This Changes Everything: How Capitalism Impacts Climate Change

Luke Dennison: Before I review this, let me be clear, my political persuasion is most probably left of centre and I absolutely believe in climate change. In addition, I try and live my life in a way which reduces the impact of my carbon foot and I am reasonably passionate about climate change. Overall, I thought this was a fascinating book and Klein does well to lay out the arguments here and there was a lot I learnt or there was a lot to enhance my understanding. This includes the level of corruption within governments and so called green organisations, the level of profit and power these companies hold and the new fuels that are escalating the pollution and climate warming. I think i also learnt quite a bit why those of a more right wing nature adds so scared of climate change being real and why everyone who doesn't agree with the right is a 'leftie'. Finally the second to last chapter gave me some hope (if not much) for the future. However, there were some things that rankled with me a bit. Most of Klein's solutions to all this is to move towards an extreme left wing mantra: stop privatisation, give the power back to governments, start up more co-op etc, to the point that sometimes I wondered...

United Kingdom on Jan 11, 2021

Marchespie: I have read a lot concerning the climate change debate, and try to read from both sides of what has become a very polarised debate. I didn't read this book expecting balance - but I did hope to have my skeptical views challenged by one of the most respected and articulate commentators from the alarmist side of the debate. I actually agree with a great deal of what she says. Big business is objectionable, driven by profit and growth to the exclusion of all else. They don't care much about nature and the people they displace or disadvantage with their activities. Carbon trading is nonsense. Most of the environmental messages from industry are hypocritical "greenwash", as is the unedifying sight of billionaire businessmen posturing about climate change. I also agree that we need to make a transition away from fossil fuels - but not because of an imagined crisis relating to CO2 - more because we will run out eventually, and to reduce pollution and environmental damage.

However, in the search for a well-argued case and a challenge to my existing viewpoint, I was sorely disappointed. Naomi Klein's book, whilst seemingly thoroughly researched, presents an argument full of holes....

United Kingdom on Apr 09, 2016

Ard Caldwell: Naomi Klein has written a book that can't possibly be enjoyed by anyone in their right mind, but everyone should read her thorough work to grasp the reality of the likely decline and fall of the human empire. Perhaps snippets of her revelations are common knowledge to people wired into what's going on in the world, but to read in one volume most of what present global reality means to our future, and mainly to our grandchildren's futures, is indeed shocking. I have recommended This Changes Everything to my children, so that my grandchildren will know what's going on and who and what is currently in total control of our species' demise. Yes, the read is long, demanding and eye popping, but it is well worth the angst, time and intellectual concentration. The text is written in "plain language" and flows well. Albeit a scholarly effort--well documented with supporting evidence, Klein's book demands action, not just thought and talk. Taking action requires all peoples--with Indigenous people being a key to halting "extractive destruction" of our planet, to draw a line and to rise up as one voice demanding change, demanding cessation of destruction or face an ugly confrontation. Why?...

Canada on Mar 26, 2016

Edward B. Crutchley: This remarkable book rounds up with wide-ranging detail and references the positions, pressures and movements around the issues of global warming and fossil fuel extraction and, in the present state of affairs, whether or not compromise can still afford to replace confrontation. It starts with the premise that global warming is man-made because over 90% of scientists agree it to be the case (John Kerry is quoted as equating climate change to a weapon of mass destruction). It exposes the considerable vested interests in fossil fuel extraction and exploitation that have the power to rival governments, the collusions and purchases of influence between these and governments, and even environmental groups, not to mention some even more disastrous track records of authoritarian supposedly leftist regimes. The growing trend towards international trade agreements allows corporations to sue governments who prevent their commercial activities related to the extraction of fossil fuels. Naomi Klein reminds us of the daunting fact that fossil fuel companies presently hold in reserve about five times what it would take to raise global temperatures by 2 degrees. It exposes apprehension over the...

United Kingdom on Dec 20, 2015

Storm Petrol: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

by Naomi Klein

The economic catastrophe of the 1930s reshaped the excesses of the Guilded Age into the more egalitarian era ushered in by The New Deal. The transformation continued after WW II, as enthusiastic voters supported sweeping social programs like Social Security, subsidized housing, public funding for the arts and, in the rest of the developed world, health care. The global warming and climate change caused by mankind’s use of fossil fuels is rapidly developing into a crisis of much greater magnitude, and the thesis of This Changes Everything is that successfully adapting to the resulting environmental changes will require a correspondingly, even grander metamorphosis of human culture.

However, a redesign of the social order that protects humanity from both a savagely unjust economic system and a destabilized climate system is not the only possible outcome.

Ms. Klein understands how corporate interests capitalize on the fear and uncertainty that accompany catastrophe. This provides the perfect climate for instituting policies designed to enrich a small elite, as demonstrated by the US...

United States on Apr 03, 2015

David L. Witt: Socialist economist Naomi Klein speaks truth to power once more in her recent book, This Changes Everything, Capitalism vs. The Climate. She is convinced that climate scientists are correct in their predictions that our current course of unbridled carbon pollution will threaten both the natural environment and the civilization built upon the favorable conditions of the past several thousand years. She proposes that the struggle against environmental destruction and the struggle against poverty are one in the same.

Klein attempts to mainstream the combination of these two concepts into the term “climate justice.” Two news reports in January 2015 lend this idea support. A NOAA/NASA analysis shows 2014 as the globally warmest year in recorded history. The charity Oxfam presented evidence at the World Economic Forum conference in Switzerland that 1% of the world’s population will come to control 50% of the world’s wealth in 2015. Wealth-producing carbon pollution wrecks the atmosphere and impoverishes people at the same time.

Conservatives, a.k.a, free market capitalists, a.k.a. “neoliberals,” continue their concentration of wealth and the CO/2 level...

United States on Jan 21, 2015

Chris ap Alfred: You know the sort of film. The one which promises to be a study of character, strengths, weaknesses and flaws, but before halftime it's degenerated into action, a sequence of car chases and shoot-em-ups.

"This changes everything" reminded me of the movie genre. It promises to tell you how the ideology, structure and practice of modern capitalism align to thwart any intention to deal with carbon emissions, that fossils are so embedded in our systems that there is no escape. However, the bulk of the book is about the struggles of plucky environmental activists against fossil businesses operating in their backyard. The telling is lively, the stories are good, but it replicates many other publications.

Early in the book is the most penetrating insight: that while climate change scientists understand the mechanics of climate change and the environmental implications, it is the climate change deniers who truly understand the economic and intermediate societal impacts of doing something about it on a scale which actually achieves a result. The Marxist in me sees the possibility of constructive synthesis, but Klein doesn't go there, except to talk about how environmental...

United Kingdom on Oct 02, 2014