutions Project: http://thesolutionsproject.org/. It maps out how

to get to 100% renewables, state by state."6

5 Reddit comments by Naomi Klein, 11/20/2014

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2mw0nf/im_naomi_klein_author_of_this_changes_everything/

6 Reddit comments by Naomi Klein, 11/20/2014

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2mw0nf/im_naomi_klein_author_of_this_changes_everything/

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

PH 12/20/2014 Page 7

Planning and Banning: Slapping the Invisible Hand, Building a

Movement

Government can force changes in industry, if so demanded by masses of people. Workers can take over

enterprises and run them as cooperatives, as in Argentina, even with low profit margins. Buy-local and

hire-local policies make sense. The potential for job creation is huge, but it will take public involvement

and often control. Sometimes nationalization of industries is needed. Decentralized implementation and

control will help, and it must avoid bureaucratization. Agroecology is promising along these lines.

Governments must not only provide incentives for alternative energy generation, transportation, etc.,

but also limit the use of fossil fuels. The threat from coal and from fracking is growing; there is also a

great threat from tar sands. Oil companies are driven by the market to continue extraction or die, and

they have tremendous influence in government. Many constituencies can join together to demand

political change, to avoid disaster capitalism arising from climate change. Most people no longer believe

neoliberal claims. A broad array of struggles are actually climate action struggles, since their successes

help to limit climate change or strengthen society in the face of climate change, and since they call for

similar political and economic changes as climate action requires. Populist movements have failed to be

sustained; they've been repressed or co-opted. The climate crisis arises from a deep cultural context,

which we must understand to build a politics based on reconnection to place, to past and future, and to

each other.

"Imagine … a powerful social movement—a robust coalition of trade unions, immigrants, students,

environmentalists, and everyone else whose dreams were getting crushed by the crashing economic

model …" (121)

"If that kind of coherent and sweeping vision had emerged in the United States in that moment of flux

as the Obama presidency began, right-wing attempts to paint climate action as an economy killer would

have fallen flat. It would have been clear to all that climate action is, in fact, a massive job creator, as

well as a community rebuilder, and a source of hope in moments when hope is a scarce commodity

indeed. But all of this would have required a government that was unafraid of bold long-term economic

planning, as well as social movements that were able to move masses of people to demand the

realization of that kind of vision." (124)

"Progressives [must show] that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building

a much more stable and equitable economic system, one that strengthens and transforms the public

sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate greed.

"But before that can happen, it's clear that a core battle of ideas must be fought about the right of

citizens to democratically determine what kind of economy they need. Policies that simply try to harness

the power of the market—by minimally taxing or capping carbon and then getting out of the way—

won't be enough." (125)

"… attempts to fix glaring and fundamental flaws in the system have failed because large corporations

wield far too much political power—a power exerted through corporate campaign contributions, many

of them secret; through almost unfettered access to regulators via their lobbyists; through the notorious

revolving door between business and government; as well as through the 'free speech' rights these

corporations have been granted by the U.S. Supreme Court." (151)

"… the only thing politicians fear more than losing donations is losing elections. And this is where the

power of climate change—and its potential for building the largest possible political tent—comes into

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

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play. … a rallying cry could bring together all of the various constituencies that would benefit from

reducing corporate power over politics—from health care workers to parents worried about their

children's safety at school." (152)

"… the climate moment [the urgent need for bold action] offers an overarching narrative in which

everything from the fight for good jobs to justice for migrants to reparations for historical wrongs like

slavery and colonialism can all become part of the grand project of building a nontoxic, shockproof

economy before it's too late.

"… the alternative to such a project is not the status quo extended indefinitely. It is climate-changefueled

disaster capitalism—profiteering disguised as emission reduction, privatized hyper-militarized

borders, and, quite possibly, high-risk geoengineering when things spiral out of control." (154)

"Free market ideology may still bind the imaginations of our elites, but for most of the general public, it

has been drained of its powers to persuade. The disastrous track record of the past three decades of

neoliberal policy is simply too apparent." (154)

"… for a great many people, climate action is their best hope for a better present, and a future far more

exciting than anything else currently on offer." (156)

There "are encouraging signs, … Yet the kind of counter-power that has a chance of changing society on

anything close to the scale required is still missing. … most leftists and liberals are still averting their

eyes, having yet to grasp that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against

unfettered capitalism since William Blake's 'dark Satanic Mills' blackened England's skies …. And yet

when demonstrators are protesting the various failures of this system [throughout the world], climate

change is too often little more than a footnote when it could be the coup de grâce." (156-57)

"As many are coming to realize, the fetish for structurelessness, the rebellion against any kind of

institutionalization is not a luxury today's transformative movements can afford." (158)

"To understand how we got to this place of profound disconnection from our surroundings and one

another, and to think about how we might build a politics based on reconnection, we will need to go

back a good deal further than 1988. …

"… Indeed the roots of the climate crisis date back to core civilizational myths on which post-

Enlightenment Western culture is founded—myths about humanity's duty to dominate a natural world

that is believed to be at once limitless and entirely controllable. This is not a problem that can be

blamed on the political right or on the United States; these are powerful cultural narratives that

transcend geography and ideological divides." (159)

Beyond Extractivism: Confronting the Climate Denier Within

Extractivism was a feature of colonialism and early industrialism, and continues in modern capitalism.

