4
street roots
Nov. 21, 2014
Shock
waves
Author Naomi Klein's new book “This
Changes Everything,”picks up where
“The Shock Doctrine” left o ff— getting
at the root o f climate change politics and
the potential to chart a better course
BY KEVIN GOPAL
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R ITE R
arlier this year the CEO of the
world’s largest oil and gas company
joined an anti-fraclang lawsuit
because of plans to erect a 160-foot water
tower near his Texas home.
Rex Tillerson of Exxon complained that
the value of his property would be harmed.
This is the sort of exquisitely painful
ironic detail to be found in Naomi Klein’s
new book. But it’s also where she finds
hope.
Companies like Exxon are addicted to
extracting fossil fuels, says writer and
activist Klein, even though the future of the
planet depends on them staying in the
ground.
But as the reserves of conventional oil ;
are diminishing, the energy companies are
seeking what they call more innovative ways
of supplying gas and oil — including fracking,
which involves blasting huge amounts of
water and chemicals into shale rock to .
fracture it and release natural gas.
And this, isn’t only happening miles out to
sea or in the distant, easily overlooked
ancestral homelands of indigenous people,
It’s happening at the foot of the gardens of
the likes of Tillerson - and they don’t like
it
Far from being a cleaner alternative to
conventional oil, recent research suggests
the methane
emissions from
fracking make it much
dirtier than its ?
advocates claim.
So-called saarfeertasei
Methane is a more
solutions are net only a
dangerous global
distraction from the p rio rity warming gas than
CO2.
of stopping p o llu tio n , K le in
Fracking is only
says, But actively contriBnte
making it harder to
to g lobal warming« She
avoid the 2 degrees
quotes research fin d in g
centigrade rise in
global temperatures
"overw helm ing evidence
that most climate
that m anufacturers a re .
scientists agree could
gam ing the system By
trigger catastrophic
producing-m ore potent
effects, including
melting of the ice
greenhouse gases so they
can lie paid to destroy them " sheets and rises in sea
levels. Seen like this,
says Klein, fracldng —
which has also
provoked protests in
Lancashire and Salford — looks less like
innovation and more like the helpless
behavior of desperate addiction. But if the
crisis has forced even Tillerson to consult
his lawyers, it’s also an opportunity.
Klein’s previous book, “The Shock
Doctrine,” charted the way political leaders
seized on natural disasters like Hurricane
Katrina or economic crises to push through
right-wing policies of privatization, cutting
public spending and lowering taxes.
Her new book, “This Changes
Everything,” picks up where “The Shock
E
Doctrine” left off but is “something
different,” she says. “It’s about people shock
and a progressive response to the crisis that
gets to the root of why disasters happen. It’s
an antidote to the shock doctrine,”
The antidote for Klein involves nothing
less than the overthrow of the dominant
free-market economic model,, in which
corporate power will be reined in,
government spending is increased to build
low-carbon economies and people seize back
democracy from the grassroots up. This is
not about just installing more efficient
lightbulbs.
“It’s too late to stop climate change from
coming; it is already here, and increasingly
brutal disasters are headed our way, no
matter what we do,” writes Klein. “But it’s
not too late to avert the worst, and there is
still time to change ourselves so that we are
far less brutal to one another when those
disasters strike. And that, it seems to me, is
worth a great deal.”
In the book, Klein’s vast sweep of
research begins in Washington at the
Heartland Institute’s conference - “the
premier gathering for those dedicated to
denying the overwhelming scientific
consensus that human activity is warming
the planet” She hears a succession of
speakers convinced that climate change is a
Commie plot to overthrow the American
way of life - and finds the evidence many
are funded by big oil money.
But although she emphasizes how wrong
the deniers are about the science, in
another way she finds them more honest
than some who profess themselves to be on
the side of the planet
She is particularly scathing about big
environmental groups that have allowed
themselves to be hijacked by corporate
interests and relates the astonishing story
of the Nature Conservancy, which took over
some land in Galveston Bay, Texas, from oil
giant Mobil to protect one of the last
remaining breeding grounds of the
threatened Attwater’s prairie chicken: In
1999, it sunk its own gas well inside the
preserve.
It’s as breathtaking a tale as Tillerson’s
anti-fracking protest, but big green groups
further the energy companies’ interests in
other ways too, points out Klein, particularly
in their support for “market-based ;
solutions” to climate change “that have
provided an invaluable service to the fossil
fuels sector as a whole.” The big green
groups got seduced by the access they were
given to the corridors of power, and started
to back so-called win-win solutions they
claimed would benefit the environment
while allowing the pursuit of profit to carry
on unfettered.
It’s a dangerous illusion, says Klein, citing
the opaque world of carbon credits and
trading, and carbon offsets. These are not
only a distraction from the priority of
stopping pollution, she says, but actively
contribute to global warming. She cites
research finding “overwhelming evidence
that manufacturers are gaming the system
by producing more potent greenhouse gases
so they can be paid to destroy them.”
Klein’s dispassionate prose in the book
only heightens the nightmarish logic. She
skewers the techno-optimists pushing geo
engineering ideas, such as space mirrors
that reflect the sun’s heat away from the
earth and the “Pinatubo Option,” which
would mimic the effect of the Philippines
volcano by blasting sulphuric acid droplets
into the atmosphere to prevent the sun’s
heat reaching the ground. Coolly, Klein
points out that this could make blue skies u
thing of the past, prevent astronomers from
seeing stars, reduce the capacity of solar
power generators - “irony alert” - and
create serious drought in Africa.
She then turns to philanthropists who
See KLEIN, page 5