The climate-change sceptic who did a sharp about-turn

Cheong Suk-wai The Straits Times AsiaOne 12 Jan 15;

The crash of Indonesia AirAsia Flight QZ8501 exactly two weeks ago has been blamed on weather so extreme that it tossed the plane about and froze its controls. The search for its ill-fated passengers' remains has been similarly hampered by white-out clouds, whipping winds and a whirling sea.

This tragedy has since put many people off flying. That change of heart towards what has become a way of life is just what Canadian journalist Naomi Klein hopes more people will have now.

That is because, as she canvasses in her new book This Changes Everything, humanity has exacerbated extreme weather and global warming to such an extent with hyper-consumption that civilisation itself may be going the way of the dodo.
The "This" in the title refers to climate change, which comes from the ever-increasing burning of fossil fuels to run everything from factories to cars and, yes, planes.

The burning sends carbon dioxide into the air, which not only traps heat that then warms the earth, but hangs around in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Small wonder, then, that in 2012, Greenland saw its mega ice sheet melting for the first time in history.

As she notes in the book, by 2013, global carbon emissions were 61 per cent higher than in 1990, the year generally considered to be the start of the current wave of globalisation. The trouble is, as she says again and again in her book This Changes Everything, people keep "looking away" from climate change because they either believe it is a Trojan Horse for anti-capitalists or simply because nobody cares to wean themselves off luxuries, recycle stuff and cycle to work just to save the planet, as it were.

In this, she stresses, she is not advocating that everyone goes back to living in caves; it is enough just to live as if one were in the 1970s, when everyone made do with just enough and were into do-it-yourself projects.

You might think her suggestion all too predictable when you learn that she is the daughter of hippies, with their "make love not war" stance and fondness for all things natural. But Klein, an award-winning journalist who has covered environmental tragedies like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, used to be obsessed with designer brands, decking herself out in them in silent protest against her parents' earth-loving ways. She was also, for years, a climate-change sceptic, averting her eyes whenever anyone spoke or wrote about the subject.

What changed her mind and led to her spending five years writing this book was a conversation with a Bolivian ambassador to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) who showed her how fighting climate change was also a way to redistribute the world's income, if rich polluters gave money to poor "climate creditors" like Bolivia, to help them buy and use green technologies and grow their economies sustainably.

Klein traces the roots of global warming and climate change to the present model of economic growth, which is largely skewed towards helping the rich get richer quickly by relying on coal-heavy industries that pollute the environment, and by stoking the consumerism that keeps these industries going at full throttle.

Her book is most valuable for its chunks of inconvenient truths about how people are making the planet "hotter, colder, wetter, thirstier, hungrier and angrier", just to satisfy their many, unending desires, be they for fuel, food or x.

Among the most inconvenient truths she has rooted out are that:

Fracking, or using water pressure to break rocks to release gas, has been weakening the earth's faultlines and so triggering small earthquakes. On top of that, fracking releases a lot of heat-trapping methane; Starfish on the Pacific Coast have been melting into distorted globs, likely from seawater made increasingly acidic from dissolved carbon dioxide; Many environmental champions have betrayed everyone by, ironically, enabling oil companies to drill for fuel. For example, the Nature Conservancy in the United States was meant to protect the endangered prairie chicken. But it let oil companies drill in protected lands and, by 2013, the species died out; and

Many respected scientists and entrepreneurs are trying to reverse global warming by pursuing The Pinatubo Option, named after Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which erupted in 1991 and spewed sun-dimming ash into the region. The Pinatubo Option involves spraying sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere, as the chemical's particles act like mirrors to deflect heat from the earth's surface, thus cooling the planet. Thing is, such cooling will curb rainfall to such an extent that swathes of Africa and Asia will become deserts.

She is most critical of world leaders and the WTO because the former insist on non-binding targets to reduce carbon emissions while the latter penalises countries which try to live more sustainably. She does not spare even former American vice-president Al Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for raising awareness of climate change.

The way she tells it, he championed only cosmetic changes and did little to oppose the setting up of the environmentally unfriendly North American Free Trade Agreement.

The main plank of her solution - an Occupy-like global movement against "Big Polluters" - is, alas, weak. She herself admits in the book that it could be "reckless" to rally everyone to protest against - gasp! - economic growth as we know it. But she insists that climate change needs just such a response and that it is gaining ground in Canada, Greece and Romania. In so saying, she points to other great social mass movements in history, such as the abolition of slavery and the move for civil rights in the United States, and making do with less during World War II in Britain, including rationing, growing vegetables and banning driving for pleasure.

Klein is best when she lets the facts speak for themselves, and she has amassed a good many - and as current as April 2014 - with the help of her lead researchers, Rajiv Sicora and Alexandra Tempus. For example, she found out that Exxon Mobil chief Rex Tillerson has quietly sued to stop fracking-related activities near his $5 million home, claiming it will lower property values.

If you believe that knowing is half the battle won, this book will show you how to leave a lighter footprint on nature.