DOOMED TO FAIL
Naomi Klein blames capitalism for the climate threat. She’s wrong.
Down with Francis Bacon, Adam Smith, the scientific method and pretty much all of the core ideas that created the Western world. It’s a campaign that’s doomed to fail for any number of reasons
Parts of Naomi Klein’s new climate-revolution/kill-capitalism manifesto, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, make for damn good reading. Especially worthy are chapters and sections that explore the group-grope shenanigans of big corporations and pro-business environmental groups as they spent much of the last decade jumping into bed with one another.
But the good bits are not enough to salvage This Changes Everything, a 560-page call-to-arms in which Ms. Klein proposes to overthrow four centuries of Enlightenment-driven human achievement. Down with Francis Bacon, Adam Smith, the scientific method and pretty much all of the core ideas that created the Western world. Notwithstanding all the media attention she’s been getting on the book for the last few weeks, it’s a campaign that’s doomed to fail for any number of reasons.
But there is enough in Ms. Klein’s latest work to keep readers of all ideological stripes engaged, if not enraged. And that includes the free-marketers she wants to put out of business.
A major Klein target is Richard Branson, the media-darling head of Virgin Group who — after a personal PowerPoint presentation from Al Gore on climate change at the Branson mansion — concluded that “we are looking at Armageddon.” Mr. Branson was so alarmed at this pending end of the world shock that he decided to launch a “new Virgin approach to business.” He called it Gaia Capitalism, and made a high-profile pledge at the 2006 Clinton Global Initiative in Manhattan to spend $3-billion to develop bio-fuels as an alternative to climate-destroying oil and gas. Mr. Branson also launched the Virgin Earth Challenge and the Carbon War Room.
Great plans, but all hilariously exposed in meticulous detail by Ms. Klein as a bunch of self-serving corporate public relations. In a 25-page chapter sub-titled “The Green Billionaires Won’t Save Us,” Ms. Klein documents the various failures of Mr. Branson to live up to any of his own climate hype. Billions were never invested, profits were not diverted, the earth challenges fizzled and the war rooms were empty.
Meanwhile, Virgin’s carbon emissions rose as the airline expanded with ever more aircraft and fossil fuel consumption.
Ms. Klein tries to give Mr. Branson the benefit of the doubt — maybe his intentions were good — but eventually concludes that there’s no hope for these and other capitalists who talk a good green game but are still playing in the carbon big leagues.
Other green billionaires skewered are Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and T. Boone Pickens, each of whom has a history of cozying up to the climate issue while their feet remained firmly planted in the fos- sil fuel world. Ms. Klein describes them as a “parade of billionaires who were going to invent a new form of enlightened capitalism but decided that, on second thought, the old one was just too profitable to surrender.”
Ms. Klein also does a fine demolition job on the geoengineering fantasists who, among other things, have proposed solving a future climate crisis by blocking out a portion of the rays of the sun “to save ourselves from incineration,” as Ms. Klein puts it.
But her best putdowns are directed at the “pro-business environmentalists,” a Who’s
Who of green activists who parade through a chapter subtitled “The Disastrous Merger of Big Business and Big Green.”
What a pleasure it is to read pointed critical comment on how Friends of the Earth, Environmental Action and the Natural Resources Defense Council jumped aboard the lower-carbon natural gas bandwagon in the 1990s. Then there’s the Environmental Defense Fund’s Fred Krupp, who led Big Green activists into a love-in with scads of corporate giants — Dow Chemical, Alcoa, Conoco-Phillips, BP, Shell and many others — to support the United States Climate Action Partnership. Ms. Klein rightly dismisses that plan, with it’s scam carbon allowances and carbon-trading schemes.
On page after page, Ms. Klein rails against people, corporations, activists, politicians and billion-dollar foundations for their pathetic collective failure to come to terms with the world-ending crisis she sees coming from the continued burning of fossil fuels. There’s the World Economic Forum climate gabbers at Davos, the TED talks, the Vanity Fair special green issues, the movie stars arriving at the Academy Awards in their flashy hybrids. Ms. Klein can’t stand any of it — or them. Carbon trading is ridiculed. Even Al Gore doesn’t come out of her book with his head on.
All of this useful and fascinating detail on the last three decades of carbon policy folly almost makes This Changes
Everything a worthwhile read. Unfortunately, the good stuff is packed into an extremely twisted ideological and political framework. It may not be as conceptually indigestible as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in
the Twenty-First Century, but it is even further off the ideologically planet that most of us live on — although Piketty had more or less the same idea when he wrote “If democracy is some day to regain control of capitalism, it must start by recognizing that the concrete institutions in which democracy and capitalism are em- bodied need to be reinvented again and again.”
