This Changes Everything

“Finding new ways to pirate the commons and profit from disaster is what our current system is built to do, left to its own devices it is capable of nothing else.”

Klein discusses “disaster capitalism.” This is the grim scenario in which companies poisition themselves to benefit from the effects of climate change, be that through reinsurance schemes in likely disaster zones, luxury disaster prevention for the wealthy, or patents on drought-resistant crops. Klein points out that these things are already underway, and this is one model of the future we could be facing.

“Climate change can be a people’s shock, a blow from below.”

Klein references shock on several occasions. She speaks of the shock doctrine, the idea that people are panicked and disorientated during crisis and so are more easily misled or divided, or inclined to take risks they ordinarily wouldn’t. Klein argues that governments and powerful corporate and media forces can exploit this. She also discusses the inverse: How moments of crisis can catalyze positive political change and inspire a spirit of shared sympathy and solidarity. This requires that people work together and that activists and movements are there to lay groundwork for that cooperation. It’s this latter sense that Klein uses here as she argues that the climate crisis can ignite a positive social movement. The force of the “shock” is directed upward, “a blow from below” toward political and corporate elites and the system that operates in their interest. The quote also reflects another of Klein’s key ideas: The fight against climate change will come from a mass movement of ordinary people and is not something that can be led or handed down from on high.

“To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socio-economic doctrine.” 

Klein discusses the beliefs and origins of the denial movement. The concern is not primarily with the truth or falsehood of the science, but with the political danger the science poses if true. As climate change would necessitate regulation, control of business, interference in the markets, higher taxation to fund green initiatives, and even restriction on certain forms of consumption and economic growth, the denial movement has come to see it as a green “Trojan horse,” and a front for socialists and Marxists and so forth. For Klein, they aren’t wrong, as she sees climate change as a way of addressing wider social and political problems with the status quo. She argues for the necessity of these things, if we are to avert climate disaster. This politicization of climate change from both sides of the political spectrum, represents a change from the years when the green movement got broad bipartisan support.

“They know very well that ours is a global economy created by, and fully reliant upon, the burning of fossil fuels and that a dependency that foundational cannot be changed with a few gentle market mechanisms.”

The “they” of this quote is the climate-change-denial movement and its advocates. Klein argues that some on the political right and those with a vested interest in the current system have correctly identified that accepting the science of climate change and its implications means accepting that their economic model (a) is responsible for creating a global crisis it can’t fix and (b) must change to ensure human survival on the earth. This is something they can’t accept; hence, the climate change denial movement. Moreover, Klein argues that the denial movement understands something liberal greens do not: Actually responding to this crisis and averting disaster would mean more than introducing “gentle market mechanisms”; it would require far-reaching changes to the free market capitalist model and our fossil fuel-dependent consumer-centric society.

“They [neo-liberals] have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time—whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.”

This quote highlights the motivation behind climate denial and shows why climate change is so central to the contemporary political struggle. If the ruling elite accept the science, this invalidates their ideology of unregulated business providing the best solution to the world’s problems. This would be a hammer blow to neoliberal ideology and is why the climate-denial movement emerged: to counter this position and its implications. For those who want to see social and economic change, on the other hand, climate change provides another forceful and compelling argument for enacting that change.

“It is the success of [the neoliberal] revolution that makes revolutionary levels of transformation to the market system now our best hope of avoiding climate chaos.”

An irony of the rapid expansion of the global free market is that it has also excelerated climate change, creating this climate crisis and necessiciting market reform to address it. This quote illustrates the stark terms in which Klein puts the options. We’ve moved past the point where tinkering with the market will make a significant difference. The only alternative now, Klein argues, is to look for more radical solutions.

“To allow arcane trade law, which have been negotiated with scant public scrutiny to have this kind of power over an issue so critical to humanity’s future is a special kind of madness.” 

Klein refers to the system of international free trade laws established in the 1980s and ’90s. These laws protect companies’ rights to trade freely regardless of their place of origin and prohibit the favoring of local or national businesses. In reality, they opened markets in developing countries for multinationals and large corporations, supposedly in exchange for jobs and investment. These laws, Klein points out, have repeatedly been used to block environmental policy that supports local green developments. Klein criticizes the rigid and outdated nature of neoliberal ideas and the laws they’re enshrined in.

“Frenetic and indiscriminate consumption of essentially disposable products can no longer be the system’s goal.”

