This Changes Everything

by Naomi Klein

  And then there is Jackie Joiner: the woman who runs my life as well as Klein Lewis Productions, our little book and movie-making outfit. Only Jackie could have managed so many moving parts in a way that carved out the time and space for me to both write this book and enjoy new motherhood. As we approach launch, it is Jackie who will keep us from capsizing. Jackie, you are family and Avi and I would be lost without you.

  Debra Levy, my longtime research assistant, regrettably had to leave this project in 2012. Before she did, she made enormous contributions, particularly to the sections on geoengineering, messianic billionaires, and climate debt. She also helped train Rajiv and Alexandra. She is one of the great collaborators of my career and I miss her still.

  In the final months before deadline, Alleen Brown and Lauren Sutherland went above and beyond, helping enormously with the fact-check on absurdly tight deadlines. Lauren also did dynamite research for the billionaires chapter. Dave Oswald Mitchell contributed wise and comprehensive research on the growth imperative, and Mara Kardas-Nelson did the same on local power movements in Germany and Boulder.

  Rajiv and I are also deeply grateful to the team of very busy climate scientists who agreed to read sections of the book relating to climate change impacts and projections. Our readers ended up being an all-star cast of scientific experts including: Kevin Anderson (Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research), Alice Bows-Larkin (Tyndall Centre), James Hansen (Columbia University), Peter Gleick (Pacific Institute), and Sivan Kartha (Stockholm Environment Institute), all of whom vetted large sections of the book for accuracy. Michael E. Mann (Penn State University) and Olivia Serdeczny (Climate Analytics) also looked over the projections of a 4-degree world and provided helpful feedback. As a nonscientist, having this team of experts vet the accuracy of this material was critical; all political conclusions drawn from those scientific findings are mine alone and in no way reflect on these generous readers.

  When Bill McKibben asked me to join the board of 350.org in 2011, I had no idea what a wild ride it would be. Through the Keystone XL campaign and the kickoff of the fossil fuel divestment movement, working with 350.org’s brilliant team—particularly its imaginative executive director May Boeve—has given me a front row seat to the fast changing climate justice movement partially documented in these pages. Bill, you are one of the world’s truly great people, a rock of a friend, and you wrote most of this years ago. I love being in this fight with you. All views expressed here are my own and have nothing to do with 350.org as an organization.

  Other experts in their respective fields who agreed to review sections of this book for accuracy include Riley Dunlap, Aaron M. McCright, Robert Brulle, Steven Shrybman, Oscar Reyes, Larry Lohmann, Patrick Bond, Tadzio Mueller, and Tom Kruse. I am most grateful to all of them.

  My dear friends Kyo Maclear, Eve Ensler, Betsy Reed, and Johann Hari all read portions of the book and shared their great skills as writers and editors. Johann, in fact, provided some of the most transformative editorial advice I received, and I am forever in his debt. This unofficial, backroom publishing team supported me in countless ways, from helping me come up with the right title to endless conversations about the book’s themes.

  My parents, Bonnie and Michael Klein, also provided helpful feedback, and my father, who has spent a lifetime researching the risks of obstetrical interventions and advocating for women’s health, acted as a laughably overqualified research assistant in my investigations into the medical risks of fertility treatments. I am particularly grateful to my brother Seth Klein for his careful and detailed edit, and to all of his colleagues at the B.C. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives for their groundbreaking work on climate justice.

  My husband, Avi Lewis, is always my first reader and primary collaborator. On this project we made it official: as I have been writing this book, Avi has been directing a documentary film on the same subject, a parallel process that often allowed us to research and travel together. The film work also fed into the book and though the film credits will do the real job of thanking the people involved, these acknowledgments would not be complete without some of our film collaborators, including: Joslyn Barnes, Katie McKenna, Anadil Hossain, Mary Lampson, Shane Hofeldt, Mark Ellam, Daniel Hewett, Chris Miller, Nicolas Jolliet, Martin Lukacs, Michael Premo, Alex Kelly, Daphne Wysham, Jacqueline Soohen, as well as Ellen Dorsey, Tom Kruse, Cara Mertes, and Amy Rao for their tremendous support from the earliest days.

