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A garbage dumpsite in Paranaque
city, Manila (Reuters/Romeo Ranoco)
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What
if, instead of accepting a future of climate catastrophe and private profits,
we decide to change everything?
About
a year ago, I was having dinner with some newfound friends in Athens. I had an
interview scheduled for the next morning with Alexis Tsipras, the leader of
Greece’s official opposition party and one of the few sources of hope in a
Europe ravaged by austerity. I asked the group for ideas about what questions I
should put to the young politician. Someone suggested: “History knocked on your
door—did you answer?”
At
the time, Tsipras’s party, Syriza, was putting up a fine fight against
austerity. Yet it was struggling to articulate a positive economic vision of
its own. I was particularly struck that the party did not oppose the governing
coalition’s embrace of new oil and gas exploration, a threat to Greece’s
beautiful seas as well as to the climate as a whole.
Instead,
it argued that any funds raised by the effort should be spent on pensions, not
used to pay back creditors. In other words, the party was not providing an
alternative to extractivism; it simply had more equitable plans for
distributing the spoils—something that can be said of most left-governed
countries in Latin America.
When
we met the next day, Tsipras was frank that concerns about the environmental
crisis had been entirely upstaged by more immediate ones. “We were a party that
had the environment and climate change in the center of our interest,” he
told me. “But after these years of depression in Greece, we forgot climate
change.”
This
is, of course, entirely understandable. It is also a terrible missed
opportunity—and not just for one party in one country in the world. The
research I’ve done over the past five years has convinced me that climate
change represents a historic opening for progressive transformation.
As part of
the project of getting our emissions down to the levels so many climate
scientists recommend, we have the chance to advance policies that dramatically
improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create huge numbers of good
jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up.
Rather
than the ultimate expression of the shock doctrine I wrote about in my last
book—a frenzy of new resource grabs and repression by the 1 percent—climate
change can be a “People’s Shock,” a blow from below. It can disperse power into
the hands of the many, rather than consolidating it in the hands of a few, and
it can radically expand the commons, rather than auctioning it off in pieces.
Getting
to the root of why we are facing serial crises in the first place would leave
us with both a more habitable climate than the one we are headed for and a far
more just economy than the one we have now.
But
none of this will happen if we let history’s knock go unanswered—because we
know where the current system, left unchecked, is headed. We also know how that
system will deal with serial climate-related disasters: with profiteering and
escalating barbarism to segregate the losers from the winners. To arrive at
that dystopia, all we need to do is keep barreling down the road we are on.
When
I despair at the prospects for change, I think back on some of what I witnessed
in the process of writing my book about climate change. Admittedly, much of it
is painful: from the young climate activist breaking down and weeping on my
shoulder at the Copenhagen summit, to the climate-change deniers at the
Heartland Institute literally laughing at the prospect of extinction; from the
country manor in England where mad scientists plotted to blot out the sun, to
the stillness of the blackened marshes during the BP oil disaster; from the
roar of the earth being ripped up to scrape out the Alberta tar sands, to the
shock of discovering that the largest green group in the world was itself
drilling for oil.
But
that’s not all I think about. When I started this journey, most of the
movements standing in the way of the fossil-fuel frenzy either did not exist or
were a fraction of their current size. All were significantly more isolated
from one another than they are today. North Americans, overwhelmingly, did not
know what the tar sands are. Most of us had never heard of fracking.
There
had never been a truly mass march against climate change in North America, let
alone thousands willing to engage together in civil disobedience. There was no
mass movement to divest from fossil fuels. Hundreds of cities and towns in
Germany had not yet voted to take back control over their electricity grids to
be part of a renewable energy revolution.
My
own province did not have a green-energy program that was bold enough to land
us in trade court. China was not in the midst of a boisterous debate about the
wrenching health costs of frenetic, coal-based economic growth. There was far
less top-level research proving that economies powered by 100 percent renewable
energy were within our grasp. And few climate scientists were willing to speak
bluntly about the political implications of their work for our frenzied
consumer culture. All of this has changed so rapidly as I have been writing
that I have had to race to keep up.
Yes,
ice sheets are melting faster than the models projected, but resistance is
beginning to boil. In these existing and nascent movements, we now have clear
glimpses of the kind of dedication and imagination demanded of everyone who is
alive and breathing during climate change’s “decade zero.”
This
is because the carbon record doesn’t lie. And what that record tells us is that
emissions are still rising: every year we release more greenhouse gases than
the year before, the growth rate increasing from one decade to the next—gases
that will trap heat for generations to come, creating a world that is hotter,
colder, wetter, thirstier, hungrier, angrier. So if there is any hope of reversing
these trends, glimpses won’t cut it; we will need the climate revolution
playing on repeat, all day every day, everywhere.
Mass
resistance movements have grabbed the wheel before and could very well do so
again. At the same time, we must reckon with the fact that lowering global
emissions in line with the urgent warnings of climate scientists will demand
change of a truly daunting speed and scale.
Meeting
science-based targets will mean forcing some of the most profitable companies
on the planet to forfeit trillions of dollars of future earnings by leaving the
vast majority of proven fossil-fuel reserves in the ground. It will also
require coming up with trillions more to pay for zero-carbon, disaster-ready
societal transformations. And let’s take for granted that we want to do these
radical things democratically and without a bloodbath, so violent vanguardist
revolutions don’t have much to offer in the way of road maps.
The
crucial question we are left with, then, is this: Has an economic shift of this
kind ever happened before in history? We know it can happen during wartime,
when presidents and prime ministers are the ones commanding the transformation
from above. But has it ever been demanded from below, by regular people, when
their leaders have wholly abdicated their responsibilities? The answer to that
question is predictably complex, filled with “sort ofs” and “almosts”—but also
at least one “yes.”
Editor’s
Note: This article is adapted from This
Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, by Naomi Klein (Simon & Schuster). Click here for
information about the book and Naomi’s September/October 2014 tour dates. The
Nation will be
livestreaming her sold-out US book launch on September 18 at 6 pm EST; you can watch that here.
Source: http://www.thenation.com
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