Thinking about the alternative model for a green and sustainable economy, Klein critiques the high-carbon, consumerist lifestyle that developed in the West and xported around the globe. What’s frenetic about consumption is presumably its impulsive nature both for the consumer, who is always looking for something new, and the producer, who is endlessly looking to make money by selling upgrades or new products. “Indiscriminate” implies spending without direction or discernment. It implies that, as consumers, we fail to consider the wider political or environmental implications of our consumption; in some cases, this may be true, in others, not.

“All around the world, the hard realities of a warming world are crashing up against the brutal logic of austerity, revealing just how untenable it is to starve the public sphere at the very moment we need it most.”

Reflecting on the increasing frequency of natural disasters, Klein notes how we have starved the public sphere of the resources needed to protect people from these disasters. In other words, people (especially people in deprived areas that rely more on public services) are being hit by the effects of global warming and austerity at the same time. The latter worsens the effects of the former. Klein uses metaphorical language to bring the point to life: The realities of the warming world are crashing like waves in a storm.

“Critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.” 

Klein reflects on the media and postmodern political culture, and on the loss of wider historical understanding that is so crucial to developing a critical perspective and enacting change. The key to forging a critical perspective is seeing how issues evolve and relate to each other; instead we have a culture of instantaneous news and distractions, things presented without the history that gives them meaning or context.

“The key is to offer people something the current system doesn’t: the tools and power to build a better life for themselves.”

Klein quotes Greek green activist Dimitra Spartharidou. This is a point Klein returns to over and again. It’s not sufficient to critique and resist the current system; it’s also necessary to offer something in its place. Resistance and a better alternative go hand in hand. This is what Klein sees in Blockadia: It is not just a resistance movement fighting the fossil fuel industry but also a laboratory for new ideas and possibilities. The quote also ties into another key theme: self-determination. It’s not about dropping green plans and solutions on communities from above, it’s about empowering communities to develop these solutions for themselves. Klein’s alternative economic model is based on decentralization and community control.

“The environmental crisis—if conceived sufficiently broadly neither trumps nor distracts from our most pressing political and economic causes—it supercharges each of them with existential urgency.” 

Klein states one of her central claims in this book: The fight against climate change is not just an isolated environmental problem but a catalyst for numerous progressive political struggles. This is repeated in several forms throughout the book and comes down to the point that addressing the causes of climate change means challenging the driving principles of the socioeconomic status quo, including the ideas that businesses are best left unregulated and that profit motive is a social good that enables economic growth and social prosperity.

“It’s not just the fight against ecological crisis, it’s the fight for a new economy, a new energy system, a new democracy, a new relationship to the planet and to each other—for Indigenous rights, for human rights and dignity for all people.”

Klein repeatedly argues that climate change crisis is an invitation to holistically change how our society operates. In this respect, climate change becomes a meta issue, or a “frame,” for a broader group of related concerns. The fight against climate change is not distinct from other economic and freedom movements and requires nothing less than a new worldview, a new relationship with our planet and with each other. Klein argues that this relationship should be based on reciprocation, cooperation, and respect for all life.

“Extractivism is a non-reciprocal, dominance based relationship with the Earth, one purely of taking.”

At the heart of this book is a critique and rejection of “extractivism.” This is a label Klein adopts from environmental thinking to describe humanity’s disengaged, dominant, and exploitative relationship to Earth. Klein traces this back to the scientific, industrial, and colonial developments of the early modern period, and especially to the discovery of fossil fuels and advent of steam engines. She sees extractivism at work equally in free market capitalism and in communist states, and even in the more progressive left states of South America, like Ecuador and Bolivia. It is not an ideology bound to one side of the political spectrum. “Non-reciprocal” here means it is a one-way relationship of taking without regard for the Earth, a relationship exemplified by extreme fossil fuel extractions that create vast waste and destruction. Klein contrasts this with the model of a respectful, nurturing relationship with nature, as found in the traditional customs of Indigenous peoples.

“Coal was the black ink in which the story of modern capitalism was written.” 

This metaphor is an excellent example of Klein’s stylistic range: concise yet vivid and rhetorically effective. Klein sees the discovery of coal and as the driving force of this development, hence the “black ink” in which the story of capitalism is written. Unlike the wind or sun or water, which all have their own rhythms that human beings remain dependent on, coal allowed humans to step above and seemingly away from dependency on nature. So long as we can extract and burn coal (and other fossil fuels), we have all the energy we need at our disposal. This energy was used to power industrialization in Europe and America (i.e., to power capitalism), and was used to transport goods as well as the West’s aggressive colonialization and imperialistic exploitation of the rest of the world.

“Post enlightenment Western culture does not offer a road map for how to live that is not based on an extractivist non-reciprocal relationship with nature.”