  People we met and worked with in the field shaped this work in many ways, including Theodoros Karyotis, Apostolis Fotiadis, Laura Gottesdiener, Crystal Lameman, Alexis Bonogofsky, Mike Scott, Nastaran Mohit and Sofia Gallisá Muriente, Wes Jackson, Phillip Whiteman Jr. and Lynette Two Bulls, David Hollander, and Charles Kovach, among many more.

  Others who shared their expertise above and beyond include Soren Ambrose, Dan Apfel, Tom Athanasiou, Amy Bach, Diana Bronson, John Cavanagh, Stan Cox, Brendan DeMelle, Almuth Ernsting, Joss Garman, Justin Guay, Jamie Henn, Jess Housty, Steve Horn, Martin Khor, Kevin Koenig, F. Gerald Maples, Lidy Nacpil, Michael Oppenheimer, Sam Randalls, Mark Randazzo, Janet Redman, Alan Robock, Mark Schapiro, Scott Sinclair, Rachel Smolker, Ilana Solomon, Matthew Stilwell, Jesse Swanhuyser, Sean Sweeney, Jim Thomas, Kevin Trenberth, Aaron Viles, Ben West, Ivonne Yanez, and Adam Zuckerman.

  Many research institutions, NGOs, and media outlets provided valuable support, and I am particularly grateful to the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, DeSmogBlog, EJOLT (Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade), the Pembina Institute, Greenpeace Canada, the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, and Oil Change International. I rely heavily on Grist and Climate Progress for my climate news, and the wonderful writers at Orion for deeper analysis. And we would all be lost without Democracy Now!’s unflagging commitment to covering climate when no one else will, providing free transcripts for every interview.

  Many books and reports are acknowledged in the text and notes, but I am particularly grateful to: Mark Dowie for Losing Ground, Christine MacDonald for Green Inc., Petra Bartosiewicz and Marissa Miley for The Too Polite Revolution, and Herbert Docena for his writing on the history of carbon trading. Andreas Malm’s work on the history of coal had a huge influence on me, as have the complete works of Clive Hamilton. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson helped me to understand the underlying logic of extractivism, and Renee Lertzman, Kari Marie Norgaard, Sally Weintrobe, and Rosemary Randall made me see climate change denial in a whole new light.

  The political economy of the climate crisis is an incredibly dense field, and there is no way I could possibly cite all the critical thinkers who laid the foundation on which this book rests. Without hope of being exhaustive, let me mention a few whose work has been particularly important to my education and who have not been listed above: Joan Martínez Alier, Nnimmo Bassey, Robert D. Bullard, Erik M. Conway, Herman Daly, Joshua Farley, John Bellamy Foster, David Harvey, Richard Heinberg, Tim Jackson, Derrick Jensen, Van Jones, Michael T. Klare, Winona LaDuke, Edgardo Lander, Carolyn Merchant, George Monbiot, Naomi Oreskes, Christian Parenti, Ely Peredo, Andrew Ross, Juliet B. Schor, Joni Seager, Andrew Simms, Pablo Solón, James Gustave Speth, Sandra Steingraber, and Peter Victor.

  Publishing is a finicky business, with more attention to detail than is at all fashionable. I am so grateful to all the people who labored over these important details, especially the stellar team at Simon & Schuster, including Johanna Li, Ruth Fecych, Fred Chase, and Phil Metcalf. At Knopf/Random House Canada, Amanda Lewis read diligently and contributed helpful editorial comments. Scott Richardson at Random House of Canada is responsible for the book’s bold cover design. No one but Scott could have produced a design that would have convinced me to take my name off the cover of my own book. Thank you in advance to the three talented and dedicated publicists responsible for launching this book into the world: Julia Prosser at Simon & Schuster, Shona Cook at Random House of Canada, and Annabel Huxley at Penguin U.K. And thanks, too, to the lawyers who vetted this text: B
rian MacLeod Rogers, Elisa Rivlin, and David Hirst.

  Other researchers and Nation interns dipped in and out of the project over its five-year life, including: Jake Johnston, Dawn Paley, Michelle Chen, Kyla Neilan, Natasja Sheriff, Sarah Woolf, Eric Wuestewald, Lisa Boscov-Ellen, Saif Rahman, Diana Ruiz, Simon Davis-Cohen, Owen Davis, and Ryan Devereaux. All did excellent work. Alonzo Ríos Mira provided invaluable help with interview transcriptions, as did several others.

