'Cowspiracy" or capitalism: what's causing the climate crisis?

Cowspiracy shines a light on the carbon emissions of the animal agriculture industry, but its beam is so narrow that it leaves the rest of agriculture and the economy hidden from view, and elevates dietary choice to political strategy.

Like many people, Kip Anderson watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and was frustrated by the limited lifestyle choices to stop climate change—like bike riding more often or using less water. He then found out that animal agriculture is responsible for significant emissions and is backed by major powers but is not the focus of many environmental NGOs. He then made a choice.

He could have made a film connecting animal agriculture to the rest of the oil economy, exposing the massive corporations who dominate the food supply and who have warped our relationships with animals. He could have called for vegans and non-vegans to unite, supporting front-line communities who bear the brunt of climate change, and integrating vegan concerns into a movement for system change and real control over food production and distribution.

But instead he chose to make a film that counterposes animal agriculture to the rest of the oil-dependent economy, dismisses the challenge to tar sands and fracking and the need for climate jobs, blames cows and those who consume animal products, shames environmental NGOs instead of agribusinesses, ignores traditional knowledge about how to live sustainably with animals, and calls non-vegan environmentalists hypocrites—while preaching veganism as the panacea for everything from climate change to world hunger.

The result: protesters inspired by his film denounced the recent People’s Climate March in Edmonton: “The organizers only wanted to focus on oil and gas, the safe climate topics and not ‘switch focus’ to address personal behaviors that can actually make difference.” There would not be a People’s Climate March and a climate justice movement were it not for Indigenous communities who have challenged tar sands and fracking, while defending their rights including hunting, fishing and trapping. It’s ridiculous to dismiss as “safe topics” the challenge to these powerful industries, and to blame diets that communities have followed sustainably for millenia. How do we place industrialized animal agriculture in its proper context so that the concerns of vegans can integrate with the climate justice movement?

Cowspiracy or cowpitalism?

Cowspiracy raises the important point that the climate crisis is not only driven by oil and gas companies but is also connected to our food system. But instead of challenging the corporations who control food production and distribution, it places all the blame on “animal agriculture.” Using decontextualized statistics and graphics, it implies that cows are inherently destructive creatures who waste water while producing the methane that is driving the climate crisis—instead of exposing how capitalism has separated cows from communities, concentrated them in factories and turned them into methane machines.

Kip Anderson claims that “the words sustainable and animal agriculture just is an oxymoron. They can't go together.” But as India’s leading environmentalist (and vegetarian) Vandana Shiva explains, “Factory farming of livestock is definitely a very important contributor of greenhouse gases, especially methane. But normal livestock—grass fed—are important for a sustainable solution. The problem with many of these studies has been that they take the most industrial practice, for example factory farming for meat…and extrapolate it to the world. As if the whole world treats its livestock in the torturous way that factory farming does.”

As she explains in Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, “Ecologically, the cow has been central to Indian civilization…By using crop wastes and uncultivated land, indigenous cattle do not compete with humans for food; rather, they provide organic fertilizer for fields and thus enhance food productivity…Indian cattle provide more food than they consume, in contrast to those of the US cattle industry, in which cattle consume six times more food than they provide.”

Instead of challenging the corporatization of agriculture, Cowspiracy blames cows—reinforcing the industry’s view of animals as abstract production units disconnected from communities. As Vandana Shiva explains, “Livestock are absolutely key. The tragedy is on the one hand we’ve got those who would put animals into factory farms—and that is the source of methane emissions, not free-grazing livestock…And there’s the problem that those who think they love animals push for a situation where there will be no animals. So we need to avoid both these extremes that are anti-animal by denying an effective role for the animal, and an effective role of a farmer. And I think it comes from the paradigm that assumes that both humans and animals can only have a predatory relationship with nature. No, we can have a harmonious relationship with nature.”

Capitalism, sustainability and choice

Our harmonious relationship with nature was not disrupted by consuming animals (which communities have done sustainably for millenia) but by a relatively recent system of production that has separated us from nature and turned animal and plant worlds—and humans themselves—into sources of profit. Not only does Cowspiracy fail to differentiate between traditional and corporatized uses of animals, it also ignores carbon emissions from capitalist agriculture in general. Our food system is not unsustainable because it includes animals, it is unsustainable because of capitalism—which is based on colonizing Indigenous territories, driving peasants off the land, exploiting workers for profit and reducing animals and plants to units of production.

In doing so, capitalism in Europe by the 19^th century created a metabolic rift between humans and nature and eroded soil fertility, sparking a search for artificial fertilizers. As Karl Marx described, “Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres…It disturbs the metabolic interaction between [humans] and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by [humans] in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the fertility of the soil… All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.”

As capitalism has developed it has become concentrated and centralized into massive corporations that dominate every industry—making our entire economy, including the plants and animals we eat, dependent on oil. As Vandana Shiva explains in Soil Not Oil, “Industrialized, globalized agriculture is a recipe for eating oil. Oil is used for the chemical fertilizers that go to pollute the soil and water. Oil is used to displace small farmers with giant tractors and combine harvesters. Oil is used to industrially process food. Oil is used for the plastic in packaging. And finally, more and more oil is used to transport food farther and farther away from where it is produced. Fossil fuels are the heart of industrial agriculture.”

Cowspiracy is right to highlight the massive subsidies and powerful interests that sustain the beef industry and create artificial supply and demand, but this applies to all industries—including the massive agribusinesses that have reduced our diets to corn, soy and wheat monocrops, sustained by massive emissions in fertilizers, machinery, storage and transportation. Calling for dietary “choice” between capitalist plant products over capitalist animal products does nothing to challenge the system that is driving climate change and constraining choices. Any limited choice some of us might have in consumption—a choice determined by the inequitable distribution of resources and income—does not challenge the system of production.

Consumerism vs climate justice

For decades the environmental movement has taken this system for granted. By depoliticizing the environment, NGOs have traditionally focused on reforming single issues by lobbying governments and calling for limited consumer choice over the products capitalism has produced—rather than challenging the profit-driven system of production and inequitable distribution. Even worse, some environmental groups have scapegoated Indigenous communities for continuing their cultural practices. As Francis Frank, co-chair of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, said in response to protests against Indigenous whaling on the west coast in the late 1990s, “The protests that are being engineered are just another form of eco-colonialism…They are arguing for the continued oppression of our people.”

The climate justice movement has risen in recent years by going beyond the old politics of individual consumerism, towards mass movements based on anti-colonial and anti-capitalist politics. It’s exciting that environmental NGOs are joining with Indigenous and labour groups to fight for the system change necessary to stop climate change. Environmental NGOs still have structural limitations and don’t address all the issues, like the fact that the US military is the largest oil consumer on the planet (a fact ignored by Cowspiracy). But the response of anti-war groups hasn’t been to suggest a conspiracy between NGOs and the military, but rather to integrate their concerns with the climate justice movement—like the “No war, no warming” contingent at the 100% possible demonstration in Ottawa.

Instead Cowspiracy names and shames a dozen NGOs without naming any agribusinesses, dismisses demands for climate jobs and ignores Indigenous communities while claiming that those who eat meat are hypocrites. The filmmaker even presents himself as the persecuted climate hero, without interviewing or even mentioning Indigenous and front-line communities who bear the brunt of the climate crisis and of state repression.

The documentary also claims that a vegan diet will end world hunger, without addressing inequalities in food production and distribution. That seems to be the point, as Kip Anderson explained in an interview: “The solution is really simple…It doesn't even take necessarily widespread transformation with the legal system and our politics. It's basically just switching our diet.” This results in just another limited consumer choice, sold as “change.” This isn’t surprising, coming from a self-described “serial entrepreneur” pushing his DVDs and t-shirt, and a few celebrities who want to appeal to environmentalists, but it shouldn’t be a guide for the movement.

Solidarity and system change

As climate organizer (and vegan) Cam Fenton wrote, “we need system change to stop climate change, and our personal dietary choices are not system change. Changing lightbulbs and taking shorter showers wasn’t a really effective strategy for the climate and that’s what switching out steak for tofu seems to be to me. Not only won’t it do a whole lot to solve the climate crisis, it actually doesn’t even get at the heart of what you’re purporting to be pushing — reducing emissions from agriculture. If the goal is really to deal with the emissions from agriculture, and these emissions are a big problem, it’s time to stop telling people not to eat meat and start figuring out how you’re going to stand with peasant farmers who are being forced by the Monsantos of the world to abandon their traditional methods of agriculture for massive mono-crop operations. It’s time to support communities that are standing up to stop cattle barons who want to clear massive tracts of land — like the rainforest in South America—to expand their operations. These things, might help to tip the scales and bring down emissions from agriculture in a way that more vegans just won’t, and they might win you some allies along the way.”

