by Naomi Klein
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Together, this group of men is doing favors for oil, gas, and coal companies on multiple fronts. For instance, Trump has killed a new program that required oil and gas companies to report how much methane—a very powerful greenhouse gas—their operations were releasing, including from leaks. Industry hated the program, which was only finalized in the last weeks of Obama’s administration, in part because it was poised to blow the lid off the claim that natural gas is in any way a climate change solution. Trump is handing the industry a big gift by effectively saying: don’t tell us, we don’t want to know. From here on in, the rest of the world will have to guess the extent to which the US is a climate renegade, because a key piece of the data won’t exist.
By far the biggest threat this industry faces is the demand for real action on climate change being voiced by people around the world, and the mounting consensus that taking the crisis seriously means a halt on new fossil fuel projects. That prospect strikes terror in the hearts of fossil fuel executives and in the governments of petro-states (like Russia), because it means that trillions of dollars’ worth of proven reserves—currently propping up share prices—could become worthless overnight. This is sometimes referred to as “the carbon bubble,” and by 2016 it was already beginning to deflate. Think of Trump as the guy running to the rescue with a bicycle pump, signaling to the industry that he’s going to fill their bubble with a few more years’ worth of toxic air. How? Easy. By making climate change disappear.
We can see it all playing out with a kind of absurd clarity. On day one, the White House website was cleansed of many of the references to climate change. There are plans to cut the NASA program that uses satellites to accumulate basic data on how the earth is changing—including disappearing glaciers and rising seas. The White House’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, was pretty blunt about all this: “Regarding the question as to climate change, I think the President was fairly straightforward—we’re not spending money on that anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.”
They are so determined to erase the reality of climate change that they are even aiming to wipe out programs that help communities cope with its impacts. Trump proposed cutting a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association program that helps communities protect their coasts. He also wanted to slash the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the agency charged with responding to large-scale natural disasters, and cut entirely its key program designed to help communities prepare for future crises. His plan to reduce the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) budget by over 30 percent would lay off thousands of people and eliminate the entire environmental justice program. The latter helps low-income communities—overwhelmingly African-American, Latino, and Indigenous—deal with some of the impacts of having the most toxic industries in their backyards. And it’s worth noting that many of the measures—including cuts to programs dealing with lead poisoning from pipes—would disproportionately hurt children in marginalized communities. A Congressional budget deal has delayed the worst of the EPA cuts until 2018.
So Trump’s rescue plan for the fossil fuel sector is multipronged: bury the evidence that climate change is happening by stopping research and gagging agencies; cut the programs that are tasked with coping with the real-world impacts of climate disruption; and remove all barriers to an acceleration of the very activities that are fueling the crisis—drilling for more oil and gas, mining and burning more coal.
Some of this backsliding can be balanced out by bold action in large states such as California and New York, which are pledging to rapidly roll out renewables regardless of Trump’s pro—fossil fuel policies. But there is one other crucial factor that may determine whether the ExxonMobil subsidiary known as the Trump administration is able to unleash an irreversible catastrophe.
Price Is Everything
There is one thing above all that is currently restraining fossil fuel companies from launching large new extraction projects, and it’s not a piece of legislation that Obama introduced and Trump can reverse. What’s holding them back is the price of oil and gas. As I write this in 2017, the price is much lower than when Obama took office, because there’s an oversupply—more oil and gas is available than consumers want.
The reason price is such an issue for new projects is that the cheap and easy-to-access fossil fuels have been steadily running out, particularly in the US. So what’s left? Stuff that’s hard and expensive to get to. It costs a lot of money to drill in the Arctic, or in very deep water, or to dig up and refine the semisolid oil found in Canada’s Alberta tar sands. When the price of oil was soaring, as it was as recently as 2014, fossil fuel companies were making multi-billion dollar investments in order to go after those expensive fuel sources. With oil at $100 a barrel, they could still turn a hefty profit even with the high costs for extraction. And the development in this sector did spur economic growth, and it did create a lot of jobs. But the environmental costs were enormous: the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was intimately connected to the fact that these companies are drilling deeper than they ever have before. The reason the tar sands in Alberta are so controversial is that Indigenous lands and waterways have been badly contaminated by the invasive and carbon-intensive process of mining for that heavy crude.
Rex Tillerson’s ExxonMobil went wild buying up high-cost heavy-oil reserves; it reached the point where fully one-third of the company’s reserves were located in the Alberta tar sands. When the price of oil collapsed, it came as a major shock. Oil prices began to crash in 2014, with Brent crude—the global benchmark for oil—plummeting from $100 a barrel to $50 in just six months, and the price has hovered at around $55 a barrel ever since. As a result, we’ve seen a lot of companies pulling back from extreme energy projects. Fracking for oil and gas in the United States has cooled off, with devastating human costs: an estimated 170,000 oil and gas workers have lost their jobs after the 2014 price collapse. Investment in the Alberta tar sands dropped by an estimated 37 percent in the year following, and continues to fall. Shell pulled back from the Arctic and has sold most of its tar sands reserves. The French oil company Total has retreated from the tar sands as well. Even ExxonMobil has been forced to write off nearly 3.5 million barrels of tar sands oil because the market considered these reserves to be no longer worth extracting at current oil prices. Deepwater drilling is also in a lull.
