This Changes Everything

“The Revolutionary Power of Climate Change” (Pages 31-38)

Klein looks at the climate-change-denial movement and considers its arguments, political makeup, and motivations. Using examples from the Heartland Institute's 2011 Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, she points out that the key driving force of the movement is not scientific, but political.

The Heartland Institute, a neoliberal thinktank, sees the environmentalist movement and green policies around global warming as a convenient front, a “green trojan horse” for a leftist, collectivist, and even communist agenda (31), which is opposed to everything it believes in. As one denialist commentator puts it, “[N]o free society would do to itself what this agenda requires” (32). The most common view is that climate change is a “trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of “green communitarianism” (33).

Klein points out that great efforts are made to challenge the science of global warming. There are various counter-theories put forward by people who “are all convinced they have outsmarted 97% of the world’s climate scientists” (33). These theories include “tree rings, sunspots, [and] the medieval warm period” (33), but most of their proponents are not scientists, and the real focus of the denialist movement is not scientific.