George Erickson
www.tundracub.com
Naomi Klein: Why Climate Change Is So Threatening to Right-Wing
Ideologues - AlterNet
"Climate change challenges everything conservatives believe in. So
they're choosing to disbelieve it, at our peril."
March 9, 2011 |
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Naomi Klein, journalist and
author. Her latest book is The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism. She’s also writing a new book on climate change and the
climate change deniers. Naomi, take it from there.
NAOMI KLEIN: The book is not about the deniers, but it does get into
it, because I started trying to understand these dramatic drops in
belief that climate change is real. I mean, we’ve just ended the
hottest decade on record. There’s overwhelming evidence that climate
change is real now. It’s not just about reading the science. It’s
about people’s daily experience. And yet, we’ve seen this remarkable
drop, where, in 2007, 71 percent of Americans believed climate change
was real, and two years later, 51 percent of Americans believed it.
So, a 20 percent drop. And we’ve seen a similar dramatic just the
floor falling out in the same period in Australia, in the U.K. It’s
happening in countries that have very polarized political debates,
where they have very strong culture wars.
Climate change didn’t used to be a partisan political issue. You
wouldn’t know whether somebody believed in climate change or not just
by asking if they were Republican or Democrat. That’s completely
changed. Democrats overwhelmingly believe in climate change. Their
position hasn’t changed. Republicans overwhelmingly do not believe in
climate change. And the environmental movement has been shocked by
how it would be possible to lose so much ground when there is so much
more scientific evidence, so that, there’s all kinds of attempts to
get climate scientists out there explaining things better, to
popularize the science, and none of it seems to be working. The
reason is that climate change is now seen as an identity issue on the
right. People are defining themselves, like they’re against abortion,
they don’t believe in climate change.
AMY GOODMAN: And what does it say, you don’t believe in climate change?
NAOMI KLEIN: The main thing is they don’t believe that humans have
anything to do with climate change. And it isn’t about the science,
because when you delve deeper into it and ask why people don’t
believe in it, they say that it’s because they think it’s a socialist
plot to redistribute wealth. In fact, most of the big green groups
are loath to talk about economics and often don’t want to see
themselves as being part of a left at all. They see climate change as
an issue that transcends politics entirely.
Why is climate change seen as such a threat? I think it’s
unreasonable to believe that scientists are making up the science.
They’re not. But actually, climate change really is a profound threat
to many things that right-wing ideologues believe in. So if you
really wrestle with the implications of the science and what real
climate action would mean, here’s just a few examples what it would
mean.
It would mean upending the whole free trade agenda, because it would
mean that we would have to localize our economies, because we have
the most energy-inefficient trade system that you could imagine. And
this is the legacy of the free trade era. That would have to be
reversed.
You would have to deal with inequality. You would have to
redistribute wealth, because this is a crisis that was created in the
North, and the effects are being felt in the South. When the polluter
pays, you would have to redistribute wealth, which is also against
their ideology.
You would have to regulate corporations. Any climate action has to
intervene in the economy. You would have to subsidize renewable
energy, which breaks their worldview.
You would have to have a strong United Nations, because individual
countries can’t do this alone. You absolutely have to have a strong
international architecture.
This challenges everything that they believe in. So they’re choosing
to disbelieve it, because it’s easier to deny the science than to
say, "OK, I accept that my whole worldview is going to fall apart,"
that we have to have massive investments in public infrastructure,
that we have to reverse free trade deals, that we have to have huge
transfers of wealth from the North to the South. Imagine contending
with that. It’s a lot easier to deny it.
But what I see is that the green groups, a lot of the big green
groups, are also in a kind of denial, because they want to pretend
that this isn’t about politics and economics, and say, "Well, you can
just change your light bulb. You can have green capitalism." They’re
not really wrestling with the fact that this is about economic
growth. This is about an economic model that needs constant growth on
a finite planet. So we are talking about some deep transformations of
our economy if we’re going to deal with climate change.
AMY GOODMAN: And the reason that we have to go through those deep
transformations? What is the threat of climate change? What is
happening today?
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, we’re already seeing it on so many levels. I was
just at the World Social Forum in Senegal. Climate change here is
still spoken of as something that if you care about your
grandchildren, you care about climate change. That is not the way
climate change is being spoken of in Africa. This is a now issue.
This is the desertification—rivers are drying up—water shortages,
food shortages.
Many of the "solutions" to climate change accept the premise that we
can’t really ask North Americans, Europeans, to really sacrifice,
really change their way of life. We can’t talk about drastically
cutting our emissions here and now. So we have to play shell games,
right? We have to have carbon offsets. We can keep polluting, but
we’ll protect a forest in the Congo, or we will have huge agrifuel
crops in Africa. All of these solutions are actually deepening the
climate crisis in Africa, because people are being displaced from
their land because they’re losing access to forests and they’re
losing access to land that had been farmed for food and is now being
farmed for fuel.
