Hot Money: Naomi Klein (Green Ideas)

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Again and again, linear, one-way relationships of pure extraction are being replaced with systems that are circular and reciprocal." (446)

However, green energy programmes which have been instigated under nation states are increasingly being challenged under World Trade Organisation rules. For example: The talk of environmental racism was great here and something I’d really like to read more on. I was interested in how Klein discussed how our capitalism feeds into our environmental issues and how governments are failing us and cleverly shifting blame to make themselves look better as the detriment of communities of colour.

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opposition movements … will need a comprehensive vision for what should emerge in the place of our failing system, as well as serious political strategies for how to achieve those goals." (9-10) Branson set out to harness the profit motive to solve the climate crisis—but the temptation to profit from practices worsening the crisis proved too great to resist. Again and again, the demands of building a successful empire trumped the climate imperative—whether that meant lobbying against needed regulation, or putting more planes in the air, or pitching oil companies on using his pet miracle technologies to extract more oil." (251-52) The United States – because the US military is the biggest consumer of petroleum in the world, arms companies should also pay. Far from using climate change as a tool to alter the American way of life, many of the large environmental organizations spend their days doing everything in their power to furiously protect that way of life, at the direct expense of demanding the levels of change required by science." (210)

Many do not believe in climate change’s high risk, especially those on the right, those with strong "hierarchical" views. They resist the call for strong measures, and they fear undermining faith in capitalism, and in humans’ project to dominate the Earth. Many believe they will be protected through their wealth. Moderate environmentalists try to make emissions reduction more palatable to the right, with little effect. Many people cannot imagine an alternative. Deliberately strengthen egalitarian and communitarian values. A 2013 study by political scientist Peter Jacques found that 72% of climate denial books, mostly published since the 1990s, were linked to right-wing think tanks such as the Heartland Institute.The student-led divestment movement has "put the fossil fuel companies’ core business model on trial, arguing that they have become rogue actors whose continued economic viability relies on radical climate destabilization—and that, as such, any institution claiming to serve the public interest has a moral responsibility to liberate itself from these odious profits." (354) huge gains [were] won by the labor movement in the aftermath of the Great Depression—the massive wave of unionization that forced owners to share a great deal more wealth with their workers, which in turn helped create a context to demand ambitious social programs…. In the same period, social movement pressure created the conditions for the New Deal and programs like it across the industrialized world. These made massive investments in public infrastructure—utilities, transportation systems, housing, and more—on a scale comparable to what the climate crisis calls for today." (454)

We have multiple emergencies here in British Columbia that are costing many lives, whether it’s a heat dome that kills 600 people, or a toxic drug supply. What we’re trying to understand is how are they feeding each other and how are they intersecting with each other? On the other hand, according to John Farrel, the attitude of most private energy companies has been, and still is ‘we’re going to take the money we make from selling fossil fuels and use it to lobby as hard as we can against any change to the way we do business’. The deniers remain strong because "…they are protecting powerful political and economic interests …" (44)But for those of us born and raised inside this system, though we may sell see the dead-end flaw of its central logic, it can remain intensely difficult to see a way out." (178) Fundamentally, the task is to articulate not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—embedded in interdependence rather than hyperindividualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy. … Because in the hot and stormy future we have already made inevitable through our past emissions, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people and a capacity for deep compassion will be the only things standing between civilization and barbarism." (462) The sad thing is, when governments subsidise green energy – it works – Denmark has the most successful renewable energy programs in the world, with 40% of its energy coming from renewables, mostly wind, but its programme was rolled out in the 1980s, with most installations being subsidised at 30%, before the WTO was established. Now such subsidies are illegal under WTO rules because it’s ‘unfair’ to fossil fuel companies. And there are alternatives—models of development that do not require massive wealth stratification, tragic cultural losses, or ecological devastation."(413) There is a simple, direct correlation between wealth and emissions - more money generally means more flying, driving, boating, and powering of multiple homes”