And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.In 1712, a Englishman named Thomas Newcomen built a most unusual ‘engyn’ on the estates of Lord Dudley, a Staffordshire grandee. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. In fact, all around the world, the fight for the next economy and against reckless extraction is already succeeding in ways both surprising and inspiring.Ĭan we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. We have also been told that humanity is too greedy and selfish to rise to this challenge. We have been told it’s impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we know exactly how to do it-it just requires breaking every rule in the “free-market” playbook: reining in corporate power, rebuilding local economies, and reclaiming our democracies. We have been told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. Klein exposes the myths that are clouding the climate debate.
Yet we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system into something radically better. The most profound threat to humanity is the war our economic model is waging against life on earth. It’s not about carbon-it’s about capitalism. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.įorget everything you think you know about global warming. Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift-a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not-and cannot-fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care.
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