These alliances are growing. A couple of years ago Heiltsuk community organizer Jess Housty wrote an article on eight ways settlers can support Idle No More, including attending rallies and challenging racism. These “personal behaviors” that can actually make a difference, rather than simply switching diets. Earlier this year the Heiltsuk Nation and its allies stopped the Department of Fisheries and Oceans from over-fishing herring stocks on the west coast. The strategy was not to claim that fishing is inherently unsustainable and to demand the community end their traditional fish diet, but to support the Heilstuk Nation that was defending the herring stock and its fishing rights. As Chief Marylin Slett explained, “We're not trying to stop people from making a living. But we need to manage things in a way so we'll have a resource that will sustain everyone into the future...There are strong-willed people in the community that will do everything within their power to protect the herring stocks.”

There is also growing vegan solidarity with Indigenous communities defending their territories: “On the fire at the blockade vegan meals for the Wildlife Defence League cook next to traditional foods for the Klabona Keepers. There is a mutual understanding and respect between the two groups as they work together to stop the over hunting of the Tahltan’s sacred lands...They recognize that it is not their right to tell indigenous people who have welcomed them onto their territory how to live. They realize that the Klabona Keepers have saved more wildlife in their resistance of industrial projects than any person could by changing their diet...Vegans can begin to decolonize our work and fight for the liberation of all, whether it be from the confines of a slaughterhouse or the confines of a colonial state.”

It’s examples like these, rather than Cowspiracy, that show how vegan concerns can be incorporated into the climate justice movement, so that we can challenge the corporations and states responsible for the climate crisis, and win collective system change rather than fight over individual diet change.

Photo essay: 25,000 march for climate justice in Ottawa

November 29 was a sglobal day of climate action, with hundreds of thousands of people taking part in thousands of actions across the world. In Ottawa 25,000 people from across Canada and Quebec came together on unceded Algonquin territory to say--and to spell in massive numbers--that climate solutions and climate justice is 100% possible.

Last month people voted for change at the ballot box, and they are continuing to vote with their feet. Trudeau was elected on the slogan of "real change," and the climate justice movement wants to make that rhetoric a reality. As people chanted, "real change not climate change."

This means stopping Canada's fastest growing source of carbon emissions, the tar sands. Following the climate welcome sit-in outside Trudeau's residence at the start of the month, yesterday's demonstration continued to remind the new Prime Minister of the need to freeze tar sands development.

While governments have given billions to the banks and corporations responsible for the economic crisis, and billions more to the oil and gas companies responsible for the climate crisis, there's a growing demand for the climate jobs that can address both crises. As one of the signs said, "If the climate were a bank, it would already be saved."

World leaders are meeting in Paris claiming to work on climate action, while at the same time launching wars that destroy the climate--and denying refugees fleeing wars and climate chaos. Carrying the banner "No war, no warming, the anti-war contingent chanted, "Stop the war on the atmosphere, refugees are welcome here," and "war and Islamophobia go hand in hand, they sabotage climate action plans."

Climate action is possible, and it means respecting Indigenous sovereignty and welcoming refugees, stopping wars and investing in climate jobs: a system change to stop climate change.  

From the 25,000 who marched in Quebec City in April, to the 10,000 who marched in Toronto in July and now the 25,000 who marched in Ottawa yesterday, we can see the growing alliance of Indigenous, environmental and labour groups who are making climate justice 100% possible.

The climate jobs leap

Coinciding with the Leap Manifesto, a global conference on climate jobs shows how the labour movement around the world can help fight climate change and inequality.

The Leap Manifesto includes a clear call for climate jobs: “A leap to a non-polluting economy creates countless openings for similar multiple ‘wins.’ We want a universal program to build energy efficient homes, and retrofit existing housing, ensuring that the lowest income communities and neighbourhoods will benefit first and receive job training and opportunities that reduce poverty over the long term. We want training and other resources for workers in carbon-intensive jobs, ensuring they are fully able to take part in the clean energy economy. This transition should involve the democratic participation of workers themselves. High-speed rail powered by just renewables and affordable public transit can unite every community in this country – in place of more cars, pipelines and exploding trains that endanger and divide us.”

Coinciding with the Leap Manifesto, trade union activists gathered in Paris for a global union climate conference—including speakers from Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. This gathering also produced a new report, Global Climate Jobs, and British climate activist Jonathan Neale summarizes the scale and urgency: “We have to stop climate change, and we have to do it quickly. To do it, we will need 120 million new jobs globally for at least twenty years…It is not realistic to wait for the market to ‘create’ those jobs. The scale of what needs doing is too big, and we need action quickly. Instead, we will need massive government programs in each country.” After reviewing the scale of global emission reductions required, and the political challenge of confronting extractivist industries and government austerity, the report gives a glimpse of climate jobs campaigns from around the world.