  My writing continues to be supported by The Nation Institute, where I am a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow, and the Institute generously provided office space to Rajiv throughout this project, while The Nation magazine did the same for Alexandra. I am grateful to all my colleagues in the Nation orbit, in particular my editor, Betsy Reed, as well as to Katrina vanden Heuvel, Peter Rothberg, Richard Kim, Taya Kitman, Ruth Baldwin, and Esther Kaplan. Special thanks also to the Wallace Global Fund, the Lannan Foundation, and the NoVo Foundation for their support over the years.

  Rajiv extends a special thank you to Hannah Shaw and to his parents, Durga Mallampalli and Joseph Sicora. Alexandra does likewise to her parents, Robyn and Kenneth Shingler, Kent Tempus, and Denise Sheedy-Tempus, and to her grandmother Sandra Niswonger. We are all grateful for their understanding and support through this long and immersive project.

  Friends with whom I have an ongoing and enriching conversation on these subjects include many of those listed above, as well as Justin Podur, Clayton Thomas-Muller, Katharine Viner, Arthur Manuel, Harsha Walia, Andréa Schmidt, Seumas Milne, Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Robert Jensen, Michael Hardt, John Jordan, Raj Patel, Brendan Martin, Emma Ruby-Sachs, Jane Saks, Tantoo Cardinal, and Jeremy Scahill. Gopal Dayaneni and the whole gang at Movement Generation provide me with an ongoing education and no end of inspiration. More personal thanks go to Misha Klein, Michele Landsberg, Stephen Lewis, Frances Coady, Nancy Friedland, David Wall, Sarah Polley, Kelly O’Brien, Cecilie Surasky and Carolyn Hunt, Sara Angel, Anthony Arnove, Brenda Coughlin, John Greyson, Stephen Andrews, Anne Biringer, Michael Sommers, Belinda Reyes, and Ofelia Whiteley.

  My deepest thanks go to little Toma, for his truly heroic feats of toddler patience. He is about to learn that the world is a lot bigger than our neighborhood.

  Photograph © Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times/Redux

  NAOMI KLEIN is an award-winning journalist and the author of the critically acclaimed #1 international bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which The New York Times called “a movement bible.” Klein is a contributing editor for Harper’s magazine, a reporter for Rolling Stone, and a syndicated columnist for The Nation and The Guardian. She is a member of the board of directors of 350.org and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute.

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  ALSO BY NAOMI KLEIN

  The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

  No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies

  Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate

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  NOTES

  * * *

  N.B.: In the interest of having an endnote section that is shorter than the main text, not every fact in the book has a citation. Facts for which sources are provided include: all quotes, statistics, data points, and facts relating to climate science and carbon mitigation, though often only when the fact first appears in the text and not on repeat references. Facts that do not fall into these categories, but are controversial for some reason, are also sourced.

  Sources are not provided for references to uncontroversial facts (usually news events) that can be easily confirmed with a keyword search. Facts that clearly come from the author’s personal reporting (but are not quotes) are also generally not sourced.

  In cases where there are sources for multiple facts and quotes in a paragraph, one superscript note number appears at the end of the paragraph rather than a number after each individual fact. In the notes section here, the sources are listed in the order in which the facts appear in the paragraph, unless otherwise indicated. This has been done in the interest of achieving a less-cluttered text and further shortening the length of the endnote section.

  Quotations that come from interviews conducted by the author or her researchers (usually Rajiv Sicora or Alexandra Tempus) or from the documentary film accompanying this book (directed by Avi Lewis) appear in the endnotes as “personal interview.”

  If there is a source for a footnote, it is cited in the numbered endnote most closely following the asterisk in the text; such sources are marked FOOTNOTE.

  Web addresses for news articles available online are not included because of the transient nature of Web architecture. In cases where a document is available exclusively online, the home page where it appears is cited, not the longer URL for the specific text, once again because links change frequently.

  All dollar amounts in the book are in U.S. currency.

  EPIGRAPHS

  1. “Rebecca Tarbotton,” Rainforest Action Network, http://ran.org/becky.

