Analysis Of Veteran Campaigner Naomi Klein's Capitalism Vs. The Climate

What can we humans, as a species, do to overcome the most daunting challenge facing us today? That challenge is, of course, that all the practices we have come to rely on for our prosperity have grown to the point where their incidental impact on our natural habitat is threatening not only that prosperity, but our very survival. In other words, what can we do to avert the consequences of man-made climate change?

Veteran campaigner Naomi Klein presents her own answer in this sometimes brilliant, but ultimately unconvincing, book.

Mission statement

Klein’s book is subtitled ‘Capitalism vs. the Climate’, foreshadowing the thrust of her case: that climate change and other environmental depredations are largely the fault of capitalism and are being irresponsibly aggravated by capitalists, who resort to all kinds of cynical propaganda and lobbying to obscure these facts and to prevent remedial action being taken. Multinational corporations, particularly those in the extractive and energy industries, are arraigned as the prime suspects behind this quasi-conspiracy. “There is still time to avoid catastrophic warming,” Klein

In formulating her answer, Klein sets great store by what she calls ‘Blockadia’ – local action by local activists to forestall environmentally-destructive development and to extract recompense for the costs when such development goes wrong (e.g. BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico). She applaud the success of campaigners – notably the ‘first nations’ in her native Canada – in thwarting some fracking and pipeline projects. Klein is not alone in this; many would applaud it, myself among them. But such initiatives do not amount to a coherent political, let alone environmental, programme. And the more she tries to extrapolate from the individual initiatives into a prospective programme, the more the hard edges of her thinking become blurred and the more she relies on rhetoric and