BLAKEWAY FINAL 4/28/15
4/28/2015 2:50 PM
THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING: CAPITALISM VS. THE CLIMATE By Naomi Klein Reviewed by Darrell Blakeway** Naomi Klein is a public intellectual with a passion for investigating issues affecting the public interest. She is an astute observer of how political and economic power are exercised in fashioning public policy. Klein devoted five years to research, reflection, and writing on climate change and the fossil fuel industry—to understand these phenomena, those who downplay their adverse effects (or doubt that climate change is “man-made”), and those struggling to avoid their adverse effects on their local environs and the future of humanity. Klein concludes that what is required to avoid or mitigate the worst effects of climate change directly clashes with our prevailing capitalist, globalized, freetrade paradigms—ironically agreeing with many “climate deniers.” Her most startling conclusion is that if humanity acts effectively to address climate change and establish a sustainable “steady-state” economy—which it must to survive— the oil and gas industry is doomed. The unanswered question is whether the end of that industry will leave us in a dystopian or utopian future. That question will be answered, Klein believes, and the future unalterably determined, in the next two or three years.1
In 2000, Klein published the book No Logo, which for many became a manifesto of the anti-corporate globalization movement. NAOMI KLEIN, NO LOGO (1st ed. 1999). In it, she attacks brand-oriented consumer culture and the operations of large corporations. In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein argued that many of the free market policies of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics were rushed to implementation while the countries were in shock from disasters, upheavals, or invasion. Many unpopular free market policies (for example, the privatization of the New Orleans Public Schools after Hurricane Katrina, and large parts of Iraq’s economy under the Coalition Provisional Authority) were implemented by taking advantage of the chaotic aftermath of major disasters, whether economic, political, military, or natural. The desire for a rapid and decisive response to catastrophes allows ideologues to implement policies that go far beyond the legitimate responses to the disaster, when the response will go un-scrutinized. The book suggests that the shocks themselves are sometimes intentionally encouraged or even manufactured. The New Yorker has called her “the most visible and influential figure on the American left—what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago.” Larissa Macfarquhar, Outside Agitator, THE NEW YORKER (Dec. 8, 2008). ** Darrell Blakeway is a former staff attorney at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). In 2006, he co-founded Perennial Energy Consulting, a firm dedicated to renewable energy and energy efficiency. He has previously authored an article for the Energy Law Journal on FERC regulations to foster interconnection of wind generators to the grid, Darrell Blakeway & Carol Brotman White, Tapping the Power of Wind: FERC Initiatives to Facilitate Transmission of Wind Power, 26 ENERGY L.J. 2, 393 (2005) and a book review of Energy Autonomy by Hermann Scheer, 29 ENERGY L.J. 1, 217 (2008). He is licensed to practice law in the District of Columbia. 1. A 2012 report on environmental degradation and climate change by a distinguished panel including James Hansen, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, and Gro Harlem Brundtland, former chairman of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, concludes: “In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.” GRO HARLEM BRUNDTLAND ET AL., ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGES: THE IMPERATIVE TO ACT 7 (2012).
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