Capitalism vs. the Climate

The US political right has campaigned fervently and, according to polls, successfully, to frame climate change as an anti-capitalist conspiracy that will lead to economic self-destruction. The right-wing's nefarious success, notes author Naomi Klein, is ultimately not based on the exploitation of feigned scientific disagreement, but on the image of impending economic doom. The populist strategy's success contains the unintended, yet valuable, lesson that climate change is not really about nature in the first place. It is rather about "the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless." According to Klein, "the climate movement" should now take advantage of the globally vehement questioning of capitalism. We must develop a new "civilizational paradigm" that looks beyond "green products" and market-led solutions...More