For the big oil companies—particularly those that gambled on the price of oil staying high—all of this has been a disaster. And no oil major has suffered more than ExxonMobil. When prices were high, with Tillerson at the helm, the company broke the record for the highest corporate profits ever reported in the United States, earning $45 billion in 2012. Compare that to 2016, when Exxon’s profits fell well shy of $8 billion. That’s a more than 80 percent drop in profits in a span of just four years.
What does all this mean? It means that oil majors like ExxonMobil, and the banks that underwrote their bad bets, desperately want the price of oil to go back up—to get their super-profits back and to get the fossil fuel frenzy back on. So a very big question that needs answering is this: what is the Trump administration—aka Team ExxonMobil—going to do to achieve that?
We are already seeing some policies that appear designed to drive up oil prices. For instance, Trump moved to eliminate the Obama-era requirement that vehicles become more fuel-efficient—which means more trips to the gas station for consumers. Trump’s budget plan, meanwhile, aimed to completely eliminate funding for new public transit projects, and kill funding for long-distance train services.
So far, though, the market isn’t responding, at least not by much. The price of oil got a little bump after Trump was elected but has held pretty steady since. From a climate perspective, this is good news: cheap gas may encourage short-term consumption, but it discourages a lot of the long-term investments that lock us into a disastrous future. The concern—and it is a real one—is that Trump
and Co. may well have more tricks up their sleeves to try to push up oil prices and realize their goal of setting off a fossil fuel frenzy.
The reason we need to have our eyes firmly fixed on this dynamic is that nothing drives up the price of oil quite like war and other major shocks to the world market—a scenario we’ll dig into in Chapter 9.
What Conservatives Understand about Global Warming—and Liberals Don’t
For many years, I wondered why some people were so determined to deny global warming. It’s strange at first glance. Why would you work so hard to deny the scientific facts that have been affirmed by 97 percent of climate scientists—facts whose effects we see all around us, with more confirmation in the news we consume every day? That question led me on a journey that informed my book This Changes Everything—and I think some of what I discovered when writing that book can help us make sense of the centrality of climate vandalism to the Trump administration.
What I found is that when hard-core conservatives deny climate change, they are not just protecting the trillions in wealth that are threatened by climate action. They are also defending something even more precious to them: an entire ideological project—neoliberalism—which holds that the market is always right, regulation is always wrong, private is good and public is bad, and taxes that support public services are the worst of all.
There is a lot of confusion around the word neoliberalism, and about who is a neoliberal. And understandably so. So let’s break it down. Neoliberalism is an extreme form of capitalism that started to become dominant in the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but since the 1990s has been the reigning ideology of the world’s elites, regardless of partisan affiliation. Still, its strictest and most dogmatic adherents remain where the movement started: on the US Right.
Neoliberalism is shorthand for an economic project that vilifies the public sphere and anything that’s not either the workings of the market or the decisions of individual consumers. It is probably best summarized by another of Reagan’s famous phrases, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Under the neoliberal worldview, governments exist in order to create the optimal conditions for private interests to maximize their profits and wealth, based on the theory that the profits and economic growth that follow will benefit everyone in the trickle-down from the top—eventually. If it doesn’t work, and stubborn inequalities remain or worsen (as they invariably do), then according to this worldview, that must be the personal failing of the individuals and communities that are suffering. They must have “a culture of crime,” say, or lack a “work ethic,” or perhaps it’s absentee fathers, or some other racially tinged excuse for why government policy and public funds should never be used to reduce inequalities, improve lives, or address structural crises.
The primary tools of this project are all too familiar: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sphere, and low taxes paid for by cuts to public services, and all of this locked in under corporate-friendly trade deals. It’s the same recipe everywhere, regardless of context, history, or the hopes and dreams of the people who live there. Larry Summers, when he was chief economist of the World Bank in 1991, summed up the ethos: “Spread the truth—the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.” (Which is why I sometimes call neoliberalism “McGovernment.”)
The 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall was interpreted as the signal to take the campaign global. With socialism in decline, there was seemingly no longer any need to soften capitalism’s edges anywhere. As Thatcher famously declared, “There is no alternative.” (Another way of thinking about this is that neoliberalism is simply capitalism without competition, or capitalism lying on the couch in its undershirt saying, “What are you going to do, leave me?”)
