This Changes Everything

“One Way or Another, Everything Changes” (Pages 1-8)

Klein begins with the anecdote of a plane that got stuck in the melting runway tarmac in Washington, DC. A tow truck was brought in to drag the plane free. The year was 2012, and the summer was “unusually hot,” which was the result of the “profligate burning of fossil fuels” (2).

The anecdote becomes a metaphor for the problem of climate change and the responses to it. Faced with the problems brought on by the burning of fossil fuels, most people, like the airline, carry on as normal. Humans are pushing the Earth’s resources to a breaking point in the search for fossil fuels, and though the environment is throwing them warning signs, they just carry on. Instead of facing the crisis, they “[double] down on the thing that’s causing it” (3).

Klein says she was a climate denier in the way that most are: by simply not focusing fully on the problem, choosing to remain hazy about the details, and continuing to live life as normal. She gives examples of the possible explanations people give themselves: technology will come to the rescue or all one can do is focus on their individual efforts.

Klein suggests that “[W]e deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this situation will change everything” (4). She points out the huge environmental and human cost of climate change: a vast, perhaps irreversible, disaster. This catastrophe can be averted, but doing so means changing everything: how people live and how economies function. Some of these changes, Klein argues, are positive and exciting.

She recalls a meeting in 2008 with a Bolivian politician, Angélica Navarro Llanos, which was a key turning point in Klein’s thinking on climate change. Llanos saw climate change as both a threat and an opportunity. She explained a plan in which developing countries like Bolivia could be viewed as “climate creditors” as they had never been major contributors to emission levels and were thus owed support from the major powers to offset the cost of the crisis and help them develop on a green energy path. She argued for “a Marshall plan for the Earth” (5).

Klein argues that this would be costly but not unprecedented; in recent years, in response to financial crises and security threats, the established powers mobilized vast capital for ultimately less devastating problems than climate change. What gets declared a “crisis,” Klein argues, is political. It is up to a mass movement of ordinary people to persuade the political class of the true crisis that is climate change and insist that serious action be taken.

She introduces her optimistic vision for the future. Climate change, she argues, “if treated as a true planetary emergency could become a galvanising force” for humanity, for social progress (7). It could be a “catalyst for social change” (7) and the best argument progressives have for transforming society, rebalancing inequality, and investing in social infrastructure. However, this depends on a powerful and coherent mass movement.

“A People’s Shock” (Pages 8-16)

Klein counterbalances this optimism with the awareness that fewer desirable changes are already taking place in response to climate change. Things can swing in both directions. She references her last work, The Shock Doctrine, and points out how global crises such as the 2008 financial crash have been taken advantage of by corporate interests to push through self-serving policies. She points out how the effects of climate change are already being exploited and that powerful private interests are already mobilizing to profit from disaster. The current system, geared as it is around profit, is set up to do nothing else.

Klein also points out that crises have also provoked positive mass movements, such as the New Deal economics after the 1929 financial crash or the rise of social welfare programs after World War II. For this to happen, powerful mass movements are required, and they must possess a comprehensive vision of what needs to change.

Returning to her central thesis she states: “I am convinced climate change represents a historical opportunity on an even greater scale” (10), believing it an opportunity to respond to crises positively, advancing a positive social program that can improve people’s lives and disperse power into the hands of the many, not the few.

Klein discusses the predicted rise in global temperature because of global warming and the way powerful countries have failed to react to control carbon omissions. She focuses on the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen, which failed to agree on binding targets for the major polluters. She describes it as a moment of realization that the change will only come from people and not governments. The summit only reached a non-binding agreement for the major polluters to keep temperatures from increasing by more than 2 degrees, something they are free to ignore. Klein points out this doesn’t go anywhere near far enough to avert a global crisis. She also points out the perilous consequences of a 2-4 degree rise in temperatures, something the climatologist community believes to be likely by the end of the century.

So far, there has been an increase of 0.8 degrees since industrialization, and there are already alarming consequences. A 2012 World Bank report, Klein quotes, points to the danger of a 2-degree rise and above triggering “non linear tipping elements” (13) such as the disintegration of the west Antarctic ice sheet. This would put the problem beyond human control and fundamentally alter life on this planet.

