How to Change Everything

by Naomi Klein

  We are all in the sacrifice zone now, unless we join together and raise our voices in opposition.

  CLIMATE CRUELTY

  When the first global School Strike for Climate came to the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, kids of all ages poured out of their schools in the middle of the day. As in New York and dozens of other cities around the world, the young people waved signs as they merged into larger streams. By early afternoon, two thousand of them were gathered in a square at the city’s center to listen to speeches and music.

  “I was so proud of the whole of Christchurch. All of these people had been so brave. It isn’t so easy to walk out,” Mia Sutherland told me. She was seventeen years old and one of the organizers of the strike.

  The high point, Sutherland said, was when the entire crowd sang a strike anthem called “Rise Up.” The song had been written by twelve-year-old Lucy Gray, who’d been the first to call for the student climate strike in Christchurch.

  Sutherland is an outdoorsy person. She had started to worry about climate disruption when she’d realized that it would harm not just far-off places but also parts of the natural world she knew and loved. Then she learned that entire Pacific nations are at risk because of sea level rise and the growing power of cyclones. That’s when climate change went from an environmental issue to a human-rights issue for her. “Here in New Zealand we are part of the Pacific Island family,” she said. “These are our neighbors.”

  On the climate strike stage in Christchurch, young people took turns speaking at the microphone. “Everyone looked so happy,” Sutherland later recalled. Then, just as she was about to speak, a friend gave her a tug and said, “You have to shut it down. Now!”

  A police officer walked onto the stage, took the microphone, and told everyone to leave the square. As Sutherland went to catch a bus, she saw a headline on her phone. A shooting had just taken place ten minutes away from where she was standing. She was stunned.

  She soon learned that at the very same time as the students’ climate strike, an Australian man living in New Zealand had driven to the Al Noor mosque, one of the Muslim houses of worship in Christchurch. He’d walked inside and opened fire on the worshippers as they’d prayed. Six minutes later he had driven to another mosque and continued his massacre. More than fifty people died as a result of the shootings. Nearly as many were seriously injured.

  The Christchurch killer was a white supremacist, someone who believes that whites are better than people of other races and should have more rights and privileges. He was driven by racist hate. What he wrote about his crimes makes it seem that ecological breakdown was one of the things that fed his hate.

  The killer called himself an “eco-fascist.” The green-sounding “eco” comes from “ecology,” the study of how living things relate to each other and to their environment. “Fascist” comes from “fascism,” a political viewpoint that favors authoritarian, dictatorial leadership above democracy and favors racial or national identity above individual human rights. Letting non-white immigrants into places like New Zealand and Europe, the killer wrote, was “environmental warfare” because it would overpopulate and destroy those regions.

  This is false. It is the richest parts of the world and the very richest people that have polluted our planet most. But as our societies start to tackle the ecological and climate crisis, this kind of white-power eco-fascism could become more common. In fact, governments of some majority-white countries, even countries that have not taken many steps to fight climate change, are already using the climate crisis as an excuse to keep out immigrants and to cut back on aid to poorer nations.

  The governments of the European Union, the United States, Canada, and Australia have already made it much harder to enter their countries as immigrants. Increasingly these governments are locking up migrants in camps and prisons. This, they claim, will prevent other desperate people from seeking safety by crossing their borders.

  This is one example of climate injustice, because one of the reasons people are forced to move and emigrate is the impact of climate change. Another example of climate injustice is the way some of the world’s super-rich are already taking steps to protect themselves from the worst effects of climate change and social upheaval. They are building well-stocked, well-guarded private ranches or mansions that are really fortresses. This deepens the divide between the haves and the have-nots, further eroding the ideas of a shared fate and the public good. It also hoards resources that could be used to help others. Wealth and private security guards, however, cannot shield anyone forever from drastic upheavals if the worst projections of climate change come to pass.

  All of this is why we cannot think about climate action without thinking about justice and fairness at the same time. Because right now, many responses to climate disruption are clearly unfair. The people who polluted the least are suffering the most. And the people who polluted the most are using their money to protect themselves from the worst results of their actions.

  So humanity faces a choice.

  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 join together to halt the threat that is advancing on all of us? Or will we try to hoard what’s left, look after only “our own,” and lock everyone else out?

  PAYING OUR CLIMATE DEBT

  We are not fated to go down the path of climate cruelty. There are other paths for the future, if we choose to take them. We could start down them by being honest about what the richer, overdeveloped parts of the world owe to the poorer, underdeveloped ones: a climate debt.

  Greenhouse gases build up in Earth’s atmosphere over time. Carbon dioxide (CO2), for example, stays in the atmosphere for several hundred years—some of it even longer. Our planet’s climate is changing today because of more than two centuries of built-up emissions. Countries that have powered their industrial economies with fossil fuels for a long time have therefore done much more to raise the planet’s temperature than countries that came later to industry. And, as chapter 4 of this book will make clear, much of the wealth of these rich parts of the world has its roots in people stolen from Africa and lands stolen from Indigenous Peoples.

