Climate change to escape capitalism?

This Changes Everything (“ this is global warming) explores ways we might escape the disasters and devastation that will accompany rising global temperatures. This is not an academic book, nor a collection of scientific data on climate change. ; Naomi Klein does not try to convince the reader of the reality of the problem. The author is a Canadian journalist and activist whose first book, No Logo, sold a million copies and contributed to the growth of the alter-globalization movement. The shock strategy, his second book, was also a worldwide bestseller. This Changes Everything defends the thesis that ecological sustainability is not compatible with capitalism ; and that climate change and its extremely serious threats are an opportunity to get rid of capitalism – since in the long term we will have to choose between capitalism and survival of the species. This Changes Everything is an intervention in the public debate by a social movement professional and a leading ideologue of the left of the 2000s.

Capitalism versus climate

For Naomi Klein, nothing better illustrates the link between capitalism and global warming than international trade law and the World Trade Organization. At theWTOthe main emitters of greenhouse gases are waging a legal war against each other to cancel subsidies for renewable energy from other countries. Any policy aimed at favoring short circuits is assimilated to protectionism, and therefore subject to appeal to theWTOwhere judges make crucial decisions for the future of the planet with the sole reference of the agreements signed by States. At the Rio summit in 1992, it was agreed that measures against global warming could not serve as “ disguised restriction » to international trade. The organization of the free movement of capital allows capitalists to travel the world in search of the cheapest labor, and where environmental standards are generally non-existent. As Naomi Klein says, cheap labor and dirty energy form a “ pack “. Fighting global warming therefore requires getting away from capitalism.

This Changes Everything identifies what will not work to combat global warming. Nothing to expect from adults NGO environmental organizations like Nature Conservancy or Environmental Defense Fund, which are mostly corrupted by multinationals. Nothing to expect from billionaire philanthropists either, to whom a chapter is devoted. Nothing yet to expect from small everyday gestures. Above all, nothing to expect from an emissions market, the perverse effects of which are obvious: in India, an entire industry produces pollutants to destroy them immediately and pocket environmental subsidies. Not much to expect from geoengineering (which Bruno Latour or Stephen Hawking recommend), which consists not of reducing emissions but of acting on the effects of global warming, by practicing carbon sequestration or the dispersion of sulfur in the atmosphere to lower the temperature (a solution promoted by the authors of Freakonomics). THE geoengineering contains an inexhaustible potential for perverse effects and can only be the last resort of a drifting planet. Humans would do well to radically change their way of life.

How to change your lifestyle ? This raises the problem of the political conditions for the implementation of environmental policies. An interesting point of the book is that Naomi Klein has no faith in electoral democracy. She doesn’t have a word about the elections (except to point out that Bill Clinton and Jean Chrétien reneged on their campaign promises on theNAFTA) nor on the environmentalist parties. The implicit observation is that there is nothing to expect from elected officials, who always end up working for the interests of multinationals: liberal democracy is incapable of doing anything other than devastating the planet. Only social movements and demonstrations organized by the base (grassroots) can occasionally set back governments and multinationals ; and at the same time, Naomi Klein emphasizes that when it comes to ecology, we cannot be satisfied with incentive policies, we must implement firm bans (for example on hydraulic fracturing). But This Changes Everything speaks very little about public policies: any change relies on vigorous and demanding social movements, in order to change Western lifestyles towards the relationship that indigenous peoples have with nature.

In these struggles, Naomi Klein tells us, we must start from the principle that state resources are at the service of capital. For example, the Pennsylvania office of Homeland Security shared its files on anti-fracking environmental organizations with oil companies, and the French state-owned company EDF illegally spied on Greenpeace. The police always repress protesters, not the multinationals that produce greenhouse gases. An example of collusion between the state and the oil industry is that of the Niger Delta. Oil extraction is particularly polluting ; It is estimated that for 50 years, the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez has been dumped on the coasts every year. Shell, in particular, practices flaring (flaring): instead of recovering the natural gas that escapes during extraction, we set it on fire, which is both wasteful and enormous pollution. When the protests of the Ogoni people, who live in the delta, became too eloquent, a brutal repression led by the Nigerian military junta left hundreds dead, including the poet and playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa, hanged with eight companions at the end of a rigged trial, all to facilitate Shell’s operations.