The World Bank report warns that humanity is on course for a 4-degree warmer world by the end of the century, one “marked by extreme heat waves and declining food stock, and life threatening sea level rises” (14). Island nations and major cities could be drowned, and brutal heat waves would be common. Other mainstream analysts estimate a 4- to 6-degree rise by the end of the century. This, for Klein, means “that climate change has become an existential crisis for the human species” (15).

She compares the situation to the Cold War threat of nuclear holocaust, only that was a remote possibility, whereas this is exactly what humanity is on course for: all people have to do is keep doing “exactly what we’re doing” despite the warnings of the scientific community (15).

“Really Bad Timing” (Pages 16-24)

Klein explores different explanations for why people don't do more to stop climate change.

1. The difficulty of getting world governments to cooperate.

While she acknowledges this difficulty, she points out that complex global organizations such as the World Trade Organization exist and operate effectively.

2. A lack of technological solutions

To this claim, Klein points out the rise and small-scale successes of green energy alternatives.

3. It’s just human nature—we’re too selfish.

Klein refutes this point by showing how people participate in collective self-sacrifice in the face of threats, like the domestic and military efforts of ordinary people during World War II. Likewise, in the current era of austerity, ordinary people have paid the price for the financial crisis of 2007-08. If people can sacrifice for that, then surely they could make lifestyle changes in the interest of saving the planet.

Klein points to deeper political reasons as to why people continue to do so little on a societal level to deal with the crisis. Measures to lower emissions “fundamentally conflict” with the ideology and system of unregulated capitalism that dominates the world, a system run by a powerful elite “with a stranglehold over our economy, politics and media” (18).

She points out that this elite currently enjoys a period of great ideological control. She briefly reviews the historical process of globalization, the creation of the World Trade Organization, and the political goals of neoliberalism: privatization of the public sphere and deregulation of the global corporate sector to benefit powerful multinational corporations.

The point here is to show that free-market capitalism and the neoliberal values that come along with it are inherently opposed to the collective approach required to tackle global warming. She also points out that free market capitalism and globalization, driven as they are by the growth of markets and the generation of profit, have “dramatically sped up” global warming (20).

To deal with the crisis would require something that runs against the very spirit of free market capitalism; what’s required is regulation, the protection of fledgling green industries, and a contraction—not an expansion—of our use and exploitation of the Earth’s resources. In sum, “our economic system and our planetary system are now at war” (21) and people must choose between them.

Klein argues the only chance of averting global catastrophe is not small incremental measures but a radical transformation of economies and societies. Because of the damage that's already been done, this transformation must begin very soon.

This, she says, challenges another principle of the liberal establishment: the belief in the value of moderation, “the fetish of centrism, of reasonableness” (22). The extent of the problem and the fact people have wasted so much time already means that nothing short of radical action will make a real difference—the door to keep the temperature from rising two degrees is about to close, and “half measures won’t cut it” (22).

What’s required is a radical change of mindset: a worldview based on cooperation and a “grand project of re-invention” that challenges the fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism (23).

“Power, not just Energy” (Pages 24-25)

Klein positions her book as a political and social inquiry into and response to the problem of climate change. She uses the example of Gary Stix (senior editor of Scientific American) who realized he needed to change focus from energy to power; that is, from the specific low-carbon technologies that could help to the “social and political context in which these technologies shifts stand a chance” (24).

Klein explains that her book is about that social and political context: the power and the ideological roadblocks that have prevented green technologies and solutions from taking off anywhere near the scale required. As she puts it: “It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power, than the politics of human power” (25). She goes on to say that this is not just about challenging the power balance of capitalism but the power relation between human beings and the environment and the assumption that people can just take as much as they want without consequence.

“Coming Out of Denial” (Pages 25-28)

Klein doesn’t say here that smaller measures aren’t valuable. She points out that under the current system, even those small measures aren’t being taken. Her approach instead is to “think big, go deep, and move the ideological pole far away from the stifling market fundamentalism that has become the greatest enemy to planetary health” (25). She points out that at heart, this is an ideological and political battle, and challenging things on this level may at least get some “breathing room” for more modest reformist policies. She also argues that the approach of “polite incremental change” has been tried and hasn’t worked (26).

Klein finishes the Introduction by discussing the difficulty of writing this book due to her growing awareness of climate change’s terrible implications for her children. She notes the depletion of animal populations such as moose, bats, and starfish, and wonders about the unstable and impoverished world people are leaving their children.