This Changes Everything

In This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein paints a stark portrait of the climate crisis. Since the book’s publication in 2014, the situation has continued to deteriorate; record-high temperatures are recorded each year, greater volumes of glacier ice are melting, and natural disasters are becoming more common and more severe. As noted in the book, suffering during these disasters is compounded by economic and political inequality—the official death toll of Hurricane Maria (2017) in Puerto Rico was 2,975, but US-imposed austerity policies on the island led to slow disaster relief, with large swaths of the island remaining without electricity for months afterward. Likewise, devastating floods in 2020 killed over 6,000 people in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, and heat waves disproportionately affect people in the Global South.

While the planet continues to warm, world governments have adopted new policies to curb climate change. In 2016, UN countries signed the Paris Agreement, which pledges to cut emissions by about 50% by 2030 to keep global warming below 1.5 °C. In 2020, after many national governments officially declared a climate emergency, the European Commission introduced the European Green Deal, aiming to make the EU carbon-neutral by 2050. Vietnam is phasing out coal power, and China is aiming for carbon neutrality by 2060. While these ambitious climate plans are a sign of progress, fossil fuel mining and consumption continue to be persistent problems, and many climate experts the goals in the Paris Agreement are insufficient to address the scale of the problem. Additionally, in keeping with Klein’s focus on profit motives being incompatible with environmental change, rates of assassinations of environmental activists have increased in recent years. A famous example is Berta Cáceres, an Indigenous Honduran activist who was killed in her home in 2016 because of her work in environmental and human rights activism. Her assassination followed the killing of 12 land defenders in Honduras in 2014.

Alongside climate crises, grassroots environmental activism has also increased in the United States and Europe in the past decade. Some of the most famous protests in the United States were the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests (NoDAPL) in 2016 and 2017. These protests erupted because the Dakota Access Pipeline was slated to run through the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, and Indigenous people in the region believed the pipeline would pollute the water supply. Activists occupied the land to halt the construction between April 2016 and February 2017. However, as Klein notes, climate activism and profit motives are incompatible, and state power often bows to powerful investors. In late 2016, militarized police raided the camp multiple times, spraying protestors with hoses despite the freezing temperatures outside. In February 2017, President Obama deployed the National Guard to clear the remaining activists from the site, and pipeline construction continued.

Still, other grassroots movements are emerging. In 2018, following student activist Greta Thunberg’s school strike for climate change, the Fridays for Future movement spread throughout Europe and the United States. At these protests, young people, particularly students, demonstrated in support of green policies and against major polluters. These protests resulted in two global student strikes; in March 2019, more than 1 million students went on strike ahead of the 2019 European Parliament elections. Organizers in the United States have taken on the Green New Deal as a policy goal, which would create a New Deal-esque program to fund the construction of green infrastructure. While great changes need to occur to minimize the effects of climate change, these are the kinds of grassroots movements that Klein notes are necessary in This Changes Everything.