Ms. Klein’s reinvention plan is much more aggressive. Fossil fuels are killing Mother Earth, global temperatures will toast the planet, four centuries of science and capitalism are to blame, and the only way out is a radical bottom-up popular revolution against governments and corporations, free markets and capitalism. At least half of This Changes Everything is a rhetorical extravaganza of agitation for national and global “climate movements” to rise up — like Arab Springs and Ukrainian revolts — in civil disobedience. “Only mass social movements can save us now” from the hell of global warming, Ms. Klein writes. Her objective is to rally millions of people in a war against climate change, to clear the world of fossil fuels and install some new social order as part of a battle of worldviews. It’s a process of “rebuilding and reinventing the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic.”
None of this is going to happen, mainly because Ms. Klein’s worldview is too unhinged from reality. One of her talking points, borrowed from others, compares climate change and slavery. “While not equivalent, the dependency of the U.S. economy on slave labour … is certainly comparable to the modern global economy’s reliance on fossil fuels.” Not equivalent would be an understatement. She then spends the next couple of thousand words explaining how the analogy is far from perfect, but she sticks with it nonetheless.
Then there’s feminism. The climate movement represents “nothing less than the unfinished business of the most powerful liberation movements of the past two centuries, from civil rights to feminism to Indigenous sovereignty.” When Ms. Klein gets worked up, she sails over the top. “Climate change does not need some shiny new movement that will magically succeed where others failed. Rather, as the furthest-reaching crisis created by the extractive worldview, and the one that puts humanity on a firm and unyielding decline, climate change can be that force — the grand push — that will bring together all of these living movements.”
There’s not much point in reviewing Ms. Klein’s climate science. She regurgitates every apocalyptic prediction and scenario, repeating scary studies and dire warnings over and over again, carefully footnoting every study, paper and reference, then reworking them all into a constant droning mantra throughout the book. Not that it matters. The climate and fossil fuels are mere plot mechanisms and backdrop.
The book’s real objective is to blame the looming climate threat on the greatest intellectual, philosophical, scientific and economic transformation in history. It all started in 1776 — reports Ms. Klein — when British inventor James Watt came up with a coal-fired steam engine, thus displacing water power with fossil fuel power. But guess what? Ms. Klein notes that 1776 is also the year Adam Smith wrote the book that launched capitalism: The Wealth of Na
tions. Ms. Klein finds a couple of ecological writers who said, as she summarizes them, “it is not coincidence that the market economy and fossil fuel economy emerged at essentially the same time.”
Compounding the perceived evil, James Watt saw his role as a fulfilment of the idea that man can and should dominate nature. “Nature can be conquered, if we can be find her weak side,” he said, a worldview that fostered the Industrial Revolution and three centuries of mind-blowing improvements in the human condition.
Watt, as Ms. Klein notes, was reflecting ideas that originated in part with Francis Bacon, a 17 th century philosopher whom Ms. Klein describes as “the patron saint” of the modern-day extractive economy, the primal cause of climate change.
It takes a lot of evasive work and syllogistic wreckage to portray Francis Bacon as the begetter of climate change, but Ms. Klein is up to the task. Bacon, she said, had a “twisted vision” of the Earth as a sphere over which man must dominate through science and knowledge. Prior to Bacon, she says, the elites of Britain held “pagan notions of the earth as a life-giving mother figure to whom we owe respect and reverence.”
Here, Ms. Klein joins the epic leftist war within economics, history and philosophy over Bacon’s ideas. Among popularizers of the war, she follows in well-worn trails set out by the likes of John Ralston Saul ( Voltaire’s Bastards, etc.) and Jeremy Rifkin, who has turned Bacon-bashing into a life-long crusade. “Whereas the ancients viewed knowledge as a window to the divine, Bacon saw it as a way to exercise power over nature,” says Rifkin. (Another anti-Bacon warrior is Carolyn Merchant, an American eco-feminist philosopher whom Ms. Klein mentions only in passing and in another context, who said: “The deeper roots of this divide [over Bacon] lie in perceptions of the Scientific Revolution as a grand narrative of progress and hope versus one of decline and disaster. How one views the Scientific Revolution itself is a marker of how one might assess the import of Bacon’s contributions.”)
Ms. Klein, Mr. Rifkin and others would have us believe that turning nature into an extractable resource to improve human life is a function of dastardly capitalist plunder and an affront to Mother Earth. Bacon, however, doesn’t appear to have seen it that way. He advocated the “sovereignty of man” and the use of science as “a rich storehouse, for the Glory of the Creator and relief of Man’s estate.”
And then there’s Genesis 1.2: “God blessed them and said to them, ‘ Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’ ”
I’m not saying Exxon-Mobil is doing the work of God, but man’s push to dominate nature did not exactly begin as the product of capitalism and free markets, or even corporations. It began centuries before that.
The logic behind the climate mass revolt advocated by Ms. Klein suffers from a rootless dislocation from history, philosophy and science. It may also be totally dislocated from the world’s human beings, who remain, after many millennia, ever keen to improve their lives on Earth through continued and increasing dominance of nature. It’s what man does.