Forget everything you think you know about global warming. The really inconvenient truth is that it’s not about carbon—it’s about capitalism. The convenient truth is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed system and build something radically better. In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of the global bestsellers The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, tackles the most profound threat humanity has ever faced: the war our economic model is waging against life on earth.
Klein exposes the myths that are clouding the climate debate. We have been told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. We have been told it’s impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we know exactly how to do it—it just requires breaking every rule in the “free-market” playbook: reining in corporate power, rebuilding local economies and reclaiming our democracies. We have also been told that humanity is too greedy and selfish to rise to this challenge. In fact, all around the world, the fight back is already succeeding in ways both surprising and inspiring.
Climate change, Klein argues, is a civilizational wake-up call, a powerful message delivered in the language of fires, floods, storms and droughts. Confronting it is no longer about changing the light bulbs. It’s about changing the world—before the world changes so drastically that no one is safe. Either we leap—or we sink.
Once a decade, Naomi Klein writes a book that redefines its era. No Logo did so for globalization. The Shock Doctrine changed the way we think about austerity. This Changes Everything is about to upend the debate about the stormy era already upon us.
Review«This is the best book about climate change in a very long time—in large part because it's about much more. It sets the most important crisis in human history in the context of our other ongoing traumas, reminding us just how much the powers-that-be depend on the power of coal, gas and oil. And that in turn should give us hope, because it means the fight for a just world is the same as the fight for a livable one.» (Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and co-founder of 350.org)
«Naomi Klein applies her fine, fierce, and meticulous mind to the greatest, most urgent questions of our times. … I count her among the most inspirational political thinkers in the world today.» (Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things and Capitalism: A Ghost Story)
“Journalist Klein is a resolute investigator into the dark side of unchecked capitalism. … This comprehensive, sure-to-be controversial inquiry, one of the most thorough, eloquent, and enlightening books yet on this urgent and overwhelming subject—alongside works by Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Diane Ackerman—provides the evidence and the reasoning we need to help us shift to a ‘worldview based on regeneration and renewal rather than domination and depletion.’” (Booklist (starred review))
"[Klein's] journalism won't slow down the fossil fuel companies, but it surely holds out hope for activists looking to avert a disaster. … A sharp analysis that is bound to be widely discussed." (Kirkus Reviews)
About the AuthorNaomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, and author of the New York Times and #1 international bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Her first book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, was also an international bestseller. Klein is a contributing editor for Harper’s and reporter for Rolling Stone and writes a syndicated column for The Nation and the Guardian. She lives in Toronto.
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* And they don’t let developing countries like China and India off the hook. According to their projections, developing countries can have just one more decade to continue to increase their emissions to aid their efforts to pull themselves out of poverty while switching over to green energy sources. By 2025, they would need to be cutting emissions “at an unprecedented 7 per cent” a year as well.
