Simpler Solution To Climate Change

Even if climate science is complicated, author Naomi Klein wants you to know that finding a solution to global warming is easy.

In her powerful new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, the Canadian globalization expert drills through the noisy climate debate and finds that humanity has no choice but to ditch its fossil fuel-driven global economy for a local model powered by renewable energy.

Out with oil, gas, and coal. In with wind, sun, small-scale hydro, and other things that don’t make the climate problem worse. Period.

Throughout the book, Klein sticks to her promise to stay out of the scientific weeds. And she doesn’t force readers to bone up on complicated programs.

For Klein, only “a mass movement capable of taking on powerful polluters” can end the madness of increasingly toxic fossil fuel extraction. Without broadbased mobilization, revamping the economy to veer off today’s course toward cataclysmic floods, fires, and drought may prove impossible.

Official efforts to slow global warming, she explains, took “what began as a straightforward debate about shifting away from fossil fuels and put it through a jargon generator so convoluted that the entire climate issue would seem too complex and arcane for non-experts to understand.”

That “jargon generator” also obscures the fact that most climate efforts cling to the lie that everyone can win in this struggle — from ExxonMobil and Shell to the polar bears and caribou.

Doesn’t that sound absurd? But this delusion triggered market-friendly “solutions” like carbon trading.

That arrangement, often called “cap and trade,” lets companies keep on polluting in exchange for paying off someone else to refrain from, say, chopping down a forest on a remote island.

The fact is that climate-altering carbon emissions are still climbing after 25 years of global climate negotiations. They attained record levels in 2013 despite rapid growth in the generation of electricity from wind and solar power.

Klein has more faith in people on the frontlines of the new climate movement, and meets up with them everywhere from Greece to Montana.

While Klein does call for overhauling the entire global economy — no minor chal- lenge — and rejects most market-based climate fixes, she doesn’t shoot down all financial responses to climate change.

“There is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy,” she says. The solutions Klein favors would reduce inequality and make the economy generally more equitable. She also embraces efforts to get institutions and individuals to divest from their oil, gas, and coal holdings while investing in more sustainable energy options.

But, Klein warns: “The profit motive is not going to be the midwife for that great transformation.” Instead, it will take millions or even billions of people working together. EMILY SCHWARTZ GRECO IS THE MANAGING EDITOR OF OTHERWORDS, A NONPROFIT NATIONAL EDITORIAL SERVICE RUN BY THE INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES.