Among climate change activists, solutions usually center on a transition to renewable energy. There may be differences over whether this would be best accomplished by a carbon tax, bigger subsidies for wind and solar power, divestment from fossil fuel companies, massive demonstrations, legislative fiat or some other strategy, but the goal is generally the same: replace dirty fossil fuels with clean renewable energy. Such a transition is often given a significance that goes well beyond its immediate impact on greenhouse gas emissions: it would somehow make our exploitative relationship to Nature more environmentally sound, our relationship to each other more socially equitable. In part this is because the fossil fuel corporations – symbolized by the villainous Koch brothers – will be a relic of the past, replaced by ‘green’ corporations and entrepreneurs that display none of their predecessors’ ruthlessness and greed.
Maybe, but I have my doubts. Here in Vermont, for example, a renewable energy conference last year was titled, “Creating Prosperity and Opportunity Confronting Climate Change”. The event attracted venture capitalists, asset management companies, lawyers that represent renewable energy developers, and even a “brandthropologist” offering advice on “how to evolve Brand Vermont” in light of the climate crisis. The keynote speaker was Jigar Shah, author of Creating Climate Wealth, who pumped up the assembled crowd by telling them that switching to renewables “represents the largest wealth creation opportunity of our generation.” He added that government has a role in making that opportunity real: “policies that incentivize resource efficiency can mean scalable profits for businesses.”[1] If Shah is correct, the profit motive – in less polite company it might be called ‘greed’ – will still be around in a renewable energy future.
But at least the renewable energy corporations will be far more socially responsible than their fossil fuel predecessors, right? Not if you ask the Zapotec communities in Mexico’s Oaxaca state, who will tell you that a renewable energy corporation can be just as ruthless as a fossil fuel one. Oaxaca is already home to 21 wind projects and 1,600 massive turbines, with more planned. While the indigenous population must live with the wind turbines on their communal lands, the electricity goes to distant urban areas and industries. Local people say they have been intimidated and deceived by the wind corporations: according to one indigenous leader, “They threaten us, they insult us, they spy on us, they block our roads. We don’t want any more wind turbines.” People have filed grievances with the government (which has actively promoted the wind projects) and have physically blocked access to development sites.[2]
It seems that a transition to renewable energy might not be as transformative as some people hope. Or to put it more bluntly, renewable energy changes nothing about corporate capitalism.
Which brings me to the new film, This Changes Everything, based on Naomi Klein’s best-selling book and directed by her husband, Avi Lewis. I saw the film recently at a screening hosted by local climate activists and renewable energy developers, and was at first hopeful that the film would go even further than the book in, as Klein puts it, “connecting the dots between the carbon in the air and the economic system that put it there.”
But by film’s end one is left with the impression that a transition from fossil fuels to renewables is pretty much all that’s needed – not only to address climate change but to transform the economy and solve all the other problems we face. As the camera tracks skyward to reveal banks of solar panels in China or soars above 450-foot tall wind turbines in Germany, the message seems to be that fully committing to these technologies will change everything. This is surprising, since Klein’s book flatly contradicts this way of thinking:
“Over the past decade,” she wrote, “many boosters of green capitalism have tried to gloss over the clashes between market logic and ecological limits by touting the wonders of green tech…. They paint a picture of a world that can function pretty much as it does now, but in which our power will come from renewable energy and all of our various gadgets and vehicles will become so much more energy-efficient that we can consume away without worrying about the impact.” Instead, she says, we need to “consume less, right away. [But] Policies based on encouraging people to consume less are far more difficult for our current political class to embrace than policies that are about encouraging people to consume green. Consuming green just means substituting one power source for another, or one model of consumer goods for a more efficient one. The reason we have placed all of our eggs in the green tech and green efficiency basket is precisely because these changes are safely within market logic.”[3]
Overall, Klein’s book is far better at “connecting the dots” than the film. The book explains how free trade treaties have led to a huge spike in emissions, and Klein argues that these agreements need to be renegotiated in ways that will curb both emissions and corporate power. Among other things, she says, “long-haul transport will need to be rationed, reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally.” She explicitly calls for “sensible relocalization” of the economy, as well as reduced consumption and “managed degrowth” in the rich countries of the North – notions likely to curdle the blood of capitalists everywhere. She endorses government incentives for local and seasonal food, as well as land management policies that discourage sprawl and encourage low-energy, local forms of agriculture.
I don’t buy everything about Klein’s arguments: they rest heavily on unquestioned assumptions about the course of ‘development’ in the global South, and focus too much on scaling up government and not enough on scaling down business. The “everything” that will change sometimes seems limited to the ideological pendulum: after decades of pointing towards the neoliberal, free-market right, she believes it must swing back to the left because climate change demands a huge expansion of government planning and support.
Nonetheless, many of the specific steps outlined in the book do have the potential to shift our economic system in important ways. Those steps, however, are given no space at all in the film. The focus is almost entirely on transitioning to renewables, which turns the film into what is essentially an informercial for industrial wind and solar.
The film starts well, debunking the notion that climate change is a product of human nature – of our innate greed and short-sightedness. Instead, Klein says, the problem lies in a “story” we’ve told ourselves for the past 400 years: that Nature is ours to tame, conquer, and extract riches from. In that way, Klein says, “Mother Nature became the mother lode.”
After a gut-wrenching segment on the environmental disaster known as the Alberta tar sands, the film centers on examples of “Blockadia” – a term coined by activists to describe local direct action against extractive industries. There is the Cree community in Alberta fighting the expansion of tar sands development; villagers in India blocking construction of a coal-fired power plant that would eliminate traditional fishing livelihoods; a community on Greece’s Halkidiki Peninsula battling their government and the police to stop an open pit gold mine that would destroy a cherished mountain; and a small-scale goat farmer in Montana joining hands with the local Cheyenne community to oppose a bevy of fossil fuel projects, including a tar sands pipeline, a shale oil project, and a new coal mine.
Klein implies that climate change underlies and connects these geographically diverse protests. But that’s partly an artifact of the examples Klein chose, and partly a misreading of the protestors’ motives: what has really driven these communities to resist is not climate change, but a deeply-felt desire to maintain their traditional way of life and to protect land that is sacred to them. A woman in Halkidiki expresses it this way: “we are one with this mountain; we won’t survive without it.” At its heart, the threat that all of these communities face doesn’t stem from fossil fuels, but from a voracious economic system that will sacrifice them and the land they cherish for the sake of profit and growth.
The choice of Halkidiki as an example actually undermines Klein’s construct, since the proposed mine has nothing directly to do with fossil fuels. It does, however, have everything to do with a global economy that runs on growth, corporate profit, and – as Greece knows only too well – debt. So it is with all the other examples in the film.
Klein’s narrative would have been derailed if she profiled the indigenous Zapotec communities of Oaxaca as a Blockadia example: they fit the bill in every respect other than the fact that it’s renewable energy corporations, not fossil fuel corporations, they are trying to block. Similarly, Klein’s argument would have suffered if she visited villagers in India who are threatened not by a coal-fired power plant, but by one of India’s regulation-free corporate enclaves known as “special economic zones”. These, too, have sparked protests and police violence against villagers: in Nandigram in West Bengal, 14 villagers were killed trying to keep their way of life from being eliminated, their lands turned into another outpost of an expanding global economy.[4]
And while the tar sands region is undeniably an ecological disaster, it bears many similarities to the huge toxic lake on what was once pastureland in Baotou, on the edge of China’s Gobi Desert. The area is the source of nearly two-thirds of the world’s rare earth metals – used in almost every high-tech gadget (as well as in the magnets needed for electric cars and industrial wind turbines). The mine tailings and effluent from the many factories processing these metals have created an environmental disaster of truly monumental proportions: the BBC describes it as “the worst place on earth”.[5] A significant shrinking of global consumer demand would help reduce Baotou’s toxic lake, but it’s hard to see how a shift to renewable energy would.
Too often, climate change has been used as a Trojan horse to enable corporate interests to despoil local environments or override the concerns of local communities. Klein acknowledges this in her book: by viewing climate change only on a global scale, she writes, we end up ignoring “people with attachments to particular pieces of land with very different ideas about what constitutes a ‘solution’. This chronic forgetfulness is the thread that unites so many fateful policy errors of recent years… [including] when policymakers ram through industrial-scale wind farms and sprawling… solar arrays without local participation or consent.”[6] But this warning is conspicuously absent from the film.
