With strong first-hand reporting and an original, provocative thesis, Klein returns with a must-read on how the climate crisis must spur transformational political change.
We seem to have given up on any serious effort to prevent catastrophic climate change. Despite mounting scientific evidence, denialism is surging in many wealthy countries, and extreme fossil-fuel extraction gathers pace. Exposing the work of ideologues on the right who know the challenge this poses to the free market all too well, Klein also challenges the failing strategies of environmental groups. She argues that the deep changes required should not be viewed as punishments to fear, but as a kind of gift. It's time to stop running from the full implications of the crisis and begin to embrace them.
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Introduction: One Way or Another, Everything Changes
Part One: Bad Timing
1. The Right Is Right: The Revolutionary Power of Climate Change
2. Hot Money: How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat the Planet
3. Public and Paid For: Overcoming the Ideological Blocks to the Next Economy
4. Planning and Banning: Slapping the Invisible Hand, Building a Movement
5. Beyond Extractivism: Confronting the Climate Denier Within
Part Two: Magical Thinking
6. Fruits, Not Roots: The Disastrous Merger of Big Business and Big Green
7. No Messiahs: The Green Billionaires Won't Save Us
8. Dimming the Sun: The Solution to Pollution Is... Pollution?
Part Three: Starting Anyway
9. Blockadia: The New Climate Warriors
10. Love Will Save This Place: Democracy, Divestment, and the Wins So Far
11. You and What Army? Indigenous Rights and the Power of Keeping Our Word
12. Sharing the Sky: The Atmospheric Commons and the Power of Paying Our Debts
13. The Right to Regenerate: Moving from Extraction to Renewal
Conclusion: The Leap Years: Just Enough Time for Impossible
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of the #1 international bestsellers The Shock Doctrine and No Logo. She is a member of the board of directors for 350.org, a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute, and a former Miliband Fellow at the LSE. She holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of King's College, Nova Scotia.
"A book of such ambition and consequence it is almost unreviewable [...] The most momentous and contentious environmental book since Silent Spring"
– Rob Nixon, The New York Times
"book that changes our understanding of the world"
– Libby Blanchard, Huffington Post
"Naomi is like a great doctor – she can diagnose problems nobody else sees"
– Alfonso Cuarón
"Damn right, this changes everything [...] one of the greatest nonfiction works of all time [...] not just a book. It is a path of survival"
– D. R. Tucker, Washington Monthly
"If the largest environmental organization in the world can't figure out how to stop pumping oil and gas, how are they going to help the rest of us figure it out?"
– The New York Times
"Naomi Klein's analysis of climate change is a full-blooded offensive against free-market fundamentalism and elite money-players, but key questions are left unanswered. Political arguments are not won by nuanced scientific claims, nor by clever point-scoring devices: they are won by telling stories – human stories – that resonate powerfully and persuasively with their audience. [...] Following Klein's earlier books No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, it will be no surprise that her climate change story is a full-blooded offensive against capitalism, the ideology of free-market fundamentalism and the elite money-players who breathe life into it. [...] The book is powerfully and uncompromisingly written, the impassioned polemic we have come to expect from Klein, mixing first-hand accounts of events around the world and withering political analysis. If this narrative appeals to you, then you must read This Changes Everything today. [...] But what if this narrative does not accord with how you see the world? [...] Well, you too should read the book and discover whether this story of climate change resonates, whether it is persuasive. But there are many people for whom it will not. [...] So the problem for Klein remains twofold. What is it that causes someone's worldview to change, and, for those who share her worldview, from where is the new moral energy for action to be drawn? A clear answer to either of these questions is lacking in the book.
– Mike Hulme, New Scientist, 23 September 2014