Page 50 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

3 AN INTERVIEW WITH NAOMI KLEIN … 33

government spending. Sometimes it’s called neoliberalism, sometimes it’s
called market fundamentalism, sometimes it’s call the Washington
Consensus, the French call it pensée unique, there’s no consensus about
what to call it. We know what it is because we’re all living it. That is an epic
case of bad timing because at its core it is a war on the collective. It’s a war
on the idea of collective action, it’s a liberation project for capital, that’s
what it is and it’s been a very successful one.
It’s not compatible with a crisis like climate change because climate
change is the essence of a collective crisis that requires that we act together
within our countries, between our countries. A winner-take-all ideology
does not compute with a crisis like this that requires that we see how we are
interdependent.
But there’s more to it than that. We were systematically selling off
exactly the parts of our economies that we most needed to control if we
were going to take climate change seriously. Our rail systems, our energy
grids, our water, this is what neoliberalism did. That makes what we need
to do so much harder. Just because something is publicly controlled
doesn’t mean that it’s good, doesn’t mean that it’s environmentally con-
scious, but if a public has the ability to have a say over their energy grid,
they can say they want it to change and that’s what we really haven’t been
able to do.
That’s why I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the countries that have
taken some of the boldest moves in the face of the climate crisis are ones
that are most socially democratic. It’s not a coincidence that the
Scandinavian countries have some of the most enlightened climate policies
(and put a big asterisk next to Norway). Or that Germany, which never
fully embraced neo-liberalism for historical reasons, though they prescribe
it with brutality on the rest of Europe, they know at home that it’s very
dangerous for them to get rid of their safety net. Germany, because of that,
has been willing to introduce a very ambitious feed-in tariff programme
that has transformed their energy grid very rapidly. So that’s the conflict.
CW: You make a very strong argument that neo-liberal economics is
driving humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. However I was also
struck by your point that these are modern expressions of an older
logic particularly the view that nature is something we can ‘bend to
our will’. To what extent then is the problem, neo-liberal capitalism,
or our reliance on fossil fuels, or is it something deeper in the rela-
tionship between humanity and the natural world?