  This means that the climate crisis was overwhelmingly created by the world’s wealthiest countries, including the United States, the nations of western Europe, Russia, Great Britain, Japan, Canada, and Australia. With less than one fifth of the world’s population, they have emitted nearly two-thirds of the carbon dioxide that is now changing the climate. The United States alone now emits about 15 percent of the world’s carbon, even though it has less than 5 percent of the world’s population.

  But even though the wealthier countries and people are responsible for most of the climate crisis, they are not the most vulnerable to its effects. Few of the richest nations are located in the hottest and driest parts of the world, and all of them are able to produce what they need, or can afford to import it—at least for now.

  In addition, although Australia and western North America have been ravaged by droughts and fires, the higher overall incomes and living standards in these countries mean that many people have refrigeration and air-conditioning and can move to new homes if necessary. Of course, this is not true for an ever-growing number of people in these countries.

  As with the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina, the poorest people and nations are hurt first and worst by greenhouse gas emissions. In 2018, the World Bank estimated that by the year 2050, flooding, heat, drought, or food shortages caused by climate change will drive more than 140 million people from their homes in South Asia, Latin America, and Africa south of the Sahara Desert. Many experts think the number will be even higher. Most of these displaced people will stay in their own countries, crowding into cities and slums that are already overcrowded and stressed. Many, though, will try for a better life elsewhere.

  Basic justice says that victims of a crisis caused by others are owed something. So a vital step toward justice woul
d be for the world’s wealthiest to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, as much and as quickly as they can. Another step would be to recognize that all people have the right to move and seek safety when their land is too parched to grow crops or is threatened by fast-rising seas. This could involve helping climate migrants move to new locations within their countries or welcoming them to other countries.

  A third step would be for the richer, more developed parts of the world to pay their climate debt to the poor, less developed nations. The idea behind climate debt is that the richer countries owe something to the poorer countries because of their history.

  Earth’s atmosphere can safely absorb only a limited amount of carbon dioxide. This is called the “carbon budget.” Wealthy countries had already used up most of the planet’s carbon budget before most poorer ones had a chance to industrialize. The reasons for this are complex, but they have to do with the legacies of colonialism and slavery. Now these lower-income countries are trying to catch up. Their people want many of the things that people in wealthier countries take for granted: electricity, sanitation, and convenient transportation networks. And they have a right to them. But the trouble is this: if everyone in the world copies the wasteful, fossil-fuel-burning lifestyles that are common in rich nations, the planet’s temperature will soar.

  The idea of climate debt is a way of finding a fair solution to this dilemma. Starting in 2006, the relatively poor South American nation of Ecuador tried to show the world how this solution could work—but few were willing to listen at the time.

  Yasuní National Park in Ecuador is an extraordinary stretch of rain forest. Several Indigenous tribes that live in the park have rejected all contact with the outside world in order to protect their way of life. This means that they have little immunity to common diseases such as influenza and could be at great risk if forced into contact with outsiders.

  The park is also home to a vast diversity of plants and animals. As many tree species grow in just 2.5 acres (1 hectare) of the park, for example, as are native to all of North America. It is also home to many threatened animal species, like the giant otter, the white-bellied spider monkey, and the jaguar. Yasuní is the kind of place that David Attenborough makes those amazing documentaries about!

  Protesting oil development in Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park, the park’s Indigenous People came face-to-face with officers in the capital city of Quito.

  But underneath that riot of life sits oil—up to 850 million barrels of it. The oil is worth billions, and oil companies want to get at it. If they did, it would bring a lot of investment to Ecuador’s economy. That money could be used to fight poverty. On the down side, burning all that oil, and logging the rain forest to get it, would add 547 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This is a problem for everyone on Earth, including the people of Ecuador.

  In 2006, an idea was put forth by an Ecuadorian environmental group called Acción Ecológica (Ecological Action). The government of Ecuador would agree not to allow drilling in Yasuní. In return, the other countries of the world would support that decision by paying Ecuador part of the money it would lose by leaving the oil in the ground.

  This arrangement would be good for everyone. It would keep planet-warming gases out of our atmosphere. It would also protect the rich biological diversity of Yasuní. And it would raise money for Ecuador to invest in health, education, and clean, renewable energy.

  The point of this plan was that Ecuador should not carry the whole burden of leaving its oil in the ground. The burden should be shared by the highly industrialized countries that have already put most of the excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—and have grown wealthy doing it (with the help of slavery and colonialism, as you’ll see in the next chapter). Under the plan, the money Ecuador received could be used to help the country move to a new era of green development, leapfrogging over the dirtier model that has prevailed for centuries. The Yasuní plan would be a model for paying the climate or ecological debt in other countries.