Coal provides a prime example. There are unintended consequences, such as climate change. Socialist

countries, and left-leaning countries, also have, and continue to be, extractivist. Indigenous peoples

offer a different worldview. Ecological Economics also challenges extractivism. The environmental

movement, however, "tried to prove that saving the planet could be a great new business opportunity."

"… 'extractivism,' a term originally used to describe economies based on removing ever more raw

materials from the earth, usually for export to traditional colonial powers, where 'value' was added. …

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

PH 12/20/2014 Page 9

"Extractivism is a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking. It is

the opposite of stewardship, which involves taking but also taking care that regeneration and future life

continue. Extractivism … is the reduction of life into objects for the use of others, giving them no

integrity or value of their own …. It is also the reduction of human beings either into labor to be brutally

extracted, pushed beyond limits, or, alternatively, into social burden, problems to be locked out at

borders and locked away in prisons or reservations. In an extractivist economy, the interconnections

among these various objectified components of life are ignored; the consequences of severing them are

of no concern.

"Exctractivism is also directly connected to the notion of sacrifice zones—places that, to their extractors,

somehow don't count and therefore can be poisoned, drained, or otherwise destroyed …" (169)

"… just one of the reasons climate change is so deeply frightening. Because to confront this crisis

truthfully is to confront ourselves—to reckon, as our ancestors did, with our vulnerability to the

elements that make up both the planet and our bodies. … we should not underestimate the depth of the

civilizational challenge that this relationship represents. … facing these truths about climate change

'means recognizing that the power relation between humans and the earth is the reverse of the one we

have assumed for three centuries.'" (175)

"The strongest challenges to this worldview have always come from outside its logic, in those historical

junctures when the extractive project clashes directly with a different, older way of relating to the

earth—and that older way fights back." (177)

"But for those of us born and raised inside this system, though we may sell see the dead-end flaw of its

central logic, it can remain intensely difficult to see a way out." (178)

"… the deeper message carried by the ecological crisis—that humanity has to go a whole lot easier on

the living systems that sustain us, acting regeneratively rather than extractively—is a profound challenge

to large parts of the left as well as the right.

"… self-described socialist states devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as their capitalist

counterparts, and spewed waste just as recklessly." (178)

"The good news, and it is significant, is that large and growing social movements in all of these countries

are pushing back against the idea that extraction-and-redistribution is the only route out of poverty and

economic crisis." (182)

"Space is opening up for a growing influence of Indigenous thought on new generations of activists … [so

that] progressive movements are being exposed to worldviews based on relationships of reciprocity and

interconnection with the natural world that are the antithesis of extractivism." (182)

"We have a big lift ahead in figuring out new ways to live in a post-capitalist world. The transition will no

doubt be messy and painful and we don’t necessarily know where we are headed, only that the current

status quo is [sic] certain demise. Fortunately, there are people on this planet – indigenous peoples – who

have long carried a vision of how to live on this earth worthy of emulating in spite of centuries of

attempts to crush their vision and disempower them. They indeed continue to shine the light in spite of an

onslaught of oppression, most recently as their lands are targeted for extraction. From them, not from the

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

PH 12/20/2014 Page 10

UN and their corporate partners, we can find inspiration, hope, humanity and leadership as we move

forward." 7

Fruits, Not Roots: The Disastrous Merger of Big Business and Big

Green

Many large environmental organizations ("Big Green groups") have close ties to large polluting

businesses. Many of these groups champion watered-down climate actions, such as "market-based"

solutions, which do not aim for a full transition away from fossil fuels. "The failure of this polite strategy

is beyond debate." (200) Some have even supported fracking. Businesses have gamed the cap-and-trade

system implemented in Europe; carbon offsets don't work very well.

"Simple principles governed this golden age of environmental legislation [1960s and 1970s]: ban or

severely limit the offending activity or substance and where possible, get the polluter to pay for the

cleanup." (203) Confronting the neoliberal ideology advanced by President Reagan, many green groups

chose to look friendlier and cooperate more with big business. The Environmental Defense Fund pushed

the first full-fledged cap-and-trade system to combat acid rain.