AMY GOODMAN: And this is a gathering of thousands of 40,000 people—
that sort of moves each year, and this year it was in Senegal.
NAOMI KLEIN: And it was global, it was international, but most of the
people were from across Africa. And the theme that came up again and
again was "the new scramble for Africa, the new scramble for Africa."
And a lot of it had to do with these so-called "solutions" to climate
change—the agrifuels, the REDD—, which is the U.N. forest protection
plan, which is very controversial in Africa because forests are being
protected instead of cutting emissions in the North. And that’s not a
solution to climate change in Africa because it doesn’t get at the
core of the issue.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you have climate change. We also have the issue of
the incredible environmental disaster that was BP. You just wrote a
piece in The Nation, "The Search for BP’s Oil."
NAOMI KLEIN: We often hear, "Well, we’re not doing anything about
climate change. It’s just business as usual." But it’s not true
because we are now in the era of extreme energy. The easy-to-get
fossil fuels have pretty much been gotten, and now it’s the harder-to-
get stuff, the more-expensive-to-get stuff and the riskier stuff. And
that means deepwater drilling, which puts whole ecologies at risk, as
we’ve seen on the Gulf Coast. And it means the tar sands in Canada.
There’s a proposal to have a tar sands project in Utah. It means
fracking for natural gas, which is hazardous to ground water. These
are methods that are a lot riskier, and it’s affecting many more
people. And so, I think we need to get away from this idea that we’re
just going on as we’ve always gone on. If we don’t get off fossil
fuels, we are accepting a much higher-risk energy trajectory.
With the oil prices increasing, we’re already starting to get the
"drill here, drill now" chorus reemerging, the energy security line
that the real problem is the dependence on foreign fossil fuels—not
the dependence on fossil fuels, —that’s the real problem—but the
dependence on foreign fossil fuels. And now, the shocking oil prices
are being used to push aggressively for opening up Anwar, for more
offshore oil drilling in the Arctic.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the trip that you took in the Gulf.
NAOMI KLEIN: I went on a boat with a team from the University of
South Florida. The chief scientist was David Hollander, who’s been
one of the most outspoken scientists challenging claims from day one
that were coming from BP and federal agencies, saying, "Oh, there are
no underwater plumes." They found one of the underwater plumes, and
at every stage, challenging the claims about how much oil was
spilling, and now challenging the claim that the oil has magically
disappeared.
They found again and again around the well site a very thick layer of—
not pure oil. It’s eroded. It’s mixed in with sand, and it’s mixed in
with dead crustaceans. But there’s definitely oil covering a very
large area. And the other thing that Dr. Hollander found, because
he’s been going back every few months, is that that layer is getting
thicker.
And we really don’t know what this is going to mean to the ecology,
because—this is one of the things I was really struck by, working
with these scientists, is that—even the most expert of the bunch,
this is still a mystery to them. The deep ocean is so under-studied.
So, even to assess the damage is extremely difficult.
The other thing that they’re very worried about—and you asked about
the Valdez disaster—is that it’s really far too early for anybody to
be giving the Gulf a clean bill of health, because the really, really
worrisome event that happened—and here, I’m only talking about the
ecology; I’m not talking about the other huge issue, which is the
effects of the dispersants on people. I was just out with a research
team in the ocean, so we were looking at microorganisms and—
AMY GOODMAN: Phytoplankton.
NAOMI KLEIN: Exactly. But the point of studying the effect of the oil
on these microorganisms is that before the oil sunk to the bottom,
before some of it evaporated or was skimmed, there was a great deal
of oil and dispersants in plumes in the open ocean. The key months
were April, June—the spawning season in the Gulf of Mexico. And there
were microorganisms, there were larvae, there was zooplankton that
would grow up to be commercial fishing stocks, just floating in the
open ocean in the same vicinity as the plumes, as the toxic oil and
dispersants. And we won’t know what effect that had, those encounters
of these very, very vulnerable microorganisms and the oil and
dispersants.
AMY GOODMAN: We only have 30 seconds. You published Shock Doctrine in
2007. So much of what you’ve predicted has come to pass. Final words?
NAOMI KLEIN: My fear is that climate change is the crisis, the
biggest crisis of all, and that if we don’t come up with a positive
vision of how climate change can make our economies and our world
more just, more livable, cleaner, fairer, then this crisis will be
exploited to militarize our societies, to create fortress continents.
We are really facing a choice. What we really need now is for the
people fighting for economic justice and environmental justice to
come together.
AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, I want to thank you for being with us. Her
book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