Naomi Klein points out that one of the facts of the problem is that oil companies are perpetually revolutionizing the means of extraction, notably with the rise of hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling (horizontal drilling). Each new source of hydrocarbons (the Athabasca oil sands (Alberta tar sands), shale gas in the United States) accelerates the quantity of particles sent into the atmosphere, contributes to global warming, which leads to the melting of glaciers, the polar ice cap and permafrost (permafrost), which will release very large quantities of carbon dioxide, further increasing warming. There is no reason for this to stop, since oil companies are the richest, most profitable and most powerful companies in the economic world.

Romanticism of social movements

This Changes Everything has many merits, first of all that of talking about climate change and recalling the urgency of the issue: the increase in global temperature by two degrees is inevitable, but drastic action over the next decade could prevent a increase of four degrees. We have no time to waste and it is the merit of Naomi Klein to remind us of this, devoting her work and her notoriety to publicizing the problem. The book is full of facts, stories and data that can only lead the reader to be better and more aware of the issues of climate change. Its goal is to mobilize, and in this it works well.

That said, This Changes Everything tells us more about the state of progressive thought and a certain environmental activism than about the ways and means of a hypothetical overcoming of capitalism. And from this point of view, the book is a bit depressing.

The main contradiction of the book is its focus on social movements, demonstrations and grassroots mobilizations, while the scale of what needs to be achieved far exceeds the scope of social movements. A fundamental challenge to capitalism goes beyond local protests. The implementation of strict bans (on drilling, use of pollutants) and the massive reduction of greenhouse gas emissions are not the responsibility of self-managed municipalities. Naomi Klein is certainly right to place no hope in electoral democracy, where economic interests and short-term electoral calculations tend to take precedence over environmental considerations. But she is too optimistic about the power of social movements or the example of indigenous peoples who resist multinationals. In his book, we do not see how we could move from local mobilizations to a planetary transition outside of capitalism. Some might also think that ultimately, only an authoritarian power could implement the necessary changes. Naomi Klein’s model of sustainable society is that of indigenous peoples: a society without geopolitics, without public policies, which would be magically rid of the harmful influence of the oil lobby thanks to citizen mobilizations. It’s not that this society is impossible, but it is unthinkable in the next ten years. However, and it is Naomi Klein who says it herself, we absolutely must act in the next ten years. As a result, the kind of incantation new age on the return to nature sounds like a form of paradoxical resignation to the inevitability of climate change.

In particular, Naomi Klein’s refusal to seriously discuss the implementation of a carbon tax and an emissions market demonstrates a form of romanticism that is not constructive. It is likely that powerful social movements are needed to implement these types of public policies. ; It is certain that in the reality of 2014, a significant carbon tax and a restrictive emissions market are more effective in reducing emissions than a hypothetical ban on fossil fuels.

Naomi Klein does not raise the issue of peak oil (peak oil), the idea that we are reaching the exhaustion of oil and gas resources. But this question is central. Or the peak oil implies an increase in the price of oil which mechanically makes renewable energies profitable and also mechanically reduces emissions ; or else, the peak oil is significantly pushed back due to the exploitation of shale gas and tar sands (the issue is controversial). If oil does not become scarce, as the author seems to suggest, the transition to renewable energies must be a political choice and not the consequence of a natural constraint. From this perspective, the problem appears to be less capitalism than the political power of oil interests in the United States and Canada (a conclusion consistent with the book’s argument). We would have liked that This Changes Everything take stock of the issue.

Finally, the book does not talk about the demographic question. Naomi Klein acts as if the only problem is lifestyle. But it is not clear that the Earth can feed several billion additional humans. Productivist agriculture is not ecologically sustainable. The problem is therefore to determine the number of humans who could feed themselves with sustainable agriculture. If we imagine a perfect distribution of production, we can perhaps feed 11 billion humans (the average projection for 2100). But this perfect distribution is illusory: in the real world, the distribution of food will be extremely unequal, with all the problems that we imagine, and in a context amplified by the droughts caused by climate change in the countries of the South. In short, no prospect is encouraging, but at least This Changes Everything makes us talk about central issues.