"Far from using climate change as a tool to alter the American way of life, many of the large

environmental organizations spend their days doing everything in their power to furiously protect that

way of life, at the direct expense of demanding the levels of change required by science." (210)

"… the refusal of so many environmentalists to consider responses to the climate crisis that would

upend the economic status quo forces them to place their hopes in solutions—whether miracle

products, or carbon markets, or 'bridge fuels'—that are either so weak or so high-risk that entrusting

them with our collective safety constitutes what can only be described as magical thing." (210-211)

"All together, This Changes Everything holds the Big Greens accountable for redirecting public attention

away from the need for big, systemic change and toward lifestyle and consumer approaches to climate

change—complete with on-line carbon calculators—that did little to actually lower emissions."8

"But most of all, regular, noncelebrity people were called upon to exercise their consumer power—not

by shopping less but by discovering new and exciting ways to consume more. And if guilt set in, well, we

could click on the handy carbon calculators on any one of dozens of green sites and purchase an offset,

and our sins would instantly be erased.

"In addition to not doing much to actually lower emissions, these various approaches also served to

reinforce the very 'extrinsic' values that we now know are the greatest psychological barriers to climate

action—from the worship of wealth and fame for their own sakes to the idea that change is something

that is handed down from above by our betters, rather than something we demand for ourselves. They

may even have played a role in weakening public belief in the reality of human-caused climate change.

Indeed a growing number of communications specialists now argue that because the 'solutions' to

climate change proposed by many green groups in this period [2000s] were so borderline frivolous,

many people concluded that the groups must have been exaggerating the scale of the problem. …

7 "Corporations Are Not Going to Save Us From Climate Disruption" by Rachel Smolker, reposted by Naomi Klein at

http://thischangeseverything.org/corporations-are-not-going-to-save-us-from-climate-disruption/

8 "‘This Changes Everything’ Including the Anti-Fracking Movement" by Sandra Steingraber

http://ecowatch.com/2014/09/15/naomi-klein-this-changes-everything-fracking/3/

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

PH 12/20/2014 Page 11

wouldn't the environmental movement be asking the public to do more than switch brands of cleaning

liquid, occasionally walk to work, and send money? Wouldn't they be trying to shut down the fossil fuel

companies?" (212-13)

"The excerpt above will likely be flagged as one of the most controversial passages of the book: Klein

lays the blame for widespread climate change denial at the feet of the environmental community!"9

In the farms and forests used for carbon "offsets," which allow pollution to occur elsewhere: "In order

for multinational corporations to protect their freedom to pollute the atmosphere, peasants, farmers,

and Indigenous people are losing their freedom to live and sustain themselves in peace." (222)

No Messiahs: The Green Billionaires Won't Save Us

Richard Branson pledged $3 billion from his businesses to tackle climate change, but did not make good

on the pledge.

Branson "dangled the prospect of a miracle technological fix for carbon pollution just over the horizon in

order to buy time to continue escalating emissions, free of meddlesome regulation." (249)

"Branson set out to harness the profit motive to solve the climate crisis—but the temptation to profit

from practices worsening the crisis proved too great to resist. Again and again, the demands of building

a successful empire trumped the climate imperative—whether that meant lobbying against needed

regulation, or putting more planes in the air, or pitching oil companies on using his pet miracle

technologies to extract more oil." (251-52)

"There is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy; but the profit motive is not going to

be the midwife for that great transformation." (252)

"… the profits from our dirtiest industries must be diverted into the grand and hopeful project of

cleaning up their mess. … it won't happen on a voluntary basis or on the honor system. It will have to be

legislated—using the kinds of tough regulations, higher taxes, and steeper royalty rates these sectors

have resisted all along." (254)

Dimming the Sun: The Solution to Pollution Is … Pollution?

Solar Radiation Management (SRM) involves "various means of injecting particles into the atmosphere

in order to reflect more sunlight back to space, thereby reducing the amount of heat that reaches the

earth." (258) Side effects include continuing ocean acidification, and possibly worse climate in some

regions—which is very hard to determine in advance, though it's predicted in some models. Testing is

necessarily inadequate, some important results will not be known until a scheme is actually

implemented for years. Historically, droughts have followed volcanic eruptions, which similarly dim

sunlight. It's likely that developed countries would be willing to risk droughts in undeveloped countries.

Many supporters of geoengineering are looking for ways to continue using fossil fuels as long as

possible.

