Curb capitalism, save the planet: an interview with Naomi Klein.

• Author: Lueders, Bill
• Position: Interview

Naomi Klein may be the most hopeful person on the planet. Despite her shattering assessment of the mostly inevitable consequences of global climate change in her 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, the Canadian author and activist believes in humanity's ability to change course.

"Climate change isn't an 'issue' to add to the list of things to worry about, next to healthcare and taxes," Klein writes. "It's a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message-spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinction--telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve."

A contributor to publications including The Nation and The Progressive, and the author of previous books including The Shock Doctrine, on how powerful interests use concocted crises to get their way, Klein is no Pollyanna in sizing up the enormity of the challenge. It will require, among other things, finagling "extinction for the richest and most powerful industry the world has ever known--the oil and gas industry." But her prescription is even more ambitious than that: "The solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves." Klein argues that humans can recreate the world and the nature of their relationship to it because they have to. Her book has been called "the most momentous and conscientious environmental book since Silent Spring" in The New York Times and "the first truly honest book ever written about climate change" in Time magazine. And now it is the subject of a companion documentary film, also called This Changes Everything, that Klein is traveling the world to promote. (For information on screenings, check the film website: thischangeseverything.org.)

I spoke with Klein by phone in mid-October, while she was in Seattle, attending a screening. We talked about her book, her qualified optimism, her thoughts on Pope Francis and President Obama, and her views on how humanity must change, or else.

Q: Your book presents two possible futures: Either humanity makes a dramatic break from past practice, especially its embrace of the capitalistic economic system, or else we drift inevitably toward unparalleled catastrophe. Given how deeply committed our political and social structure is to the dictates of capitalism, isn't the latter scenario more likely?

Naomi Klein: Yes. [Laughs.] I don't make the argument that the odds are in our favor. I make the argument that the stakes are so high that [we have] a tremendous and unparalleled moral responsibility to do everything possible to increase those odds. Now I will say that there is more space to debate the costs of capitalism than at any point in my lifetime. It...