This Changes Everything

“Just Enough Time for Impossible” (Pages 449-458)

Klein recalls a speech at a science conference in San Diego in 2012 by Brad Werner, titled “Is Earth F**cked?” Werner, a complex-systems specialist, had run complex computer models to predict the fate of the planet. The computer model made it clear that global capitalism was making “Earth-human systems dangerous, and his own answer to the question posed in his paper was: ‘more or less’” (449). However, the one point of hope that came from it was what he referred to as the dynamic of resistance: the movement of people who adopt behaviors and values that don’t fit within the dominant cultural model. Klein includes environmental direct-action groups among these. He argued that history shows the power of resistance groups to reshape culture, and these resistance groups represent the likeliest source of friction with our current trajectory toward environmental disaster.

Klein believes it is social movements that will save us now. We’re on a path to self-destruction and “the only remaining variable is whether some countervailing power will emerge to block the road” (450-51). She sees resistance in Blockadia, already working at choke points to slow fossil fuel expansion and building positive alternative ways of living. For all the bleak things that are happening to the environment, Klein takes hope from the fact this movement is growing and getting better connected. We have a glimpse of what’s needed, but to stand a chance of making the scale of changes required to avoid climate disaster, the movement needs to grow in power, numbers, and scope. What’s needed is large-scale change, and the challenge is huge: getting companies to leave trillions of dollars worth of fossil fuel in the ground and rebalancing our global economies, all through peaceful democratic means.

Klein looks through history to find examples of where a social movement has achieved change on this scale before. Looking at the labor movement, the civil rights movements, feminism, the struggles against apartheid in South Africa, and against various forms of colonialism around the world, she concludes that social movements have accomplished great things, but winning rights has always been easier than changing the fundamental economic balance of things.

She cites the abolition of slavery as the closest comparison in that it required land owners to relinquish what they saw as vast resources of “capital,” which is to say, people. Klein is quick to point out the differences, too: The abolition movement was forced to fight for its cause through war and bloodshed, and even then, the enslavers were paid compensation while newly freed people were left impoverished. “A sharp end to fossil fuels offers no such consolation price” (457): “if climate justice carries the day, the economic costs to our elites will be real” (457).

“The Unfinished Business of Liberation” (Pages 458-465)

Past social movements did better on legal than economic fronts, and the issue of wealth inequality persists. Klein calls this the “unfinished business of liberation” and argues that the new movement that grows around climate change can pick up this fight, unifying and rallying all these social movements behind a “Marshall Plan for the Earth” (458) that could bring jobs, homes, security, clean energy, and a healthy environment to the world’s population. It would be based on the “idea that real equality means equal access to the basic services that create a dignified life” (458). In this respect, climate change does not need some new movement that will magically succeed where others failed; it can be, instead, the rallying point of an existing movement, like “a rushing river fed by countless streams” (459). What’s required would be inclusive social mobilization on a scale we have not seen across the whole social spectrum. It would blur the line between ordinary people and activists.

Klein finishes with a rallying call: “there is just enough time and we are swamped with green tech and green plans” (460). What we need is the movement to make use of these resources to make meaningful change. Our politicians have shown themselves unable to do this as they are wedded to core tenets of free-market ideology, the system that is worsening the crisis. Klein argues that we, too, are influenced by this system to be passive or defeatist spectators, to see ourselves “as singular gratification seeking units” (460), out for ourselves rather than brothers and sisters in a common struggle. Klein argues that the answer to this is to “rebuild and reinvent the very idea of the collective, the commons” which has been attacked and neglected for so long. We need nothing short of a change of worldviews, a “civilisation leap” (461). She points out that, historically, major change often comes in times of crisis and in quick bursts rather than slowly and incrementally.

How do you change a worldview? You start by choosing the right battles and raising the fundamental questions of what it is we value, who we are, and where we are headed. This goes beyond the narrow politics of pragmatism in which the debate is usually framed. It takes a visionary and forceful moral argument that asks what is right and wrong, not just what is profitable. Klein cites the language of the abolition movement as an example of this: “The climate movement has yet to find its full moral voice on the world stage, but it is most certainly clearing its throat” (464). Some of its strongest voices are coming from young people on the front lines of Blockadia.

“Suddenly, Everyone” (Pages 446-466)

Klein notes how when a moment of social uprising and rebellion occurs, it usually takes people by surprise. They often spring from a crisis that awakens public concern or anger on an unexpected scale. Our warming world and the likelihood of coming disasters that this world brings will provide many of these moments. The political and cultural context now is a lot more favorable for change than it was 20 years ago when the scale of the environmental crisis was just being realized. “Many of the barriers that paralysed a serious response to the crisis are today significantly eroded” (645) as the ideological hold of neoliberalism is weakening, along with faith in our political elite and the corporate groups they serve. Klein points, too, to the growth of the Blockadia movement and the way more people are connected through community and digitally through social media.

Klein believes “[a]nother crisis will see us in the streets and squares once again” (466). The open question is what we and progressive forces can make of these crises before it’s too late.