9 "‘This Changes Everything’ Including the Anti-Fracking Movement" by Sandra Steingraber

http://ecowatch.com/2014/09/15/naomi-klein-this-changes-everything-fracking/3/

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

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"… I have been repeatedly struck by how the hard-won lessons about humility before nature that have

reshaped modern science, particularly the fields of chaos and complexity theory, do not appear to have

penetrated this particular bubble." (267)

"… we would be wise to anticipate even small amounts of geoengineering unleashing a new age of

weather-related geopolitical recrimination, paranoia, and possibly retaliation, with every future natural

disaster being blamed—rightly or wrongly—on the people in faraway labs playing god." (269)

"We have options, ones that would greatly decrease the chances of ever confronting those impossible

choices, choices that indeed deserve to be described as genocidal. To fail to exercise those options—

which is exactly what we are collectively doing—knowing full well that eventually the failure could force

government to rationalize 'risking' turning whole nations, even subcontinents, into sacrifice zones, is a

decision our children may judge as humanity's single most immoral act." (284)

"In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves

from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely." (285)

"As environmental author Kenneth Brower writes, 'The notion that science will save us is the chimera

that allows the present generation to consume all the resources it wants, as if no generations will follow.

It is the sedative that allows civilization to march so steadfastly toward environmental catastrophe. It

forestalls the real solution, which will be in the hard, nontechnical work of changing human behavior.'"

(289)

Blockadia: The New Climate Warriors

"Blockadia is not a specific location on a map but rather a roving transnational conflict zone that is

cropping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attempting to dig

and drill …" (294-95)

"Resistance to high-risk extreme extraction is building a global, grassroots, and broad-based network the

likes of which the environmental movement has rarely seen. And perhaps this phenomenon shouldn't

even be referred to as an environmental movement at all, since it is primarily driven by a desire for a

deeper form of democracy, one that provides communities with real control over those resources that

are most critical to collective survival—the health of the water, air, and soil. In the process, these placebased

stands are stopping real climate crimes in progress." (295)

"The collective response to the climate crisis is changing from something that primarily takes place in

closed-door policy and lobbying meetings into something alive and unpredictable and very much in the

streets (and mountains, and farmers' fields, and forests)." (295-96)

"These activists understand that keeping carbon in the ground, and protecting ancient, carbonsequestering

forests from being clear-cut for mines, is a prerequisite for preventing catastrophic

warming.

"… Indeed, if the movement has a guiding theory, it is that it is high time to close, rather than expand,

the fossil fuel frontier." (304)

People organized in Nigeria against oil extraction, and the government responded brutally. The conflict

escalated to "a full-blown armed insurgency, complete with bombings of oil infrastructure and

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

PH 12/20/2014 Page 13

government targets, rampant pipeline vandalism, ransom kidnapping of oil workers …. In the process,

the original goals of the movement—to stop the ecological plunder, and take back control over the

region's resource—became harder to decipher." (308-09)

The movement has been propelled by expansion of fossil fuel extraction, often into hostile territory, and

by the heightened risk of extraction and transportation operations.

"… in the era of extreme energy, there is no longer the illusion of discreet sacrifice zones anymore."

(314) The expansion of fracking and other extractive activities has galvanized the new climate

movement. Resistance is increasing.

"One battle doesn't rob from another but rather causes battles to multiply, with each act of courage,

and each victory, inspiring others to strengthen their resolve." (324)

In Blockadia, risk assessment is being replaced by the precautionary principle. The burden of proving

safety is being put back on the industry.

"This sense of moral clarity, after so many decades of chummy green partnerships, is the real shock for

the extractive industries." (336)

Love Will Save This Place: Democracy, Divestment, and the Wins So

Far

"… when the extractive industry's culture of structural transience bumps up against a group of deeply

rooted people with an intense love of their homeplace and a determination to protect it, the effect can

be explosive." (344)

"… what has emerged in the movement against extreme extraction is less an anti-fossil fuels movement

than a pro-water movement." (344)

Water is contaminated not only by spills, but in regular production of tar sands and in fracking.

Resistance is growing in India, and particularly in China where pollution has become a big issue.

The student-led divestment movement has "put the fossil fuel companies' core business model on trial,

arguing that they have become rogue actors whose continued economic viability relies on radical

climate destabilization—and that, as such, any institution claiming to serve the public interest has a

moral responsibility to liberate itself from these odious profits." (354)

The divestment movement won't bankrupt the industry, but it is "chipping away at the social license

with which these companies operate." (354)

"Divestment is just the first stage of this delegitimization process, but it is already well under way.

"None of this is a replacement for major policy changes that would regulate carbon reduction across the

board. But what the emergence of this networked, grassroots movement means Is that the next time

climate campaigners get into a room filled with politicians and polluters to negotiate, there will be many

thousands of people outside the doors with the power to amp up the political pressure significantly—

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

PH 12/20/2014 Page 14

with heightened boycotts, court cases, and more militant direct action should real progress fail to

materialize." (355)

Fair trade laws are being used by extractive industries to quash environmental wins.

