Reviews
Everything in this book still is still tangibly and depressingly relevant. Klein writes with immediacy and power. Don't skip the later chapters about rooting and motivating activism in love and local knowledge
Couldn’t finish the book because it’s mostly an overly emotional preaching of the author’s political ideology, which gets boring very fast.
Exciting but not persuasive. It's an attempt to borrow the prestige and consensus of the Green movement to push through all the expensive social policies she wanted anyway. That sounds cynical, but she says as much right at the start of the book: I was propelled into a deeper engagement with [environmentalism] partly because I realized it could be a catalyst for forms of social and economic justice in which I already believed... liberals are still averting their eyes, having yet to grasp that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism since William Blake's 'dark Satanic Mills' Here's what I think the central argument is (she never comes out and says it): Climate change is an existential risk. Capitalism exacerbates climate change. Therefore change capitalism. But the subtitle's misleading; she constantly blurs the distinction between two theses: 1) 'solving the climate crisis will require regulation of the market', and 2) 'solving the climate crisis will require the abolition of capitalism' In most of this she doesn't endorse (2) at all - "there is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy" - and surprisingly she doesn't deny that communism was worse for the environment than the C20th Western system: ...the truth is that, while contemporary, hyper-globalized capitalism has exacerbated the climate crisis, it did not create it. We started treating the atmosphere as our waste dump when we began using coal on a commercial scale in the late 1700s and engaged in similarly reckless ecological practices well before that. Moreover, humans have behaved in this shortsighted way not only under capitalist systems, but under systems that called themselves socialist as well... If you read closely enough you see her actual target is not capitalism but 'extractivism', the (ancient!) tendency of people to exploit natural resources relentlessly. The cause of extractivism is fatuously said to be the philosophical divide between mind and body, whence also science and the industrial revolution. This causation is ascertained in one line, with a vague citation to unnamed feminist scholars having "recognised" (by which she means conclusively demonstrated) this at some point (pp.177). She's really good at generating urgency and panic: she calls anything that doesn't cut all 10 petagrams of emissions right away a "failure". And since it's a failure, therefore confront and block and yell. (Needless to say, activism can't make all the cuts in time either.) She has a chapter on each of the non-political solutions: so she is sequentially anti-nuclear, anti-GM, anti-geoengineering, anti-cap, anti-tax, anti-Branson, anti-'corporate reponsibility'. I suspect she's wrong about most of these. But she is most wrong on the matter of carbon pricing and Big Green. We need to stop subsidising fossil fuels (you can blame lobbying for those if you like, but this is still a massive government failure). And pricing is the best and least dangerous policy option. In their stead she promotes "planning and banning" (vast micromanagement of allowed resources and technologies), divestment (which we know has no long-term effect on public companies) and blockading machinery (which sorta works but at terrible human cost). She also wants North America to be more northern European, with cheap public transit and clean light rail accessible to all: affordable, energy-efficient housing along those transit lines; cities planned for high-density living; bike lanes in which riders aren’t asked to risk their lives to get to work; land management that discourages sprawl and encourages local, low-energy forms of agriculture; urban design that clusters essential services like schools and health care along transit routes and in pedestrian-friendly areas; programs that require manufacturers to be responsible for the electronic waste their produce... That's most evocative of the Netherlands. But their infrastructure was not born of mass politics, green or otherwise, but rather of high energy costs and low land per capita. Joseph Heath explains that this cost difference creates the demand for transit, bike lanes, and pedestrian-friendly cities, just like the electricity price creates the demand for efficient housing. This is what drives the style of planning that predominates in that country. You can do all the “planning” of urban development you want, but unless people actually want to live in the high-density houses you’re building, they will remain empty. The reason they are attractive to people in the Netherlands is that the alternatives are unattractive, largely because of the cost. Given the impact that prices have on behaviour throughout the economy, it is clear that the ability to control prices is by far the most powerful policy lever that the state has in its possession. Thus the natural upshot of a wish-list like the one Klein presents is that the state should start to price the carbon externality generated through fossil-fuel consumption, through either a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax. And yet this is not what Klein recommends. Anyway the market is decarbonising. I would say that we have the benefit of the three years of progress since she wrote this, but the (capitalist) trend was clear back then too: 17% renewables growth per year. Electric cars are now cheaper to run than fossil ones and the price curve is tending quickly and strongly down. New-build solar power is now cheaper per megawatt than oil, and the associated storage cells for night are becoming cheaper even faster. These are both market developments (boosted by subsidies but more and more self-sustaining). She has a long section on how having a child was the cause of her environmentalism - but she fails to reconcile this with the fact that having a child in the developed world is the single most significant environmental footprint for an individual; it would take an extraordinary amount of work to just zero out this harm. As economics this is shaky, and as politics unlikely, but she remains a good journalist. Where by journalist I mean 'person who works at the “These terrible unknown things are happening; here is what the people involved say. What might it mean?” level'. She also writes at the "Here is the big picture and what to do about it" level though, and honestly I recommend just walking right by those bits (pages 1 through 300). Minus a point because it falsely maligns effective and politically available environment policies, and so has done expected harm. Read Mackay and OWiD instead.
