Page 51 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

34 N. KLEIN AND C. WRIGHT

NK: We’ve been talking about this collision between neoliberalism and
climate change and it does go deeper than that. Now because we’ve waited
so long we need to be cutting our emissions so rapidly that it isn’t in any
way compatible with the growth based economic system. The Tyndall
Centre says that wealthy countries like Australia or where I live, Canada,
we need to be cutting our emissions by eight to 10% a year. There isn’tan
economist in the world that can tell you how you do that within a growth
based economic system which is why the book is not called ‘neoliberalism
versus the climate’.It’s called ‘capitalism versus the climate’ because that
growth imperative is at the heart of our system.
Your question about whether it’s even deeper than capitalism and
whether it’s something about humanity, it’s a complicated question.
I think it is something deeper than capitalism and we know that industrial
socialist economies have been equally violent towards the planet, whether
it’s Mao’s ‘war on nature’, that’s what it was called, proudly, the war
against nature. How’s that for a slogan? We know that the only time there’s
been a sustained drop in greenhouse gas emissions, has occurred at two
points. One when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s and one when
capitalism collapsed in 2008, they both led to severe drops.
So what we know is that the Earth responds well to both of these
systems crashing. Now we don’t want to crash, we want a great transition
to another economic system.
The part that I disagree with is the idea that this is about humanity. It’s
not all of humanity that is responsible for this. In fact it’s quite a small
minority of humanity, so I think that really at the core of what we’re
dealing with is an idea that took hold in the 1600s in a very specific place,
England, and spread to other parts of Europe.
That was the idea that the Earth is a machine that all could be known
and the key philosophers of this were Francis Bacon and René Descartes
who said man could be the masters and possessors of nature. This is still a
minority view if we look at the whole globe. Most people on earth actually
approach the natural world with reverence, humility and a healthy dose of
fear. I really think you have to be careful of throwing words like ‘humanity’
around.
The other thing that’s complicated about it is that this idea emerged at
the same time as industrial capitalism was emerging. So you really can’t pry
it apart from the emergence of capitalism. What came first, right? The fact
that the Industrial Revolution was kicking off or that René Descartes had
that idea. What we do know is that it took the commercial steam engine,