Page 52 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

3 AN INTERVIEW WITH NAOMI KLEIN … 35

the marketing of the commercial steam engine in the late 1700s. To take
that idea which was just a theory, this idea that we could separate ourselves
from nature and dominate it and know it and no longer be at its mercy, and
turn that into an apparent reality.
So it was the combination of an idea and a technology that allowed us to
really convince ourselves, this small subset of humanity, that nature was a
thing and that we could be the boss.
I think the reason why climate change is so threatening is that it is a
rebuke, a fundamental rebuke of that idea and it is saying to us that we
were never the boss. This was an illusion and in the book I quote Robert
Manne who says this very eloquently. This is a civilisational crisis, this is a
narrative crisis because all the time we were liberating ourselves from
nature because we were able to sail our ships whenever we wanted. We
didn’t have to wait for winds to fill the sails because we were the boss. We
could build our factories wherever we wanted. We didn’t have to look for
rushing water as they did before with the industrial burning of coal. All that
time we were burning carbon and it was accumulating in the atmosphere.
The response didn’t come right away.
So we had the illusion of a one way relationship but it was a fantasy.
That’s the thing about climate change that makes it more than just an
issue. That makes it this narrative crisis, this civilisational crisis because now
all that carbon that has been accumulating over hundreds of years is cre-
ating a response that is making us feel very weak indeed. We are up against
forces that show us that we were never the bosses that we imagined our-
selves to be. I think that it’s a crisis of story, it’s a crisis of relationship but I
would be very careful about attributing it to humanity. Because it comes
from a place and not all humans believed it and still don’t.
CW: Of course there are many in business and government who
promote a vision of green capitalism. That the answer is to use market
forces to price carbon, to drive decarbonisation and decouple growth
from its material impacts. What are your thoughts on such arguments?
Is green capitalism and green growth a myth?
NK: Is it a myth? I think it needs to be pried apart in that there are green
pockets within capitalism and it is possible to have some marginal growth
while lowering emissions, I think that’s true. Certainly transitioning away
from fossil fuels, if you do make the sorts of investments that we’re talking
about, changing an energy grid, changing a transit system, this is going to
create huge numbers of jobs and there is going to be growth. The problem