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First published in the United States of America by Simon & Schuster 2014
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2014
Published in Penguin Books 2015
Text copyright © Naomi Klein, 2014
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-97180-3
Introduction One Way or Another, Everything Changes
PART ONE
BAD TIMING
1. The Right Is Right: The Revolutionary Power of Climate Change
2. Hot Money: How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat the Planet
3. Public and Paid For: Overcoming the Ideological Blocks to the Next Economy
4. Planning and Banning: Slapping the Invisible Hand, Building a Movement
5. Beyond Extractivism: Confronting the Climate Denier Within
PART TWO
MAGICAL THINKING
6. Fruits, Not Roots: The Disastrous Merger of Big Business and Big Green
7. No Messiahs: The Green Billionaires Won’t Save Us
8. Dimming the Sun: The Solution to Pollution Is … Pollution?
PART THREE
STARTING ANYWAY
9. Blockadia: The New Climate Warriors
10. Love Will Save This Place: Democracy, Divestment, and the Wins So Far
11. You and What Army? Indigenous Rights and the Power of Keeping Our Word
12. Sharing the Sky: The Atmospheric Commons and the Power of Paying Our Debts
13. The Right to Regenerate: Moving from Extraction to Renewal
Conclusion The Leap Years: Just Enough Time for Impossible
Notes
Acknowledgments
Follow Penguin
For Toma
“We need to remember that the work of our time is bigger than climate change. We need to be setting our sights higher and deeper. What we’re really talking about, if we’re honest with ourselves, is transforming everything about the way we live on this planet.”
—Rebecca Tarbotton, Executive Director of the Rainforest Action Network, 1973–20121
“In my books I’ve imagined people salting the Gulf Stream, damming the glaciers sliding off the Greenland ice cap, pumping ocean water into the dry basins of the Sahara and Asia to create salt seas, pumping melted ice from Antarctica north to provide freshwater, genetically engineering bacteria to sequester more carbon in the roots of trees, raising Florida 30 feet to get it back above water, and (hardest of all) comprehensively changing capitalism.”
—Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, 20122
PENGUIN BOOKS
‘The book the world has been waiting for. I urge everyone to read it. It is her most prescient book yet’ Cornelia Parker, Observer, Books of the Year
‘This is a conversation that needs to happen on a large scale, and on a local scale, and on a personal scale, very soon. If the oceans die, so do we. It’s that simple’ Margaret Atwood, Guardian, Books of the Year
‘Gripping and dramatic’ Roy Scranton, Rolling Stone
‘Today @NaomiAKlein’s new book #ThisChangesEverything is out now – I’m reading it – it’s great’ Russell Brand
‘This Changes Everything challenges the values by which we live’ John Powers, Vogue
‘One of the most influential books of our time’ Owen Jones
‘[Her] words and knowledge run deep, inspiring change and the need for immediate action’ Charlize Theron
‘A book for those who don’t read climate change books … Her task is to take a potential catastrophe of unimaginable reach and to be calm and welcoming, drawing new people in’ Jenny Turner, Guardian
‘The voices Klein gathers from across the world achieve a choral force … What she does, brilliantly, is provide a historically refined exposé of “capitalism’s drift toward monopoly” … To change economic norms and ethical perceptions in tandem is even more formidable than the technological battle to adapt to the heavy weather coming down the tubes. Yet This Changes Everything is, improbably, Klein’s most optimistic book. She braids together the science, psychology, geopolitics, economics, ethics and activism that shape the climate question’ Rob Nixon, The New York Times
‘Nothing less than a political, economic, social, cultural and moral make-over of the human world’ Mike Hulme, New Scientist
‘Uplifting: humans have changed before, and can change again’ Camilla Cavendish, Sunday Times
‘The beauty of this book is that suddenly, imagining a different world - tragically diminished in some ways, yes, but deeply inspiring in others - doesn’t seem quite so much like an act of fantasy’ Truth Out
‘One of the basic texts of the modern era … no one will take you seriously until you’ve read every single page’ Toronto Star
‘Naomi Klein is a genius. She has done for politics what Jared Diamond did for the study of human history. She skilfully blends politics, economics and history and distils out simple and powerful truths with universal applicability’ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
‘This may be the first truly honest book ever written about climate change’ Time
‘Klein is not paralyzed by enormous, fundamental, systematic problems. Instead, she excels at dissecting them. Such was true of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, and the same can be said with This Changes Everything. No one could have been better chosen to bring such an unsettling issue to the mainstream than Klein. The result is an excellent and plausible balance between fear and hope, and a call for social activism’ Libby Blanchard, Huffington Post
‘One of the most important books of the decade’ Amitav Ghosh
‘This is the best book about climate change in a very long time - in large part because it’s about much more. It sets the most important crisis in human history in the context of our other ongoing traumas, reminding us just how much the powers-that-be depend on the power of coal, gas and oil. And that in turn should give us hope, because it means the fight for a just world is the same as the fight for a liveable one’ Bill McKibben author of The End of Nature and co-founder of 350.org
‘If global warming is a worldwide wake-up call, we’re all pretty heavy sleepers… Klein’s sharp analysis makes a compelling case that a mass awakening is part of the answer’ Chris Bentley, Chicago Tribune