Global Climate Jobs

Writing from Canada, Tony Clarke describes the emergence of the Green Economy Network and their campaigns on renewable energy, green buildings and public transit. As he explains, “Today we urgently need ‘system change’ not ‘climate change.’ As a society, we can no longer afford an economic model that treats the natural environment and human beings as disposable goods. Instead we must start to collectively build a new economy, one based on much more sustainable modes of production and consumption while transforming the economic and social inequalities that plague and overburden society…These climate jobs provide more secure forms of employment that would ensure greater social equity for marginalized peoples such as the unemployed and working poor, including Indigenous peoples and people of colour.”

Activists in South Africa have collected 100,000 signatures for their One Million Climate Jobs Campaign to address both the climate crisis and the high levels of unemployment and inequality. As Sandra van Neikerk explains, “By placing the interests of workers and the poor at the forefront of strategies to combat climate change, we can simultaneously halt climate change and address our job bloodbath.”

In South Africa the climate jobs campaign is taking on the mining corporations, whereas in Norway the campaign is challenging the government’s greenwashing of oil and gas. Through a campaign of trade unions, environmental organizations and the Norwegian Church, there’s a growing movement demanding 50,000 jobs in offshore wind.

New York experienced the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, the inspiration of the People’s Climate March, and has the challenge of reducing energy demand from the million buildings that form the city’s iconic skyline. There have also been lessons from recent campaigns, as J Mijin Cha, Josh Kellerman and Lara Skinner explain: “The grassroots environmental movement forced NY State Governor Cuomo to ban fracking in 2014. The Governor was reluctant to ban fracking because many communities in upstate NY are economically depressed with high rates of unemployment and poverty, and the gas industry argued fracking would produce thousands of new jobs. Once Governor Cuomo banned fracking, it became more important politically for social movements in NY to present a viable, alternative jobs plan, one based on creating good union jobs, tackling the climate crisis, and strengthening NY communities.”

Writing from Britain, Tabitha Spence explains the growth of the Campaign Against Climate Change, and its trade union group, to make the most of Britain’s bad weather: “Britain has the advantage of famously bad weather, which means enormous wind resources, especially offshore in the North Sea. It would take about 400,000 jobs to set up onshore and offshore wind turbine systems, and wave and tidal power, all connected to a national and international grid.”

Change the politics, not the climate

She also explains the growing network supporting climate jobs, including political support: “We started with unions. While we continue gaining even broader support of unions and union members, today we are also working to gain the support of environmental groups, NGOs, and direct action groups. We have the support of the Green Party, and are building support in Labour, the largest opposition party.”

This goal recently received a boost from Labour’s new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who supports the call for climate jobs—which makes it all the more frustrating that no major political party in Canada will do the same. Author and NDP candidate Linda McQuaig early on in the federal election campaign echoed the climate science that “a lot of the oil sands oil may have to stay in the ground if we’re going to meet our climate change targets.” Conservatives and media commentators attacked her for ignoring workers, when climate jobs provide far more and far better work than the oil and gas industry.

The refusal of the federal election to discuss climate job alternatives reflects governments around the world sleepwalking into the climate crisis. As the Global Climate Jobs report notes,  “Unlike the build-up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009, there is a much broader understanding across the world that world leaders will not deliver in Paris this year…But the early success of the campaigns reported on in this booklet, also demonstrates the popularity and power of the idea of climate jobs.”

It’s clear that climate justice can’t fit in the Parliamentary ballot box, and movements will need to challenge whoever is elected next month to respect Indigenous rights, reduce emissions and support climate job alternatives. But there’s still time to demand the parties reflect the climate justice movement, and support candidates who do.

Sign the Leap Manifesto and the Greenpeace petition: change the politics, not the climate

Join the September 29 keynote panel Linda McQuaig is right: keep the tar sands in the ground

  

Linda McQuaig is right: leave the oil in the soil

“Oil has become the elephant in the room,” Linda McQuaig wrote in It’s the Crude, Dude: Greed, Gas, War and the American Way. Turns out it’s the Canadian way as well. As Toronto Centre NDP candidate, McQuaig stated a simple fact on CBC’s Power and Politics: “a lot of people recognize that a lot of the oilsands oil may have to stay in the ground if we’re going to meet our climate change targets.”