"Again and again, after failing to persuade communities that these projects are in their genuine best

interest, governments are teaming up with corporate players to roll over the opposition, using a

combination of physical violence and draconian legal tools reclassifying peaceful activists as terrorists."

(362)

Many cities, and the Transition Town movement, are working to limit or plan for climate change.

You and What Army? Indigenous Rights and the Power of Keeping

Our Word

"… Indigenous land and treaty rights have proved a major barrier for the extractive industries in many of

the key Blockadia struggles.

"… Even more critically, many non-Natives are also beginning to see that the ways of life that Indigenous

groups are protecting have a great deal to teach about how to relate to the land in ways that are not

purely extractive." (370)

Many Indigenous communities, having trouble meeting basic needs, feel pressured to make quick-anddirty

deals with extractive industries.

Sharing the Sky: The Atmospheric Commons and the Power of Paying

Our Debts

Renewables "demand that we adapt ourselves to the rhythms of natural systems, as opposed to bending

those systems to our will with brute force engineering." (394)

Poor communities are often forced to support extraction projects in order to gain some jobs and

"development" funds. "Part of the job of the climate movement, then, is to make the moral case that

the communities who have suffered most from unjust resource relationships should be first to be

supported in their efforts to build the next, life-based economy now.

"And that means a fundamentally new relationship, in which those communities have full control over

resource projects, so that they become opportunities for skills training, jobs, and steady revenues

(rather than one-off payments)." (399)

"As discussed, the resources for this just transition must ultimately come from the state, collected from

the profits of the fossil fuel companies in the brief window left while they are still profitable." (401)

Meanwhile, the divestment movement is asking institutions "to reinvest that money in entities that have

a clear vision for the healing process." (401)

"During these times of continual economic stress and exclusion, the communities on the front lines of

saying no to dirty energy have discovered that they will never build the base they need unless they can

simultaneously provide economic alternatives to the projects they are opposing." (403)

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

PH 12/20/2014 Page 15

"Increasingly, [Blockadia doesn't just say no, it] is also a constructive movement, actively building an

alternative economy based on very different principles and values." (405)

"… developing countries [are] owed a debt for the inherent injustice of climate change—the fact that

wealthy countries had used up most of the atmospheric capacity for safely absorbing CO2 before

developing countries had a chance to industrialize. …if wealthy countries do not want poorer ones to

pull themselves out of poverty in the same dirty way that we did, the onus is on Northern governments

to help foot the bill.

"This, of course, is the core of the argument for the existence of a 'climate debt' …" (409)

"The truth is—and this is a humbling thing for cultures accustomed to assuming that our actions shape

the destiny of the world to accept—the real battle will not be lost or won by us. It will be won or lost by

those movements in the Global South that are fighting their own Blockadia-style struggles—demanding

their own clean energy revolutions, their own green jobs, their own pools of carbon left in the ground.

And they are up against powerful forces within their own countries that insist that it is their 'turn' to

pollute their way to prosperity and that nothing matters more than economic growth." (412)

"And there are alternatives—models of development that do not require massive wealth stratification,

tragic cultural losses, or ecological devastation." (413)

"With many of the biggest pools of untapped carbon on lands controlled by some of the poorest people

on the planet, and with emissions rising most rapidly in what were, until recently, some of the poorest

parts of the world, there is simply no credible way forward that does not involve redressing the real

roots of poverty." (418)

The Right to Regenerate: Moving from Extraction to Renewal

"… protecting and valuing the earth's ingenious systems of reproducing life and the fertility of all of its

inhabitants, may lie at the center of the shift in worldview that must take place if we are to move

beyond extractivism. A worldview based on regeneration and renewal rather than domination and

depletion." (424)

"It suddenly dawned on me that I was indeed part of a vast biotic community, and it was a place where a

great many of us—humans and nonhuman alike—found ourselves engaged in an uphill battle to create

new living beings." (427)

Pollution is hurting fertility and affecting health in other ways. Animals are affected as well. Eggs, larvae,

and juveniles are especially hard hit.

"What is emerging [in Blockadia], in fact, is a new kind of reproductive rights movement, one fighting

not only for the reproductive rights of women, but for the reproductive rights of the planet as a whole

…. All of life has the right to renew, regenerate, and heal itself." (443)

Such rights are being adopted as legal rights. People are remembering their connections with nature.

"Again and again, linear, one-way relationships of pure extraction are being replaced with systems that

are circular and reciprocal." (446)

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

PH 12/20/2014 Page 16

"… systems are being created that require minimal external inputs and produce almost no waste—a

quest for homeostasis ….

