Naomi Klein's climate manifesto.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate - Book review

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

By Naomi Klein

Simon & Schuster, $30. 566 pages.

Here is the long-awaited book on climate change by one of the leading lights of the left. Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine (my pick for the most important book of the last decade), is back with another urgent work.

In This Changes Everything, she not only synthesizes the science on global climate change in accessible language and highlights the horrific hazards. She also gets right to the roots of the crisis, and then tells us what needs to be done about it.

This book is no downer, though, for she has her ear to the ground, and she has picked up on all the rumblings at the grassroots--all the little and not-so-little acts of resistance and regeneration that offer hope in the here and now.

She argues that the climate crisis represents a "historic opportunity" to change the world for the better. It "could become a galvanizing force for humanity, leaving us all not just safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are safer and fairer in all kinds of other ways as well."

And for the left, she argues, it's practically a godsend.

"It could be the best argument progressives ever had," she writes, "to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to block harmful free trade deals and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect indigenous land rights--all of which would help to end grotesque levels of inequality within our nations and between them."

She pins much of the crisis on runaway capitalism.

"We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism," she writes. "We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe ... are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets."

She pinpoints the media's complicity, noting that even as the climate crisis has accelerated, the coverage has diminished.

"In 2007, the three major U.S. networks--CBS, NBC, and ABC--ran 147 stories on climate change," she writes. "In 2011, the...