Hot Money: Naomi Klein (Green Ideas)

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the tight correlation between ‘worldview’ and acceptance of climate science [is attributed] to ‘cultural cognition,’ the process by which all of us … filter new information in ways that will protect our ‘preferred vision of the good society.’ If new information seems to confirm that vision, we welcome it and integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain immediately gets to work producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the unwelcome invasion. Our cultural narratives include myths about humanity’s duty to dominate a natural world that is said to be both limitless and entirely controllable. We must regain a feeling of humility before nature, which is ultimately more powerful than us humans. We are part of a vast biotic community engaged in an uphill battle to create new living beings. We must act (among humans and in relationship to the natural world) according to principles of interdependence rather than hyperindividualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy. Linear, one-way relationships of pure extraction will be replaced with systems that are circular and reciprocal. Nature sets ecological limits, within which we must live. We must adapt ourselves to the rhythms of natural systems and, acting as stewards, regenerate and renew rather than dominate and deplete, thus fully participating in nature’s process of maximizing life’s creativity. None of this is a replacement for major policy changes that would regulate carbon reduction across the board. But what the emergence of this networked, grassroots movement means is that the next time climate campaigners get into a room filled with politicians and polluters to negotiate, there will be many thousands of people outside the doors with the power to amp up the political pressure significantly—with heightened boycotts, court cases, and more militant direct action should real progress fail to materialize." (355) For more than twenty years Naomi Klein's books have defined our era, chronicling the exploitation of people and the planet and demanding justice. On Fire gathers for the first time more than a decade of her impassioned writing from the frontline of climate breakdown, and pairs it with new material on the staggeringly high stakes of what we choose to do next.

Most of us cannot imagine being part of the mobilization that’s needed. "In other words, we are products of our age and of a dominant ideological project. One that too often has taught us to see ourselves as little more than singular, gratification-seeking units, out to maximize our narrow advantage, while simultaneously severing so many of us from the broader communities whose pooled skills are capable of solving problems big and small." (460) One’s political outlook predicts one’s views on climate change more so than anything else – only 11% of Americans with hierarchical/ individualistic (right-wing) worldviews rate climate change as high risk, while 69% of those with egalitarian and communitarian worldviews rate it as high risk.) This in turn is down to the primary driving force of the trade system in the 1980s and 1990s – allowing multinationals the freedom to scour the globe in search of the cheapest and most exploitable labour force (the ‘race to the bottom’) – it was a journey that passed through Mexico and South Korea and ended up in China where wages were extraordinarily low, trade unions were brutally suppressed and the state was willing to spend seemingly limitless funds on massive infrastructure projects – modern ports, sprawling highway systems, endless numbers of coal-fired power plants, massive dams, all to ensure that the lights stayed on in the factories and the goods made it from the assembly lines onto the container ships in time – A free trader’s dream, in other words, and a climate nightmare. The expansion of China’s ports indicates the increasing volume of trade between China and other countries as we remake our economies to stay within our global carbon budget, we need to see less consumption (except among the poor), less trade (as we relocalize our economies), and less private investment in producing for excessive consumption. These reductions would be offset by increased government spending, and increased public and private investment in the infrastructure and alternatives needed to reduce our emissions to zero. Implicit in all of this is a great deal more redistribution, so that more of us can live comfortably within the planet’s capacity." (91)The movement has been propelled by expansion of fossil fuel extraction, often into hostile territory, and by the heightened risk of extraction and transportation operations. Climate justice also means, at its most basic level, dealing with the wild overconsumption of the rich and the underconsumption of the poor. Survival demands a correction because climate change keeps showing us that it’s inequality and injustice that kills. Again and again, after failing to persuade communities that these projects are in their genuine best interest, governments are teaming up with corporate players to roll over the opposition, using a combination of physical violence and draconian legal tools reclassifying peaceful activists as terrorists." (362)

Naomi Klein's work has always moved and guided me. She is the great chronicler of our age of climate emergency, an inspirer of generations' - GRETA THUNBERG

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Klein suggests that there is a causal link between the quest for cheap labour and rising CO2 emissions – the same logic which works labour to the bone will burn mountains of coal while spending next to nothing on pollution controls because it’s the cheapest way to produce. Thirdly, the WTO has given western companies stronger patent rights over their technologies – whereas if renewable technologies are to be transferred to the developing world, they would need to make their own cheap copies of those technologies (because they would not be able to afford to buy them).

I always tell people that the most important thing they can do is join groups of other people taking action. And that action depends on where they can have the most influence. If they’re university students, that may mean divestment. If they live somewhere in the path of a pipeline, it may mean stopping that pipeline. If they’re a brilliant economist, it may mean working with colleagues on policy approaches that movements can champion. The hierarchy was so clear that the 1992 Rio Earth Summit agreement made clear that ‘measures taken to combat climate change… should not constitute a disguised restriction on international trade.’Exctractivism is also directly connected to the notion of sacrifice zones—places that, to their extractors, somehow don’t count and therefore can be poisoned, drained, or otherwise destroyed …" (169) With many of the biggest pools of untapped carbon on lands controlled by some of the poorest people on the planet, and with emissions rising most rapidly in what were, until recently, some of the poorest parts of the world, there is simply no credible way forward that does not involve redressing the real roots of poverty." (418) aGlobal environmental change |0https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh96001848 |xEconomic aspects. |0https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh99005484

Resistance to high-risk extreme extraction is building a global, grassroots, and broad-based network the likes of which the environmental movement has rarely seen. And perhaps this phenomenon shouldn’t even be referred to as an environmental movement at all, since it is primarily driven by a desire for a deeper form of democracy, one that provides communities with real control over those resources that are most critical to collective survival—the health of the water, air, and soil. In the process, these place-based stands are stopping real climate crimes in progress." (295) As general evidence of the link between neoliberal policies and the increase in global warming we have the following stats – ‘Before the neoliberal era, emissions growth had been slowing from 4.5% annual increases in the 1960s to about 1% a year in the 1990s, but between 2000 and 2008 the growth rate reached 3.4%, before reaching a historic high of 5.9% in 2009. (Evidence for this comes in the form of the report below (although growth does slow in more recent years!) marked the date of the first United Nations Earth Summit in Rio – the first UN Framework Convention of Climate Change was signed. Activism "becomes an entirely normal activity throughout society …. During extraordinary historical moments—both world wars, the aftermath of the Great Depression, or the peak of the civil rights era—the usual categories dividing ‘activists’ and ‘regular people’ became meaningless because the project of changing society was so deeply woven into the project of life. Activists were, quite simply, everyone." (459) Again and again, linear, one-way relationships of pure extraction are being replaced with systems that are circular and reciprocal." (446)

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On the other hand, according to John Farrel, the attitude of most private energy companies has been, and still is ‘we’re going to take the money we make from selling fossil fuels and use it to lobby as hard as we can against any change to the way we do business’. This movement is actually more widespread than Germany (there are even some cities in America have done this, such as Boulder in Colorado which have gone down this route), and is most prevalent in the Netherlands, Austria, and Norway, and these are the countries with the highest commitment to coming off fossil fuels and pursuing green energy alternatives. If I had to name a single book that makes sense of these last few dark years, it would be this one’ New York Times Klein argues that the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age (1989 – present day ) are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels and bring climate change under control. But for those of us born and raised inside this system, though we may sell see the dead-end flaw of its central logic, it can remain intensely difficult to see a way out." (178)