"And contrary to capitalism's drift toward monopoly and duopoly in virtually every arena, these systems

mimic nature's genius for built-in redundancy by amplifying diversity wherever possible …. The beauty of

these models is that when they fail, they fail on a small and manageable scale—with backup systems in

place. Because if there is one thing we know, it's that the future is going to have plenty of shocks.

"… living nonextractively means relying overwhelmingly on resources that can be continuously

regenerated ….

"These processes are sometimes called 'resilient' but a more appropriate term might be 'regenerative.'

Because resilience—though certainly one of nature's greatest gifts—is a passive process, implying the

ability to absorb blows and get back up. Regeneration, on the other hand, is active: we become full

participants in the process of maximizing life's creativity." (447)

Conclusion: The Leap Years: Just Enough Time for Impossible

"… global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient, and barrier-free that

'earth-human systems' are becoming dangerously unstable in response." (450)

"… only mass social movements can save us now. Because we know where the current system, left

unchecked, is headed. We also know, I would add, how that system will deal with the reality of serial

climate-related disasters: with profiteering, and escalating barbarism to segregate the losers from the

winners." (450)

"The events out on the streets in New York this week did provide some hope and inspiration. There were

plenty of wishy-washy, nonsense calls (“100 percent renewable energy, now,” “Go Vegan: Save the

Planet,” “electric cars,” “biofuels” etc.). But there were also many who have dug in deep enough to

conclude that our only real chance for addressing the multipronged crises we face is to overcome

divisions and disparities to build unity and take action including bold nonviolent direct action targeting

the roots of the problem. People are recognizing that all of the various issues, concerns and struggles that

we contend with – from tar sands, to fracking, from nukes and uranium mining to biofuels, from

oppression and incarceration to poverty, sexism, racism and a lack of basic rights – all stem from a

common root cause (named capitalism). With virtually everything at stake, we can and must use our

power in numbers to put an end to the utterly grotesque system that currently reigns and which has

demonstrated that it is willing to go to any lengths – including destroying our only planet – in the name of

endless profitmaking and accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny few. Only then can real

solutions prevail."10

"The movements explored in these pages—Blockadia's fast multiplying local outposts, the fossil fuel

divestment/reinvestment movement, the local laws barring high-risk extraction, the bold court

challenges by Indigenous groups and others—are early manifestations of this resistance. They have not

only located various choke points to slow the expansion plans of the fossil fuel companies, but the

economic alternatives these movements are proposing and building are mapping ways of living within

planetary boundaries, ones based on intricate reciprocal relationships rather than brute extraction. This

is [what] is needed to put the brakes on the forces of destruction and destabilization." (451)

10 "Corporations Are Not Going to Save Us From Climate Disruption" by Rachel Smolker, reposted by Naomi Klein at

http://thischangeseverything.org/corporations-are-not-going-to-save-us-from-climate-disruption/

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

PH 12/20/2014 Page 17

"My movement heroes right now are a Bay Area [East Bay] group called Movement Generation — check

them out: http://movementgeneration.org/"11

"… lowering global emissions in line with climate scientists' urgent warnings demands changes of a truly

daunting speed and scale. … forcing some of the most profitable companies on the planet to forfeit

trillions of dollars of future earnings by leaving the vast majority of proven fossil fuel reserves in the

ground. … coming up with trillions more to pay for zero-carbon, disaster-ready societal transformations.

And let's take for granted that we want to do these radical things democratically and without a

bloodbath, so violent, vanguardist revolutions don't have much to offer in the way of road maps." (452)

Previous movements—for civil rights for African-Americans and women—were successful in gaining

legal rights against institutional discrimination, but not regarding "fundamental challenges to the free

market economic order." (453)

"… huge gains [were] won by the labor movement in the aftermath of the Great Depression—the

massive wave of unionization that forced owners to share a great deal more wealth with their workers,

which in turn helped create a context to demand ambitious social programs …. In the same period, social

movement pressure created the conditions for the New Deal and programs like it across the

industrialized world. These made massive investments in public infrastructure—utilities, transportation

systems, housing, and more—on a scale comparable to what the climate crisis calls for today." (454)

"… the movements for the abolition of slavery and for Third World independence from colonial powers.

Both of these transformative movements forced ruling elites to relinquish practices that were still

extraordinarily profitable, much as fossil fuel extraction is today." (455)

"… the climate justice movement is demanding that an existing set of political and economic interests be

forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of wealth. It is impossible to point to any precedent other than

abolition.

… It is an audacious demand, and those making it should be clear-eyed about just what they’re asking.

