Jan 22

Jan 22 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate

Author: Naomi Klein
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems.

In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon our physical world. The status quo is no longer an option.

In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. 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. 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. 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.

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 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.

Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.

TL;DR Review

This Changes Everything is a hard-hitting book on climate change issues, full of real-world stories and examples. I sometimes lost the narrative thread, but I’m really glad I read it.

For you if: You want to learn how our economy is impeding progress on climate change.

Full Review

“In other words, changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.”

I’ve been meaning to read This Changes Everything for a while now, given that it’s one of the most famous nonfiction books on climate change out there. The book itself is as hard-hitting as you’d guess from the title and cover, and even though it was written in 2014 so some of the stats are out of date, unfortunately it’s pretty much just as relevant today.

The book, as you might guess from its subtitle “capitalism versus the climate,” focuses on how our current economic system and those who cling to it impede progress on climate change, and it makes the case for the fact that if we’re going to avoid disaster, we need to make radical changes. Even our most progressive leaders are still searching for a way we can have our cake (the earth) and eat it (fossil fuel profits) too, but it’s just not going to work.

This is chock full of real-world stories and examples, and I found that to be both good and bad. Good because it really did help me get a grasp of the issues and marvel at the denial humans are capable of (which I think, ultimately, is the point here, so that’s good and effective). My only complaint is that I felt like I lost the narrative thread of the book overall; if you asked me the theme of the chapter I was reading, I’d likely have forgotten it. Maybe a reread would help me out in this regard. Still, though, it was very very worth the read.

I’m really glad I read this, and I’m and looking forward to trying Naomi Klein’s other books as well. I do think I’m still looking for a good hand-holding intro to all the issues and players and actions of climate activism today, so I think I’m going to try her 2021 book for young readers, How to Change Everything.