Naomi Klein's optimistic call to combat the climate crisis requires drastic, immediate change

Climate change is always on my mind. After a year full of natural disasters, I thought it would also be on the American people’s minds. However, their attention span is shorter than I could have imagined. They are distracted by domestic and international conflict, turning their attention to whatever the news chooses to present – instead of focusing on what is the greatest modern threat to human existence ever.  

There will always be new issues popping up, and those problems must also be addressed, but climate change is one of the most intersectional issues that society has ever faced. It affects everything from poverty rates to weather patterns, to income inequality. Helping solve the climate crisis will help alleviate the suffering of tens of millions of people who unknowingly suffer the consequences of other issues stemming from the climate crisis.

However, to ensure that our planet can continue to thrive, the American people need to keep their focus on the climate crisis. They must hound their politicians and demand systemic change, not just from companies, but also from their own local, state, and federal governments. 

The most important type of change must be effected on the U.S. and the world’s economic system. Capitalism created the climate crisis, and believing that the crisis can be solved without changing or getting rid of capitalism is extremely naive. As Cardinal Pietro Parolin, State Secretary of the Holy See said “Capitalism is unsustainable. Its irrational and unsustainable production and consumption patterns and the growing and unjust concentration of wealth are the main threat against the ecological balance of the planet.” 

The Lie

Canadian climate writer Naomi Klein has written extensively on this subject, releasing several books and writing multiple articles on how ending the climate crisis can only be done by upending our economic system. 

As she wrote in her article for The Nation, “The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract.” 

In the same article, Klein emphasizes that to combat the climate crisis, the U.S. will have to abandon the enduring laissez-faire economic style created during the ‘80s and “[shred] the free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades.”

In the opening of Klein’s book On Fire (a read that I would highly recommend), she writes that the deadly impacts of capitalism and its effects on the environment “were impossible to deny; it was simply argued that they were the necessary costs of a system that was creating so much wealth that the benefits would eventually trickle down to improve the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. 

What has happened instead,” Klein says “is that the indifference to life … has instead trickled up to swallow our entire planet, turning fertile lands into salt flats, beautiful islands into rubble, and draining once vibrant reefs of their life and color.”

Instead of bringing untold wealth and status to millions of people, the world’s economic system has destroyed our world and put unimaginable amounts of wealth into the pockets of a handful of very cruel and merciless rulers, companies, and billionaires. 

Klein understands that the system has lied to us and it is time to see through it and take control of our own futures. However, doing so will require more change than ever before. 

A Call to Action

All of Klein’s writings make the same case: climate change is intertwined into every global issue you can think of and capitalism is the major fueler of the crisis. Our culture of consumption also needs to be changed and how people define themselves may need to change too.

Klein is no doomsday writer, however, she conveys the facts clearly. She writes about the magnificent world we could live in once we have confronted the climate crisis and most importantly changed our economic system and consumption habits. 

Personally, Klein’s writing has inspired me to decrease my consumption habits and join the climate fight by becoming part of the Jewish Youth Climate Movement (JYCM). However, her writing has also relieved some of my climate anxiety as I’ve realized that while individual action is important, systemic change is what is really going to build us a livable future. 

Reading Klein’s work and joining JYCM has restored my hope in our future and I would recommend that anyone who wants to become more involved in the climate fight read any of her published pieces. 

At the end of On Fire, Klein writes that the biggest obstacle to enacting a Green New Deal and helping to end the climate crisis is “hopelessness, a feeling that it’s all too late, we’ve left it too long and we’ll never get the job done on such a short timeline.” However, Klein argues that that is the wrong mindset. She says that this crisis is an opportunity to rewrite our future as a society and create a world our children will thank us for. 

The final line of her book is: “When the future of life is at stake there is nothing we cannot achieve.” The crisis is great, but the future we can build is even greater. The forests we could replant, the communities we could rebuild – the past offenses we could repay. Humanity has the option to reimagine our future like never before.

Written by Ami Gelman