As punishment for speaking the truth, McQuaig is now the target of corporate power. Calgary Conservative MP Michelle Rempel immediately jumped on the remark, accusing McQuaig of having an “ideological aversion” to tar sands and opposing workers in the energy sector. Alberta Opposition Leader Brian Jean labeled McQuaig’s remarks “anti-Alberta posturing” and called on Premier Rachel Notley to “actively repudiate this crazy idea in the strongest terms possible.” Presiding over his second recession, Harper warned that it’s the NDP who would “wreck this economy.” The corporate media are calling McQuaig’s remarks a “flap” that the NDP need to exert “damage control” to repair. God forbid a journalist and candidate raise in the mildest terms a basic scientific fact concerning the most pressing issue of our generation, in the hopes that an election could affect change.

Ideology vs science

McQuaig wrote It’s the Crude, Dude in the wake of the Iraq War, to bring awareness to the dangers of climate change and the way the oil industry influences politics. Quoting a 2003 report from the Pentagon—hardly a bastion of left-wing ideology—she wrote: “There’s been a tendency to regard global warming as a problem that will set in gradually, giving the world a chance to adapt and even possibly take advantage of what could be longer growing seasons. ‘This view of climate change may be a dangerous act of self-deception, as increasingly we are [already] facing weather-related disasters,’ the report states. ‘Rather than decades or even centuries of gradual warming, recent evidence suggests the possibility that a more dire climate scenario may actually be unfolding.’”

A decade later, Harper finally has the Iraq War he always wanted and climate change is even more of a clear and present danger—from wildfires on the west coast to record temperatures in the Middle East. But the corporate-backed Conservatives and Liberals have an ideological aversion to science, which calls for limiting climate change to 2 degrees to avoid catastrophic change. “Nearly all politicians across the world would like to develop all domestic sources of oil and gas and coal that they have and also search for new resources. What this analysis shows is that those two positions are inconsistent. Every country can’t exploit all of their domestic reserves and keep to two degrees,” explained Christophe McGlade of the University College London. His report in the journal Nature this year showed that 85% of tar sands have to be left in the ground.

“This would seem, by any meaningful standard, to be a problem worthy of serious attention at the very highest levels. But, oddly, it’s a problem that is largely unacknowledged in official quarters,” McQuaig wrote a decade ago about US politicians refusing to face reality about oil politics, and fabricating terror threats to distract from the climate crisis: “Our wanton over-consumption of oil might be about to create a whole new kind of terror in our lives. Yet the Bush administration, which had consistently ignored and downplayed the threat of climate change and done its best to sabotage the international Kyoto accord aimed at dealing with the problem, was not about to change horses in its ‘war on terror.’ Its defense strategy would remain fixated on shadowy men in long-flowing robes, not on ones wearing business suits and bearing large checks made out to the Republican Party.” Harper is continuing the Bush legacy—stoking Islamophobia to justify wars abroad and attacks on civil liberties at home, while fueling the climate crisis.

Anti-Alberta?

It is not “anti-Alberta” to question the tar sands; the tar sands themselves are anti-Alberta, undermining the traditional territories and the communities in what is called Alberta. As McQuaig wrote a decade ago, “Getting the oil out of the tar is a horrendous task; it involves a massive, high-tech operation that causes serious environmental damage…By any logic, then, most of that tar sands oil should be left in the ground.”

Harper has tried to undermine this logic by making people in Alberta so dependent on the tar sands that they put the profits of Big Oil ahead of their own lives. When the price of oil fell, the only solution the Conservatives offered was to slash public services to balance the budget, but Notley’s election was a rejection of this blackmail. The Conservatives are trying to undo the provincial election and win the federal election—attacking Notley at the start of the campaign and now demanding she attack McQuaig.

But what we need to actively repudiate in the strongest possible terms is not a debate on the tar sands but the tar sands themselves. As Melina Laboucan-Massimo from the Lubicon Cree First Nation said at the March for Jobs, Justice and the Climate: “What I have seen is immense changes to the land, to the air, to the climate, to the water, to the people, and to the animals. Where I come from, until my generation my family was able to live sustainably off the land. And it becomes harder and harder to do that. People and animals are sick and dying. And now across the tar sands we are surrounded by operations across Northern Alberta. We have also seen immense oil spills like the one that happened near my family, just a few miles away. It was one of the biggest oil spills in Alberta’s history in 2011… What we need now today, is Canada needs to accelerate the transition from destructive climate polluting sources like the tar sands and build a green, just economy that many of our communities so desperately want and need now…Even in the heart of the tar sands we can build a different kind of economy, with clean energy and green jobs, without compromising our families and our communities.”