They should also recognize that, like the abolitionists of yore, their task may be as much instigation and

disruption as it is persuasion. There is no way around conflict with this much money on the line, no

available solution that makes everyone happy."12

"While not equivalent, the dependency of the U.S. economy on slave labor—particularly in the Southern

states—is certainly comparable to the modern global economy's reliance on fossil fuels." (456) The value

of the slaves was "very roughly similar to the value of the carbon reserves that must be left in the

ground worldwide if we are to have a good chance of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius.

"But the analogy, as all acknowledge, is far from perfect. Burning fossil fuels is of course not the moral

equivalent of owning slaves or occupying countries. … Nor were the movements that ended slavery and

defeated colonial rule in any way bloodless: nonviolent tactics like boycotts and protests played major

roles, but slavery in the Caribbean was only outlawed after numerous slave rebellions were brutally

suppressed, and, of course, abolition in the United States came only after the carnage of the Civil War.

"[Also] the economic side of the struggle was far less successful." (456-57)

11 Reddit comments by Naomi Klein, 11/20/2014

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2mw0nf/im_naomi_klein_author_of_this_changes_everything/

12 "The New Abolitionism" by Christopher Hayes http://www.thenation.com/article/179461/new-abolitionism

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

PH 12/20/2014 Page 18

"The only transformation of comparable scope, Klein argues, was the abolition of slavery. Ironically,

abolition may have succeeded when it did only because coal power was quickly replacing human toil. In

trying to cut the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, activists have their work cut out for them."13

"Truly addressing the crisis will require building people power on a scale that the world has never seen

before." 14

"… if climate justice carries the day, the economic costs to our elites will be real—not only because of

the carbon left in the ground but also because of the regulations, taxes, and social programs needed to

make the required transformation. Indeed, these new demands on the ultra rich could effectively bring

the era of the footloose Davos oligarch to a close." (457)

Climate justice economic demands "represent nothing less than the unfinished business of the most

powerful liberation movements of the past two centuries, from civil rights to feminism to Indigenous

sovereignty. … Such is the promise of a Marshall Plan for the Earth." (458)

"So climate change does not need some shiny new movement that will magically succeed where others

failed. Rather, as the furthest-reaching crisis created by the extractivist worldview, and one that puts

humanity on a firm and unyielding deadline, climate change can be the force—the grand push—that will

bring together all of these still living movements. … Climate change is our chance to right those festering

wrongs at last—the unfinished business of liberation." (459)

"A central idea behind the approach I take is that we all have to get out of our “issue” silos: labour,

environment, poverty — and build a genuine social movement that is democratic and has a coherent

narrative. Part of our problem is the NGO-isatin [sic] of the left."15

Activism "becomes an entirely normal activity throughout society …. During extraordinary historical

moments—both world wars, the aftermath of the Great Depression, or the peak of the civil rights era—

the usual categories dividing 'activists' and 'regular people' became meaningless because the project of

changing society was so deeply woven into the project of life. Activists were, quite simply, everyone."

(459)

More ideas for action: "Twenty Things YOU Can Do To Address the Climate Crisis!" 16

Most of us cannot imagine being part of the mobilization that's needed. "In other words, we are

products of our age and of a dominant ideological project. One that too often has taught us to see

ourselves as little more than singular, gratification-seeking units, out to maximize our narrow advantage,

while simultaneously severing so many of us from the broader communities whose pooled skills are

capable of solving problems big and small." (460)

13 "'This Changes Everything,’ by Naomi Klein: review" by Mason Inman

http://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/Review-This-Changes-Everything-by-Naomi-5764874.php

14 "Twenty Things YOU Can Do To Address the Climate Crisis!" by Patrick Robbins, reposted by Naomi Klein

http://thischangeseverything.org/twenty-things-you-can-do-to-address-the-climate-crisis/

15 Reddit comments by Naomi Klein, 11/20/2014

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2mw0nf/im_naomi_klein_author_of_this_changes_everything/

16 "Twenty Things YOU Can Do To Address the Climate Crisis!" by Patrick Robbins, reposted by Naomi Klein

http://thischangeseverything.org/twenty-things-you-can-do-to-address-the-climate-crisis/

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

PH 12/20/2014 Page 19

"All of this is why any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as

part of a much broader battle of worldviews, a process of rebuilding and reinventing the very idea of the

collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and

neglect. Because what is overwhelming about the climate challenge is that it requires breaking so many

rules at once—rules written into national laws and trade agreements, as well as powerful unwritten

rules that tell us that no government can increase taxes and stay in power, or say no to major

investments no matter how damaging, or plan to gradually contract those parts of our economies that

endanger us all.