Neoliberalism is a very profitable set of ideas, which is why I am always a little hesitant to describe it as an ideology. What it really is, at its core, is a rationale for greed. That’s what the American billionaire Warren Buffett meant when he made headlines a few years ago by telling CNN that “there’s been class warfare going on for the last twenty years, and my class has won…the rich class.” He was referring to the tremendous tax cuts the wealthy have enjoyed in this period, but you could extend that to the whole neoliberal policy package.
So what does this have to do with the widespread refusal by the Right to believe that climate change is happening, a refusal deeply embedded in the Trump administration? A lot. Because climate change, especially at this late date, can only be dealt with through collective action that sharply curtails the behavior of corporations such as ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs. It demands investments in the public sphere—in new energy grids, public transit and light rail, and energy efficiency—on a scale not seen since the Second World War. And that can only happen by raising taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, the very people Trump is determined to shower with the most generous tax cuts, loopholes and regulatory breaks. Responding to climate change also means giving communities the freedom to prioritize local green industries—a process that often clashes directly with the corporate free trade deals that have been such an integral part of neoliberalism, and which bar “buy local” rules as protectionist. (Trump campaigned against those parts of free trade deals, but, as we will see in Chapter 6, he has no intention of rescinding those rules.)
In short, climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. To admit that the climate crisis is real is to admit the end of the neoliberal project. That’s why the Right is in a rebellion against the physical world, against science (which is what prompted hundreds of thousands of scientists around the world to participate in the March for Science in April 2017, collectively defending a principle that really shouldn’t need defending: that knowing as much as possible about our world is a good thing). But there is a reason why science has become such a battle zone—because it is revealing again and again that neoliberal business as usual leads to a species-threatening catastrophe.
What mainstream liberals have been saying for decades, by contrast, is that we simply need to tweak the existing system here and there and everything will be fine. You can have Goldman Sachs capitalism plus solar panels. But the challenge is much more fundamental than that. It requires throwing out the neoliberal rulebook, and confronting the centrality of ever-expanding consumption in how we measure economic progress. In one sense, then, the members of Trump’s cabinet—with their desperate need to deny the reality of global warming, or belittle its implications—understand something that is fundamentally true: to avert climate chaos, we need to challenge the capitalist ideologies that have conquered the world since the 1980s. If you are the beneficiary of those ideologies, you are obviously going to be very unhappy about that. That’s understandable. Global warming really does have radical progressive implications. If it’s real—and it manifestly is—then the oligarch class cannot continue to run riot without rules. Stopping them is now a matter of humanity’s collective survival.
If we fail, the death I saw at the Great Barrier Reef will spread to all corners of our collective home in ways we can scarcely imagine.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE GRABBER-IN-CHIEF
Since Trump took office, there’s been a lot of talk about how we all need to stop “re-litigating the 2016 election”—that it’s time to look forward, not backward.
To be honest, I’m tired of looking backward as well, because the tensions during the election, and in particular during the Democratic primary, were almost unbearable. For a long time, I couldn’t look at social media because all I saw were people who used to like each other warring over “Bernie Bros” and “Hillary Bots.” I lost friends over it, as others did on all sides—people who blame me and people like me for Hillary’s defeat because we did not publicly endorse her or because we were so hard on her corporate entanglements during the primary. And I have tr
ouble forgiving people like the liberal economist Paul Krugman, who has written so much of such great importance about economic inequality and bank fraud over the years, and yet used his influential platform in the New York Times to repeatedly attack the only candidate, Bernie Sanders, who was serious about battling income inequality and taking on the banks. It’s perfectly understandable that people don’t want to rehash those ugly battles—they were miserable.
We all cope with fear and uncertainty differently. A great many conservatives are dealing with their fears about a changing and destabilizing world by attempting to force back the clock. But if the Right specializes in turning backward, the Left specializes in turning inward and firing on each other in a circular hail of blame.
Still, I’m suspicious of the speed with which we are being told to move on. Because we do need to build as broad a coalition as possible against Trump and forces like him wherever we live—but we also need to avoid repeating the same mistakes that have created the conditions for the rise of Trumpism and its counterparts around the world. And unfortunately, there’s some evidence that the only lesson a lot of establishment Democrats are learning is: don’t let Russians hack your e-mail.
So I think we should take a deep breath and dare to look back, if only briefly—not to reopen old wounds, but just to see what there is to learn. Because we can’t get off the road we are on if we aren’t honest about the factors that landed us here.
Foul Mood Rising
If there is a single, overarching lesson to be drawn from the foul mood rising around the world, it may be this: we should never, ever underestimate the power of hate. Never underestimate the appeal of wielding power over “the other,” be they migrants, Muslims, Blacks, Mexicans, women, the other in any form. Especially during times of economic hardship, when a great many people have good reason to fear that the jobs that can support a decent life are disappearing for good.