Jobs, justice and the climate

Harper has been silent while the economic crisis destroyed 400,000 manufacturing jobs, and stood by while the drop in oil prices led to thousands of further layoffs in the oil industry. But now the Conservatives are attacking McQuaig and the NDP for being anti-worker.

What the climate justice movement has made clear is that the choice between the environment and jobs is “fear-mongering at its worst,” in the words of Jerry Dias, president of Unifor. As the union representing thousands of workers in the oil and gas industry, Unifor is a signatory of the Solidarity Accord against the Northern Gateway pipeline and was a major participant in the recent March for Jobs, Justice and the Climate.

As the report by Blue-Green Canada makes clear, the $1.3 billion in subsidies to the oil and gas industry could instead create 18,000 more jobs in renewable energy and energy efficiency. From the UK to South Africa, there are campaigns for a million climate jobs, to solve the economic and climate crises, and now these demands have spread to Canada. For $4.65 billion (less than half what Harper recently gave to the military), we could create 92,000 jobs in wind, solar, geothermal and tidal power. For $25 billion (less than half what Harper gave in corporate tax cuts) we could create a high-speed rail network could create 100,000 jobs and reduce our dependence on oil. And $1 billion on a home and building retrofit program (the amount Harper spent attacking civil liberties at the G20 protest) could leverage $50 billion to create a million jobs that would reduce carbon emissions.

Damage control

In order to control the damage done to the planet and its people we need to leave the oil in the soil, respect First Nations and create a million climate jobs. Unfortunately climate justice was largely absent from the first leaders debate, which instead displayed unanimity on tar sands expansion—with only minor differences on which pipelines should transport it, or where it should be refined. Both the Green Party and the NDP have advocated more domestic refining, while Mulcair supports west-east pipelines and calls for “objective reviews”—as if the increasingly dire climate science and the lived experience of Indigenous communities is not objective.

As the upcoming Toxic Tour in Aamjiwnaang First Nation makes clear, domestic refining and alternate pipelines are no solution: “In Aamjiwnaang everything is polluted air, soil, water, and people. Some of the land Industry has now made their empire on is stolen land or ongoing projects that have little to no consent. This is a prime land for industry because it is used to refine and export. The colonial fight against industry has left indigenous communities like Aamjiwnaang in a constant daily struggle.” This daily struggle by Indigenous communities most affected by the climate crisis is leading a rising climate justice movement: 25,000 marched in Quebec City in April to Act on Climate and 10,000 marched in Toronto last month for Jobs, Justice and the Climate.

The climate justice movement deserves a voice this election, but the corporate parties and the corporate press are calling on the NDP to repudiate the slightest comment that echoes these movements. The same development happened in the BC provincial election, where NDP comments against the Kinder-Morgan pipeline were said to be the cause of their defeat. But after the election, opposition to Kinder Morgan exploded—showing the NDP’s electoral loss was not because of its timid opposition but because they didn’t go far enough in outlining bold alternatives. If the NDP leadership see statements against tar sands as more damaging than the tar sands themselves, they will sever themselves from the climate justice movement and provide no alternative at the ballot box. Instead they should defend McQuaig for helping spark a real debate this election, spend the next two months repudiating in the strongest terms the Conservatives’ and Liberals’ ideologically-driven wrecking of the climate, and be a megaphone for the climate justice movement that is trying to control the damage and promote alternatives.

This Changes Everything, including Naomi Klein

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate is a must-read guide to the climate justice movement. It summarizes the science of climate change, the extractivist industries driving it, the system to which they are connected, and the growing resistance. Through her dynamic style, Naomi Klein describes the changes in the climate, the changes in the movement, and inspires us to change ourselves as well—just as her own politics have changed.

Climate change

This Changes Everything warns of the severe consequences of climate change, the industries (like tar sands, fracking, and mountain top removal) that are pushing us to the precipice, and the racism and profiteering that accompany it. Klein shows that the proposed capitalist solutions—from industries like nuclear power, market schemes like carbon offsets, technology like geoengineering, or faith in the 1%—only compound the problem. As she explains, “The idea that capitalism and only capitalism can save the world from a crisis created by capitalism is no longer an abstract theory; it’s a hypothesis that has been tested and retested in the real world. We are now able to set theory aside and take a hard look at the results.”