Klein’s premise is that climate change is the one issue that can unite people globally for economic change, but there’s a more strategic way to look at it. What we face is not only a climate crisis but literally hundreds of potentially devastating crises: there’s the widening gap between rich and poor, islands of plastic in the oceans, depleted topsoil and groundwater, a rise in fundamentalism and terror, growing piles of toxic and nuclear waste, the gutting of local communities and economies, the erosion of democracy, the epidemic of depression, and many more. Few of these can be easily linked to climate change, but all of them can be traced back to the global economy.
This point is made by Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder of Local Futures, who explains how a scaling-down of the corporate-led global economy and a strengthening of diverse, localized economies would simultaneously address all of the most serious problems we face – including climate change.[7] For this reason, what Norberg-Hodge calls ‘big picture activism’ has the potential to unite climate change activists, small farmers, peace advocates, environmentalists, social justice groups, labor unions, indigenous rights activists, main street business owners, and many more under a single banner. If all these groups connect the dots to see the corporate-led economy as a root cause of the problems they face, it could give rise to a global movement powerful enough to halt the corporate juggernaut.
And that really could change everything.
[1] Shaheen, Troy, “Climate change may have economic potential for Vermont”, VTDigger.org, Feb. 20, 2015. http://vtdigger.org/2015/02/20/climate-change-may-economic-potential-vermont/
[2] “Defining and Addressing Community Opposition to Wind Development in Oaxaca”, Equitable Origin, updated January 2106. http://www.equitableorigin.org/media/eoweb-media/files_db/Equitable_Origin_Case_Study_Wind_Development_in_Oaxaca_JAN_2016_1.pdf
[3] Klein, Naomi, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (Simon and Shuster, 2014), page 90.
[4] “Nandigram Violence a ‘State-Sponsored Massacre’”, Countercurrents.org, August 9, 2007. http://www.countercurrents.org/tribunal090807.htm
[5] Maughan, Tim, “The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust”, BBC Future, April 2, 2015. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth
[6] Klein, op. cit., page 287.
[7] Norberg-Hodge, Helena, Localisation: Essential Steps to an Economics of Happiness, Local Futures, 2015.
Bravo! No one could have said it better!!! Just as I was muttering to myself that too many people omit the book and movie subtitle … Capitalism vs Climate ….. (to the point of almost choking on the word capitalism) this review arrives.
For those in the Northeast Kingdom area of Vermont, Steve will be on a panel discussion following a showing of the movie. Hardwick, VT TownHouse April 24, 1 pm – 4.
Re: Industrial Wind and Solar in world of global markets.
The undeveloped, struggling, starving billions of the planet are concentrated in a band between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer, centered by the Equator:
that is, South America, Africa, and South Asia and South Pacific.
Why isn’t the norm that RESIDENTIAL, HOME solar be the norm THERE, not Germany—but then of course there would be no “market” for all those champion teeshirts emblazoned with the name and logo of the team that LOSES the World (TradeCenter) Series—-plus all that corn and ethanol from Kansas and the Amazon, cellphones and ipads from China, cars from Korea et al ad infinitum.
What a disaster for Holy Global Growth if the wretched of the earth are locally empowered and not a hungry mass of “new addicted customers” for the sacred Consumptive Economy.
Change at a micro level is all that is left for us wealthy consumers. Be true to your beliefs and act them out daily if you can. That’s it.
Is this more elitist technology for the few. It seems to me all this promotion of solar and wind energy collecting devices are either envisioned as worldwide or it is simply more imperial colonizing of countries with resources and no power. Then think of the resources and energy required to meet global need for the global population.
The whole picture needs to be included not just the installed devices. I am not a supporter of fossil fuels or nuclear. I am concerned about continuing business as usual and its devastation of the earth and humanities future.
Solar and wind energy collecting devices and their auxiliary equipment have an industrial history. They are an extension of the fossil fuel supply system and the global industrial infrastructure. It is important to understand the industrial infrastructure and the environmental results for the components of the solar energy collecting devices so we don’t designate them with false labels such as green, renewable or sustainable.
