Locating Naomi Klein in the political economy of climate change

Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, offers a distinctive political economy perspective on the slow rate of policy responses to the scientific consensus that emissions of greenhouse gasses must be reduced if hazardous and irreversible changes to the earth’s climate are to be avoided.  It makes uncomfortable reading for advocates of ‘business as usual’, which is perhaps its primary purpose. But it also contains some equally challenging arguments for those genuinely keen to explore the nature of, and transition to, an environmentally and economically sustainable political economy.  Sometimes, though, she is less than explicit in what she is saying, leaving it to her readers to wrestle with the many implications of her remarks.

My aim in this post is to draw out just one of these implications: namely, the relationship between ‘capitalism’ and the climate highlighted in the sub-title of Klein’s book.

Klein’s argument is that the scale of industrial activity in, or sustained by, developed economies is such that only ‘de-growth’ of activity and consumption will suffice – if an internationally just and economically sustainable model of economic activity is to be achieved in a time-scale consistent with avoiding the worst effects of anthropogenic climate change.  Drawing on the work of Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin, she concludes that developed countries must immediately reduce emissions by 8-10% per annum and consumption to the levels of the 1970s.  Debates about the scope of as-yet unspecified and unrealised ‘innovations’ to ‘de-couple’ growth from emissions, or about the hitherto mixed track record of ‘climate capitalism’ in promoting sustainable restructuring, are thus instantly rendered moot points.

Her analysis of our failure to act sooner stresses the impact of neoliberal restructuring – in particular, the various institutional and ideological obstacles that it has put in the path of those advocating more interventionist measures to make economies more sustainable.  Yet, for Klein, the underlying cause is capitalism itself, especially the damaging ideology of ‘extractivism’ to which she thinks it is bound.  Here, extractivism denotes the treatment of economic resources (natural or human) in entirely instrumental ways without regard for the regenerative capacity of the (ecological or social) systems from which they are drawn.  In this vision neoliberalism has served simply to dissemble extractivist capitalism at precisely the moment it was approaching its climatological limits.  Unfortunate timing indeed!

Thus Klein sweeps up in one authoritative stride the highly contested relationships between capitalism, ideology, growth and environmental degradation – some of the biggest of the ‘big’ questions of political economy.

Her prescriptive intervention is no less ambitious.  It is the reconfiguration of political forces via the building of an international anti-extractivist social movement, which will, in turn, lead to the election of environmentalist parties and the emergence of what we might call a ‘post-extractivist’ state.  Such states will then co-operate with each other to facilitate the restructuring of domestic and international political economies in ways that will bring about both sustainability and justice (goals she sees as ethically and functionally intertwined).  The policy measures to be deployed to this end are ‘green industrial policies’ and social programmes funded by a rigid ‘polluter pays’ approach to business taxation.  In a candid statement, Klein refers to the eventual outcome of post-extractivist restructuring as a ‘carefully planned economy’, and she highlights the role that democratic processes should play in resource allocation by alluding to the case for communal and not-for-profit forms of ownership within such an economy.