This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein (review)

Political ecology analysis of the “out of control juggernaut” of globalization as a changeable political position is almost unintelligible outside academia (for example, Peter Newell, Globalization and the Environment, 2012). The international economic organizations (such as the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank) that govern trade, production, and finance are critical to the possibilities of effective environmental governance, but they are not typically thought of as environmental regimes—and yet, these organizations have substantive environmental profiles in terms of the authority they exercise over resource access, use, and environmental impact. Reified categories that separate the global from the national or the political from the economic interfere with effective environmental analysis. Until reified categories are challenged and what counts as “environmental” is broadened, political solutions can be framed only within a business-as-usual approach that is headed in an unsustainable direction (Newell). Once claims to political impotency are demystified, the discourse that absolves governments from blame for the consequences of reckless investment and irresponsible speculation can be challenged, and the globalization dynamics can no longer be used as an excuse for the lack of a project for political reform (Newell). Political ecology scholars seek to identify indicators of real political activity that do not overstate their potential for political reform, and indicators of real ecological disruption that do not understate the potential for ecological collapse. Once the indicators are identified, one can easily appreciate the desire for inspiring political reform by making causal inferences, but the co-evolution of globalization in our biosphere represents a singular case study that constitutes an inadequate basis for generalizing about the process.

Agendas for reform are just as subject to the distorting influences of deterministic assumptions as are the reified categories associated with major institutions or nations. The scholarly challenge is to deconstruct reified categorizations that block political reform without socially constructing a political agenda that generates “big conclusions from small samples” lest our methodological needs generate the theory, rather than vice versa (Stanley Lieberson, Small N’s and Big Conclusions, 1991). Unfortunately, the very process that makes a study more academically sound (for instance, contextualization, qualification, measurement error, interaction effects, and multicausality) often renders it unintelligible to a broader audience. This itself becomes problematic if the proposed political solution involves popular democratic reform.

Overcoming these identification challenges with an accessible writing style that investigates complicated interconnections in a meaningful way contributes to our understanding of a political ecology approach to macroeconomics. In This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, Naomi Klein uses a story-based inquiry method of investigative journalism to delve deeply into the relationship between capitalism and climate change. She believes that the global community is entering a new historic moment, dubbed “decade zero,” of widespread public recognition that we are in a crisis of our own making that threatens our existence, the outcome of which will change everything (p. 452). She deconstructs the underlying politics of business-as-usual decision-making behavior, demystifies belief in technological fixes and messianic saviors, challenges reckless behavior and political irresponsibility, and calls for a just transition to a responsible future.

Klein begins with a political analysis of factors that support unregulated capitalism, documenting political decisions in which “trade has repeatedly been allowed to trump climate, but under no circumstances would climate be permitted to trump trade” (p. 78). The first section unmasks hyper-extractivism as a political strategy sabotaging a collective response to climate change just when it is most needed (p. 130). Inadequate oversight and regulation of natural gas fracking is linked to fossil fuel industry lobbying efforts and changeable political regulatory decisions (p. 145). Political delay only radicalizes the economic changes that must be made if adaptation to environmental changes are to have any hope of success, so starving the public sphere at the very moment when it is needed most is argued to be a politically untenable position (p. 106).

The second section...