  2. Kim Stanley Robinson, “Earth: Under Repair Forever,” OnEarth, December 3, 2012.

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Mario Malina et al., “What We Know: The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change,” AAAS Climate Science Panel, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2014, pp. 15–16.

  2. “Sarah Palin Rolls Out at Rolling Thunder Motorcycle Ride,” Fox News, May 29, 2011.

  3. Martin Weil, “US Airways Plane Gets Stuck in ‘Soft Spot’ on Pavement at Reagan National,” Washington Post, July 7, 2012; “Why Is My Flight Cancelled?” Imgur, http://imgur.com.

  4. Weil, “US Airways Plane Gets Stuck in ‘Soft Spot’ on Pavement at Reagan National.”

  5. For important sociological and psychological perspectives on the everyday denial of climate change, see: Kari Marie Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Rosemary Randall, “Loss and Climate Change: The Cost of Parallel Narratives,” Ecopsychology 1.3 (2009): 118-29; and the essays in Sally Weintrobe, ed., Engaging with Climate Change (East Sussex: Routledge, 2013).

  6. Angélica Navarro Llanos, “Climate Debt: The Basis of a Fair and Effective Solution to Climate Change,” presentation to Technical Briefing on Historical Responsibility, Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Bonn, Germany, June 4, 2009.

  7. “British PM Warns of Worsening Floods Crisis,” Agence France-Presse, February 11, 2014.

  8. “Exponential Growth in Weather Risk Management Contracts,” Weather Risk Management Association, press release, June 2006; Eric Reguly, “No Climate-Change Deniers to Be Found in the Reinsurance Business,” Globe and Mail, November 28, 2013.

  9. “Investor CDP 2012 Information Request: Raytheon Company,” Carbon Disclosure Project, 2012, https://www.cdp.net.

  10. “Who Will Control the Green Economy?” ETC Group, 2011, p. 23; Chris Glorioso, “Sandy Funds Went to NJ Town with Little Storm Damage,” NBC News, February 2, 2014.

  11. “ ‘Get It Done: Urging Climate Justice, Youth Delegate Anjali Appadurai Mic-Checks UN Summit,” Democracy Now!, December 9, 2011.

  12. Corinne Le Quéré et al., “Global Carbon Budget 2013,” Earth System Science Data 6 (2014): 253; “Greenhouse Gases Rise by Record Amount,” Associated Press, November 3, 2011.

  13. Sally Weintrobe, “The Difficult Problem of Anxiety in Thinking About Climate Change,” in Engaging with Climate
Change, ed. Sally Weintrobe (East Sussex: Routledge, 2013). 43.

  14. For critical scholarship on the history and politics of the 2 degree target, see: Joni Seager, “Death By Degrees: Taking a Feminist Hard Look at the 2 Degrees Climate Policy,” Kvinder, Køn og Foraksning (Denmark) 18 (2009): 11-22; Christopher Shaw, “Choosing a Dangerous Limit for Climate Change: An Investigation into How the Decision Making Process Is Constructed in Public Discourses,” PhD thesis, University of Sussex, 2011, available at http://www.notargets.org.uk; Christopher Shaw, “Choosing a Dangerous Limit for Climate Change: Public Representations of the Decision Making Process,” Global Environmental Change 23 (2013): 563-571. COPENHAGEN: Copenhagen Accord, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, December 18, 2009, p. 1; “DEATH SENTENCE”: “CJN CMP Agenda Item 5 Intervention,” speech delivered by activist Sylvia Wachira at Copenhagen climate conference, Climate Justice Now!, December 10, 2009, http://www.climate-justice-now.org; GREENLAND: J. E. Box et al., “Greenland Ice Sheet,” Arctic Report Card 2012, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, January 14, 2013; ACIDIFICATION: Bärbel Hönisch et al., “The Geological Record of Ocean Acidification,” Science 335 (2012): 1058-1063; Adrienne J. Sutton et al., “Natural Variability and Anthropogenic Change in Equatorial Pacific Surface Ocean pCO2 and pH,” Global Biogeochemical Cycles 28 (2014): 131-145; PERILOUS IMPACTS: James Hansen et al., “Assessing ‘Dangerous Climate Change’: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature,” PLOS ONE 8 (2013): e81648.

  15. “Climate Change Report Warns of Dramatically Warmer World This Century,” World Bank, press release, November 18, 2012.