Faced with a capitalist climate change, she debunks simplistic solutions—whether it’s calling for individual lifestyle changes while ignoring the socioeconomic conditions that constrain choice, claiming there aren’t enough resources while billions have gone to corporate bailouts, or blaming China and India while ignoring Western corporations profiting from the exploitation of their workers. This is not only a critique of the system that produces climate change but of the record of the mainstream environmental movement in challenging it. Klein outlines the coopting of the earlier environmental movement, “what had been a rabble of hippies became a movement of lawyers, lobbyists, and UN summit hoppers” who presented climate change “as a narrow technical problem with no end of profitable solutions within the market system.”

The failure of mainstream environmentalism has eliminated gradual and incremental options: “We are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.” This Changes Everything is an urgent call for mass action, connecting the increasing climate disasters to the radical transformation needed to stop them. As Klein explains in her poetic style, climate change is “a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message—spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions—telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet.”

Movement change

This Changes Everything profiles the rising climate justice movements, introducing readers to campaigns and activists around the world, and showing concrete and inspiring examples of how people are organizing. “All of this has changed so rapidly as I have been writing that I had had to race to keep up. Yes, ice sheets are melting faster than the models projected, but resistance is beginning to boil.”

Klein profiles the indigenous communities leading the climate justice movement, from the Ogoni people in Nigeria to the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation at ground zero of the tar sands. Contrasting the lack of solidarity to the Mi’kmaq blockade at Burnt Church 15 years ago with the broad support for the Mi’kmaq blockade at Elsipogtog last year, she describes the sea change that the movement is producing: “The movements against extreme energy extraction are becoming more than just battles against specific oil, gas, an coal companies and more, even, than pro-democracy movements. They are opening up spaces for a historical reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and non-Natives, who are finally understanding that, at a time when elected officials have open disdain for basic democratic principles, Indigenous rights are not a threat, but a tremendous gift.”

Arguing that “exploited workers and an exploited planet are, it turn out, a package deal,” Klein shares lessons from the Northern Cheyenne in building community-run solar panels, and explains how that the technology for renewables exists and provides an alternative both for front-line Indigenous communities defending their land and for non-Indigenous workers needing jobs: “Manufacturing in North America is as battered as family farming, which means that well-paying union jobs are so scarce that people will fight for whatever jobs are on offer, no matter how dangerous, precarious, or polluting to themselves, their families, or their communities. The solution, as the more visionary sectors of the labor movement understand, is to fight for policies that do not force workers to make those kinds of choices…Today’s climate movement does not have the luxury of simply saying no without simultaneously fighting for a series of transformative yeses—the building blocks of our next economy that can provide good clean jobs, as well as a social safety net that cushions the hardships for those inevitably suffering losses…There is no more potent weapon in the battle against fossil fuels than the creation of real alternatives. Just the glimpse of another kind of economy can be enough to energize the fight against the old one.”

As a great theorist for the movements, Naomi Klein has both influenced and been influenced by them. This Changes Everything represents another change in Naomi Klein’s own politics, that have shaped and been shaped by movements against corporate globalization, war and climate change.

From brand bullies to state bullies

In No Logo she explained the rise of multinationals as the result of a marketing idea in the 1980s, and wrote that the “virtual brick and mortar” of branding was replacing production. Taking aim at the “brand bullies” she praised a resistance “both focused and fragmented” that could subvert and hold the multinationals accountable by culture jamming and reclaiming the streets. Released in the wake of the 2001 Seattle protest against the WTO, No Logo reflected the emerging anti-globalization movement and provided activists with a global framework to understand corporations and the diverse threats they pose. But it left open the role of the state.

The Iraq War of 2003 and the historic movement against it showed that corporate profits don’t just derive from marketing strategies but from state violence—whether it’s to steal Iraq’s oil or profit from disasters in New Orleans. The Shock Doctrine reflected this radicalization and deepened it. As Naomi Klein wrote, “Most of us chose to oppose the way as an act of folly by a president who mistook himself for a king, and his British sidekick who wanted to be on the winning side of history. There was little interest in the idea that war was a rational policy choice, that the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means, that the level of terror was proportional to what was at stake.”

The Shock Doctrine was released in 2007 just at the time of the economic crisis, and armed activists to confront the resulting austerity. As the moderator introducing her at the Climate Convergence last week explained, Chicago teachers had reading groups of her book during their successful strike.

Whereas the word “capitalism” did not even make the index of No Logo, it was on the front cover and throughout The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. But it was not capitalism itself that was the problem, but a particular “fundamentalist” “unfettered” and “deregulated” version. Rather than a bad marketing idea of the 1980s, Klein located the problem decades prior in Milton Friedman’s economic theories that led a “50 year campaign for total corporate liberation.” As she wrote, “I am not arguing that all forms of market systems are inherently violent…A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy—like a national oil company—held in state hands…Markets need not be fundamentalist… Keynes proposed exactly that kind of mixed, regulated economy…that system of compromises, checks and balances.”

