Book Review: This Changes Everything, Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi Klein.
This is a comprehensive and timely book.
Klein says in part one, “If there has ever been a moment to advance a plan to heal the planet that also heals our broken economies and our shattered communities, this is it.”
In the introduction she says “this is the hardest book I have ever written because climate change puts us on such a tight and unforgiving deadline.”
This book is about our “climate moment” with all its challenges and opportunities.
First, Klein says we have to stop looking away.
We deny because we fear letting in the full reality of a crisis that changes everything.
The need to change everything is not something we readily accept.
If we are to curb emissions in the next decade we need a massive mobilisation larger than any in history.
She quotes the Bolivian Navarro Llamos who suggests it is time for a “Marshall Plan for Earth”.
The question is posed: What is wrong with us?
What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that’s threatening to burn down our collective house?
The global economy always takes centre stage. Market fundamentalsim has systematically sabotaged our collective responses.
Our economic system and our planetary systems are at war.
We are faced with a stark choice: “either we allow climate change to disrupt everything about our world or we change pretty much everything about our world to avoid that fate”.
We need a radical rethink for these changes to be remotely possible.
Our “climate moment” is accompanied by what she calls a “fossil fuel frenzy”.
A wild dig is going on in most nations on the planet. Aotearoa/NZ being no exception. Continue reading
- Fr Peter Healy is a Marist priest who lives and works in Ōtaki.