Page 49 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

32 N. KLEIN AND C. WRIGHT

and the legacy of neoliberal capitalism (and the reality of neoliberal capi-
talism), as well as American racism, and those three forces intersected in the
most toxic way imaginable. Both during the storm and in the years since, in
the way that storm was capitalised upon by elites in the United States.
So what I saw in New Orleans was just how really antithetical a political
ideology is that does not believe in the state. How antithetical that ide-
ology is to what needs to happen in the face of climate change. At the time,
Paul Krugman called it the ‘can’t do government’ and it couldn’tdo
anything in the face of this disaster. So FEMA, the agency that should have
been evacuating people and dealing with this disaster couldn’t find New
Orleans for five days, and Americans were completely shocked across the
political spectrum. It was a totally hollowed out state.
But then it was also incapable, and this is what’s more important, in
learning the lessons of the disaster. The lesson of that disaster is climate
change is real, we need to get offfossil fuels and we need to invest in the public
sphere both to deal with the impacts of climate change and to stop making it
worse. We need to change our energy system, we need to have public transit,
we need to change the way we move ourselves around. None of that hap-
pened. In fact New Orleans has become a laboratory for privatisation of
various kinds. It’s a much more unequal city than it was before the storm.
So, this is what climate change looks like in hyper-capitalism and it looks
like New Orleans and it’s not a pretty sight.
CW: You argue that the current climate crisis is a product of what you
term ‘bad timing’. Could you elaborate on that?
NK: Scientists have understood the connection between greenhouse gases
and warming for a long time but the issue had its tipping point moment in
the late 1980s. That was the moment when we all lost all plausible denia-
bility; 1988 was the year when governments first had an intergovernmental
meeting to talk about the need for emission reductions. That was really the
turning point year. It was also the year that the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change was formed.
So I think one thing you can only see with hindsight is what an epic case
of bad timing it was. What else was happening in 1988? Well, Canada and
the US signed their first free trade deal that became the prototype for
NAFTA and then all these other trade deals that have proliferated around
the world. It’s the year before the Berlin Wall collapsed. It’s right when
Francis Fukuyama declared history over, and this single ideological project
was then spread throughout the world. Privatisation, deregulation cuts to