From disaster capitalism to capitalist disasters

The climate science and the indigenous-led climate justice movement have led to another exciting shift in politics. As she wrote in the introduction of This Changes Everything, “this is the hardest book I have ever written, precisely because the research has led me to search out such radical responses.” Her search encourages us to do the same. Now the problem is not years of marketing or decades of neoliberalism but centuries of colonialism and capitalism: “the things we must do to avoid catastrophic warming are no longer just in conflict with the particular strain of deregulated capitalism that triumphed in the 1980s. They are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our economic model: grow or die.”

Rather than defending state-owned oil companies, she argues: “These have never been safe or low-risk industries. Running an economy on energy sources that release poisons as an unavoidable part of their extraction and refining has always required sacrifice zones—whole subsets of humanity categorized as less than fully human, which made their poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable.”

As a result, she takes on the record of the “extractivist left” who have tried to make change without fighting for climate justice—including trade unions “trying to freeze in place the dirtiest jobs, instead of fighting for the good clean jobs their members deserve,” centre-left Keynesians obsessed with GDP growth regardless of how it’s achieved, the former Soviet Union whose environmental record was just as bad as the capitalists, the Latin American government who have reduced economic inequality but not ecological injustice, and Greece’s left alternative Syriza that counterposed the environment with economic recovery.

Rather than calling for compromises, Naomi Klein denounces the “fetish of centrism” in the face of climate catastrophe: “What the ‘moderates’ constantly trying to reframe climate action as something more palatable are really asking is: How can we create change so that the people responsible for the crisis do not feel threatened by the solutions? How, they ask, do you reassure members of a panicked, megalomanical elite that they are still masters of the universe, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary? The answer is: you don’t. You make sure you have enough people on your side to change the balance of power and take on those responsible.”

Strategic debates

Shifting from subverting brands to calling for a climate revolution leads to a shift in strategy: “I have, in the past, strongly defended the right of young movements to their amorphous structures—whether that means rejecting identifiable leadership or eschewing programmatic demands…As many are coming to realize, the fetish for structurelessness, the rebellion against any kind of institutionalization, is not a luxury today’s transformative movements can afford…Despite endless griping, tweeting, flash mobbing, and occupying, we collectively lack many of the tools that built and sustained the transformative movements of the past. Our public institutions are disintegrating, while the institutions of the traditional left—progressive political parties, strong unions, membership-based community service organizations—are fighting for their lives.”

There’s also the question of the ultimate aim of this fight. If the climate crisis is rooted in centuries of colonialism and capitalism, then we need to replace the corporations and states responsible. But while This Change Everything leads us in that direction, it constantly returns to the theme of The Shock Doctrine: that the problem is not capitalism itself but the “reigning ideology” of “market fundamentalism,” created by the “free market counterrevolution” that has “infiltrated virtually every government” and “binds the imagination of our elites.” This makes it seem like neoliberalism is a conspiratorial highjacking of a system that could otherwise be sustainable, leading to nostalgia for the Keynesianism of the 1930s and social programs after WWII.

But Keynesianism failed to solve the Great Depression, which only disappeared through the barbarism of WWII and a permanent arms economy that temporarily sustained a capitalist boom. This allowed states to develop health and education both under pressure from social movements but also in order to compete with other capitalist rivals. The re-emergence of economic crisis led to neoliberal ideology—not the other way around—and the limitations of its “corporate liberation strategy” was made clear when decades of deregulation and financialization failed to prevent the worst (and ongoing) economic crisis since the Great Depression. Economic crisis and war (whose ecological impacts are hardly mentioned) are both intrinsic features of capitalism, whether Keynesian or neoliberal. But because the democratic and revolutionary waves that ended WWI and inspired the world were first crushed and then buried in history, the only answer to her question “has an economic shift of this kind ever happened before in history?” is some reformist version of capitalism.

This Changes Everything does not quite change everything. But released in the context of 400,000 marching for climate justice—along with thousands of actions across the world—it reflects and advances the hope that this new movement can change everything: “The climate movement offers an overarching narrative in which everything from the fight for good jobs to justice for migrants to reparations for historical wrongs like slavery and colonialism can all become part of the grand project of building a nontoxic, shockproof economy before it’s too late.”