For Klein, the extractivist approach runs deeper than capitalism. Capitalism is one expression of this deeper underlying approach, which is entrenched in Western culture. The quote illustrates that change has to come from a perspective change. The current economic and philosophical systems cannot solve the problem they created. Climate change, in this sense, spells either the end of the planet as we know it or else the end of our extractivist and capitalist society.

“The solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.” 

This line comes in the context of Klein’s discussion of geoengineering and works by evoking a simple contrast. Geoengineering aims to solve the problem of climate change by introducing large scale technical fixes that will further imbalance the natural world and increase the level of human interference that has already created the problem. The solution, Klein argues, is to seek the problem to its source in ourselves, in our relationship to nature and the world, so we can establish a way of living and interacting with the planet that doesn’t endanger our collective future.

“Building a liveable world isn’t rocket science; its far more complex than that.” 

This quote comes from environmentalist Ed Ayers, who says a tremendous amount in just a few short words. It is a witty rejection of the idea that we can rely on technological genius and advancement to save us from climate change. For both Ayers and Klein, the technology we need is already with us, but what’s lacking is the political will, collective values, and social organization.

“Step one for getting out of a hole: Stop digging.”

Environmentalist KC Golden sums up the case against further fossil fuel extraction in the climate change era. He uses the metaphor of digging a hole and applies it to the literal situation of digging further to extract fossil fuels. Having exhausted more easily reachable deposits, the industry has heavily invested in new dangerous techniques, including fracking, deep sea and Arctic oil drilling, and tar sand oil extraction. This at a time when there’s already enough oil, gas, and coal in the stated reserves of fossil fuel companies to cause extreme and potentially irreversible damage to the planet through global warming. Extractavism has dug us into a hole, and rather than stop, we keep digging deeper. The quote also implies that before real progress can be made on other fronts, we must curb the fossil fuel industry. Only then can we determine how to address climate change.

“When we marvel at that blue marble in all its delicacy and frailty, and resolve to save the planet, we case ourselves in a very specific role. That role is of parent, the parent of the earth.”

Klein discusses the famous picture of the Earth taken from space, which became a central part of many environmentalist campaigns in the 1980s and ’90s. The Earth looks small and delicate in this picture, and the viewer observes the Earth from afar, as if they are disengaged. This is what Klein refers to critically as the “astronaut’s view.” This embodies what Klein sees as a faulty way of looking at the problem of climate change—as if we were somehow outside of it, looking down on the Earth, when actually we are very much a part of that picture and it is us who are small and fragile, not the Earth.

“Watching him pace around these homes, a twinkle in his eye, it struck me that this need to adapt to nature is what drives some people mad about renewables; even at a very large scale, they require a humility that is the antithesis of damming a river, blasting bedrock for gas, or harnessing the power of the atom.”

This is one of Klein’s more descriptive reflections on her experience on the Northern Cheyenne reservation where community leader Red Cloud taught a dozen young people how to install solar panels. The moment sticks in Klein’s memory as one of hope for the planet and the community, which are clearly wedded in her mind. The scene also leads her to reflect on the nature of renewable energy alternatives like solar and wind power. She repeatedly stresses the difference with fossil fuel is that fossil fuel provides a false, or temporary, freedom from nature. It gives us energy whenever we want it, and it puts nature and its life-giving force at our disposal. In the long term, though, this will destroy the planet. Renewables, on the other hand, return us to a shared dialogue and more “humble” relationship with nature.

“As our boat rocked in that terrible place—the sky buzzing with Black Hawk helicopters and snowy whit egrets—I had the distinct feeling that we were suspended not in water but in amniotic fluid, immersed in a massive multi-species miscarriage.”

This passage exemplifies Klein’s writing at its most literary and emotive. “That terrible place” is the marshes of the Mississippi, where she was reporting on an oil spill that had contaminated the surrounding waters and was killing off fish eggs and juveniles. Klein makes a strong metaphorical connection between a human fertility crisis and natural fertility crisis (created by pollution) as the water, in the force of this image, becomes “amniotic fluid” and the deaths of young sea creatures are described with the human terminology of “miscarriage.” The sky buzzes—but with the machine life of helicopters, not with animal or insect life. The passage depicts a grim, almost apocalyptical fusion of human and environmental death.

“Our systems are designed to promote more life.”

This simple statement is drawn from a modern interpretation of Indigenous wisdom. The speaker, Mississauga Nishnaabeg, is an Indigenous American author whom Klein met. The statement captures Klein’s imagination precisely because it puts the issue of nature’s regeneration and reproduction of life at the heart of a philosophy. Our aim should not be simply to take from the Earth to grow our economies, as we currently do.