"And yet each of those rules emerged out of the same, coherent worldview. If that worldview is

delegitimized, then all of the rules within it become much weaker and more vulnerable." (460-61)

We need "game-changing [policy battles] that don't merely aim to change laws but change patterns of

thought." We need to open up "a space for a full-throated debate about values—about what we owe to

one another based on our shared humanity, and what it is that we collectively value more than

economic growth and corporate profits.

"Indeed a great deal of the work of deep social change involves having debates during which new stories

can be told to replace the ones that have failed us. Because if we are to have any hope of making the

kind of civilizational leap required of this fateful decade, we will need to start believing, once again, that

humanity is not hopelessly selfish and greedy—the image ceaselessly sold to us by everything from

reality shows to neoclassical economics." (461)

Many of us are overwhelmed by our concerns for people and the earth. We are silent "because we lack

the collective spaces in which to confront the raw terror of ecocide [and] the end of the world as we

know it …." (461-62)

"Fundamentally, the task is to articulate not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative

worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—embedded in interdependence rather

than hyperindividualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy. …

Because in the hot and stormy future we have already made inevitable through our past emissions, an

unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people and a capacity for deep compassion will be the only

things standing between civilization and barbarism." (462)

The transformative movements of the past "modeled different values in their own behavior, and in the

process liberated the political imagination and rapidly altered the sense of what was possible. They were

also unafraid of the language of morality—to give the pragmatic, cost-benefit arguments a rest and

speak of right and wrong, of love and indignation." (462)

Abolitionists used "highly polarizing rhetoric" to emphasize their moral arguments. Climate activists

need to take a similarly clear moral stance.

"… there are plenty of solid economic arguments for moving beyond fossil fuels ... But we will not win

the battle for a stable climate by trying to beat the bean counters at their own game—arguing, for

instance, that it is more cost-effective to invest in emission reduction now than disaster response later.

We will win by asserting that such calculations are morally monstrous …" (464)

"… there is little doubt that another crisis will see us in the streets and squares once again, taking us all

by surprise. The real question is what progressive forces will make of that moment, the power and

confidence with which it will be seized." (466)

Notes on Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything

PH 12/20/2014 Page 20

Naomi Klein's Worldview

We can foresee important effects of our action or inaction, confidently aiming for good and for avoiding

harm. Our collective actions can build the better future we can imagine. Through long-term planning

and collective action (extending globally), we humans (not just elites) can intentionally change our

economic and political systems, perhaps just barely fast enough to deal with current emergencies.

Scientists are helping us to understand climate change (part of a greater ecological crisis) and our role in

it. The prognosis is dire—great suffering among humans, and harm to the natural world—so we must act

to prevent disaster.

Climate change is the result of a system in action: the capitalist system, which also results in inequity

and many injustices (at all scales, from individuals to countries). Left to its own, it will grind every bit of

value out of the earth and our labors. We cannot just blame "bad guys", ignorance, or greed. Politicians,

business leaders, and others implementing extractivist policies are acting as the system demands, so we

must radically change the system.

Some people believe in technological innovation solving our big social problems, but that's magical

thinking. Only a global mass movement may be effective. Violence cannot be part of the strategy, since

it leads to severe repression and loss of life. We must, united across the globe, express our love and

indignation, set goals, strategize, make sacrifices, and (shifting the balance of power) force governments

to rein in corporations and reorient the economy. Decisions should be made democratically, not by

elites or bureaucrats, according to our deep compassion, what we collectively value (and our

understanding of right and wrong), and what we owe to one another based on our shared humanity and

the equal rights of all people.

This is challenging because the system enculturates people according to the dominant ideology, which

supports the system's destructive operations. For example, the culture leads us to define ourselves by

what we buy, worship wealth and fame for their own sakes, compromise, accept change as something

that is handed down from above by our betters rather than something we demand for ourselves, and

generally not get overly excited about anything. We are also encouraged to believe the narratives of

neoliberalism, including the magic of "free markets" and the "fact" that humanity is hopelessly selfish

and greedy.

Our cultural narratives include myths about humanity's duty to dominate a natural world that is said to

be both limitless and entirely controllable. We must regain a feeling of humility before nature, which is

ultimately more powerful than us humans. We are part of a vast biotic community engaged in an uphill

battle to create new living beings. We must act (among humans and in relationship to the natural world)

according to principles of interdependence rather than hyperindividualism, reciprocity rather than

dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy. Linear, one-way relationships of pure extraction will

be replaced with systems that are circular and reciprocal. Nature sets ecological limits, within which we

must live. We must adapt ourselves to the rhythms of natural systems and, acting as stewards,

regenerate and renew rather than dominate and deplete, thus fully participating in nature's process of

maximizing life's creativity.}: