This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate

Naomi Klein

Simon and Schuster, Sep 16, 2014 - Political Science - 566 pages

The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems.

In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon our physical world. The status quo is no longer an option.

In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.

Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.

Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.

Contents

• Introduction One Way or Another Everything Changes: 1
• PART ONE bAdTimiNg: 29
• The Revolutionary Power of Climate Change: 31
• How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat the Planet: 64
• Overcoming the Ideological Blocks to the Next Economy: 96
• Slapping the Invisible Hand Building a Movement: 120
• Confronting the Climate DenierWithin: 161
• PART TWO mAgiCAl ThiNKiNg: 189
• The Disastrous Merger of Big Business and Big Green: 191
• The Green Billionaires Wont Save Us: 230
• The Solution to Pollution Is Pollution?: 256
• sTArTiNg ANyWAy: 291
• Democracy Divestment and the Wins So Far: 337
• You and What Army? Indigenous Rights and the Power of Keeping Our Word: 367
• The Atmospheric Commons and: 388
• Moving from Extraction to Renewal: 419
• Just Enough Time for Impossible: 449
• Notes: 467
• Acknowledgments: 527
• Index: 535

About the author

Naomi Klein was born in Montreal, Canada on May 8, 1970. She attended the University of Toronto and began writing there for the student newspaper, The Varsity. Klein was offered a series of editorial jobs in newspapers and magazines and this prevented her from getting a final degree from the university. She worked for The Toronto Globe and Mail and This Magazine. She is an author and social activist, who is known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization. Her books include No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She received the 2014 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction for This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.

Bibliographic information

• Title: This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate; Business book summary; This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein
• Author: Naomi Klein
• Publisher: Simon and Schuster, 2014
• ISBN: 1451697384, 9781451697384
• Length: 566 pages
• Subjects: Political Science / Public Policy / Economic Policy; Political Science / Public Policy / Environmental Policy