  The government of Ecuador championed the Yasuní plan to the world. The people of Ecuador strongly supported it. A poll in 2011 showed that 83 percent of them wanted to leave Yasuní’s oil in the ground. This was up from 41 percent just three years earlier, showing that a plan for positive change can capture people’s imaginations quickly.

  A goal of $3.6 billion for Ecuador was set to protect Yasuní from drilling. But contributions from developed countries were slow to arrive—or never did. After six years, only $13 million had been raised.

  So, because the plan had failed to raise the hoped-for payments, in 2013 the president of Ecuador said that he was going to allow drilling. Ecuadorian supporters of the climate debt plan did not give up. Citizens’ groups and nonprofit organizations campaigned against drilling. Protesters stood up to arrests and rubber bullets. Yet in spite of their efforts, drilling began in Yasuní in 2016. Three years later the government allowed drilling in a third oil field inside the park, this time in the area where tribes had lived without contact with the outside world.

  Ecuador’s government says that the oil extraction is being done with great care to protect the environment. But even if this is so, drilling in Yasuní means more use of fossil fuels, more greenhouse gas emitted into the atmosphere, and more climate change.

  Latin America, Africa, and Asia are filled with opportunities for the richer parts of the world to step up and pay their climate debts. For that to happen, the wealthy peoples and nations of the world must acknowledge what they owe to the countries that find themselves in a crisis they did little to create.

  What are the responsibilities of the rich? What are the rights of the poor, no matter where they live in the world? Until we face these questions, we will not have a worldwide approach to climate change that is big enough to solve the problem. And we will keep having more heartbreaking lost opportunities like in Yasuní.

  LABORATORIES FOR THE FUTURE

  After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans became a kind of laboratory. Like mad scientists, corporations and their supporters in government and in think tanks carried out experiments on the public body. They tinkered with turning areas that had once been part of the common good, such as public health and education, into business opportunities. In the end, they left the city even more starkly divided between the wealthy and the poor, and weakened for the next disaster.

  But future disasters could become laboratories for the common good. Disasters—whether events such as floods, earthquakes, and storms or political upheavals such as wars—often highlight inequality, as Katrina did in New Orleans. Social and climate injustice become easier to see. But disasters also disrupt ordinary life. Often they push people to come up with new ways of doing things. This is where disaster becomes opportunity.

  In the wake of many disasters, the rich and powerful have seized the opportunity to become richer and more powerful. What if, instead, disasters were turned into opportunities to empower and strengthen the public good?

  Government, local officials, and aid groups could allow and encourage people to react to disasters in ways that help each other and also help local communities, not just the corporations that are rich enough to weather the storms. Chapter 6 tells about a few places where this has already happened. That is the path of climate justice, and it lowers the chances that we will all be battered by the storms ahead. And this path is achievable.

  As you’ve seen in part 1, today’s young climate protesters are right—the current state of the climate and our society puts us at a critical decision point. How will we shape the future through our actions, not just as individuals but as societies and as a species?

  To avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, we need to know how we got to the present moment of global climate crisis and how we built up that climate debt. As you will see in the next chapter, that story also begins in a laboratory.

  Part Two HOW WE GOT HERE

  CHAPTER 4 Burning the Past, Cooking the Future

&
nbsp; Climate change was born in 1757 in a laboratory, or a workshop. The place was a bit of both. It belonged to a twenty-one-year-old Scotsman named James Watt.

  Watt’s craft was making and repairing the delicate instruments used by scientists and mathematicians. After he fixed some astronomical equipment belonging to the University of Glasgow, he was invited to open a shop within the university. Six years later, the university asked him to repair an engine. That repair job would eventually lead James Watt to a new power source—a steam engine that a historian named Barbara Freese called “perhaps the most important invention in the creation of the modern world.”

  The engine led to the rapid growth and spread of industry, then to the large-scale burning of fossil fuels in order to power industry—and, in time, to the climate crisis.

  WATT POWER

  We’ve talked a lot about fossil fuels, but what exactly are they? Coal, oil, and natural gas are called fossil fuels because they are made of the remains of living things that died millions or even hundreds of millions of years ago. These living things were not towering dinosaurs like those you may see in museums. Instead, coal and some types of natural gas come from the remains of long-dead trees and other plants. Oil and most natural gas come from the bodies of tiny water plants like algae, or microscopic ocean-dwelling creatures called plankton.

  When these living things died, they sank to the bottoms of ancient swamps and seas. Through ages of time, earth steadily built up over the trillions and trillions of remains. Pressure from the weight of the earth created chemical reactions that turned the organic remains into coal, crude oil, or natural gas.