This Changes Everything

“All of us who live high consumer lifestyles […] are metaphorically passengers on flight 3935. Faced with a crisis that threatens our survival as a species, our entire culture is continuing to do the very thing that caused the crisis, only with an extra dose of elbow grease.”

Klein often uses anecdotes like this to introduce a point or make an extended metaphor to illustrate her point. This rhetorical strategy brings color and life into the argument. The case of flight 3935, which sank in the hot tarmac and was towed out by another fossil-fueled vehicle, embodies the absurdity of ignoring climate danger signs and carrying on as normal or burning even more fossil fuel to resolve the problem caused by fossil fuels in the first place. The image gently implicates us all as “passengers” in this process who are passively continuing along a destructive path without questioning.

“Finding new ways to pirate the commons and profit from disaster is what our current system is built to do, left to its own devices it is capable of nothing else.”

Klein discusses “disaster capitalism.” This is the grim scenario in which companies poisition themselves to benefit from the effects of climate change, be that through reinsurance schemes in likely disaster zones, luxury disaster prevention for the wealthy, or patents on drought-resistant crops. Klein points out that these things are already underway, and this is one model of the future we could be facing.

“Climate change can be a people’s shock, a blow from below.”

Klein references shock on several occasions. She speaks of the shock doctrine, the idea that people are panicked and disorientated during crisis and so are more easily misled or divided, or inclined to take risks they ordinarily wouldn’t.