This is a challenge to ‘business as usual’. If we teach people that these solar devices are the future of energy without teaching the whole system, we mislead, misinform and create false hopes and beliefs. They are not made with magic wands.
These videos are primarily concerning solar energy collecting devices. These videos and charts are provided by the various industries themselves. I have posted both charts and videos for the solar cells, modules, aluminum from ore, aluminum from recycling, aluminum extrusion, inverters, batteries and copper.
Please note each piece of machinery you see in each of the videos has its own industrial interconnection and history.
http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2015/04/solar-devices-industrial-infrastructure.html
Thanks for the much needed discussion of why green-tech alone, no matter how widely adopted, will not solve the various crises of modern capitalist civilization (and can even go right on perpetuating those crises). But if, as I’ve come to believe, the roots of these crises are psycho-social – i.e., a disruption of healthy human values and ways of relating to each other and the world – then let’s face it, even localized economies will also not be enough of a solution. Localized economies of modern, westernized peoples whose psyches are still oriented primarily towards owning stuff will go right on destroying each other and the planet. Green-tech and localization are without doubt necessary pieces of the puzzle, but are perhaps of secondary importance. Of primary importance may be the need to reclaim the healthy human psyche (seemingly the norm in traditional cultures) that is oriented more towards relating, rather than owning.
I agree that “reclaiming the healthy human psyche” is crucial, and that emotional health was “the norm in traditional cultures.” Put these two together, and you have further reason to rethink our globalized growth-at-any-cost economy. That economy thrives on creating insecurity, discontent and competitiveness: cradle-to-grave advertising and media messages tell us that we’re inadequate now but that everything will be better if we wear these clothes, have that gadget, use these cosmetics, buy that car, etc.. With this bombardment targeting children as young as 2, it’s no wonder that psychological health in the West has suffered.
In traditional cultures, role models are flesh-and-blood people, not idealized, air-brushed fantasies projected by the media. Traditional cultures are built around strong communities, and cultivate a sense of interdependence with others and with the natural world. These traits lead to real psychological and emotional health. We can’t regain the virtues of traditional cultures by mimicking their rituals or wearing their clothes, but we can embrace critical components of their underlying structure and scale. By localizing and reducing the scale of our economies, we strengthen community and our connection to Nature, key components of a healthy psyche. These ideas are explored more fully in our film “The Economics of Happiness”, so please check that out if you haven’t already seen it.
Yes – all the things you mention here sound like vital parts of the total picture of what makes a society either healthy or ill. Having as complete and holistic a picture as possible seems so important if we really do want to get back to a healthy way of life. And now you’ve got me thinking about how far embracing “critical components” of the “underlying structure and scale” of traditional cultures might go towards restoring the psychological health we foolishly sacrificed on the altar of our great god The Economy.
And speaking of economics and pictures, I will check out “The Economics of Happiness.” Sounds like my kind of picture and my kind of economics!
Thanks Steven,
posted to BC’s main enviro listserves. Particularily liked your insight into the difference between Klein’s book and Lewis’ movie.
Thought you might be interested in a complementary (if heretical) subject: the climate science arguments against the ‘slow transition’ – decarbonization as it is presently conceived and how this is new and pervasive climate denial.
Building renewable capacity isn’t the same thing as emission reduction. Carbon pricing and decarbonization – AS PRESENTLY CONCEIVED – is not an effective emission reduction path. Of course, we need an effective price on carbon and an investment of much more innovation time and money in a fast transition to a post-carbon socio-economy, but it is denial to rely on the puny, ineffectual pricing possible within our present economy and denial to allow continued, even expanding, fossil fuel production decades into the future until oil coal and gas are no longer economically competitive with non-fossil fuel sources. This ‘slow transition’ keeps fossil fuels in the game and leaves us with no hope of staying below 2C.
I’ve been trying to detail this new climate denial: Renewables and carbon pricing are new climate denial
http://www.countercurrents.org/henderson050815.htm
and if it interests I have lots more on what should be an important topic,
Bill Gibsons, BC
Thanks for your thoughtful analysis. Way too many environmentalists go along uncritically with the pleasant fantasy that “renewables,” though still embedded in the dominant destructive culture, will save us. Your conclusions are similar to those in this review of Klein’s “This Changes Everything”.