Abstract
The United Nations Climate Change Conference will be held in Paris from 30 November to 11 December 2015. The conference objective is to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, from all the nations of the world. It is hard to overestimate the importance of this conference for the future of humanity.
Naomi Klein shows the extent of the challenge by putting the whole climate debate into the broader context of the neoliberal economic consensus, which, she argues, dictates the terms under which the debate has been carried out so far. She illustrates how we will not make the progress we need until we challenge that consensus.
The strength of Klein's approach is that she takes a very broad view of the situation. This enables her to see real hope in a situation which looks desperate. Climate change pits what the planet needs to maintain stability against what our economic model needs to sustain itself. But since that economic model is failing the vast majority of the people on the planet on multiple fronts that might not be such a bad thing. Put another way, if there has ever been a moment to advance the plan to heal the planet that also heals our broken economies and shattered communities, this is it. (p. 156)
She also sees hope in the growing opposition to the ‘extractivism’ of the fossil fuel companies and especially in the fast developing campaign to keep the fossil fuels in the ground. She is not optimistic about what she calls the ‘fossilised democracies’ being able to challenge the fossil fuel companies but she’s much more hopeful about ‘the intimacy of local politics … (which has) turned this tier of government into an important site of resistance to the carbon extraction frenzy’ (p. 365). I think she has done herself a disservice by having as the subtitle for her book ‘Capitalism vs. the Climate’. This suggests that she is calling for the total abolition of the entire capitalist system. What she is calling for is radical, namely, the reassertion of genuinely democratic control over the huge, largely unaccountable corporations and a renewal of our democratic institutions with a much greater emphasis on local democracy. However, the way she does this commands respect.
The tone of what she is suggesting is indicated far better when she talks about the values we need to espouse. She finishes with a clear statement about the values she believes we need if we are going to reforge a world that can grapple with the challenge with which climate change confronts us. 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 hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy. This is another lesson from the transformative movements of the past (for example the abolition of slavery and of apartheid): all of them understood that the process of shifting cultural values … was central to their work. And so they dreamed in public, showed humanity a better version of itself, modeled different values in their own behavior, and in the process liberated the political imagination and rapidly altered the sense of what was possible. They were also unafraid of the language of morality – to give the pragmatic, cost benefit arguments a rest and to speak of right and wrong, of love and indignation. (p. 462)
This book, apparently totally untheological, has many resonances with the work of Walter Wink for example: ‘When a particular Power becomes idolatrous, placing itself above God's purposes for the good of the whole, then that Power becomes demonic. The church’s task is to unmask this idolatry and to recall the Powers to their created purposes in the world’ (Walter Wink, Collected Readings, ed. Henry French (Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 2013), p. 34).