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Q+A: Naomi Klein

There’s no averting your eyes when you read Naomi Klein. The internationally recognized author, journalist and activist has a way of shoving our faces into the darkest corners of capitalism.

In her latest, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate, Klein turns the spotlight on the carnage inflicted by free-market fundamentalism and its “war against life on earth.” Klein issues a “civilizational wake-up call,” but first, she says, she had to wake herself up.

You confess that you denied climate change for longer than you care to admit.

Hard denial is Donald Trump saying, “This isn’t happening because it’s cold outside.” I didn’t deny climate change, but I was still in a kind of state of denial, looking away, and I think that’s the state most of us are in. I wasn’t engaging with the issue I was outsourcing it to the big green groups that were supposed to be dealing with it. I thought it was too complicated and just kind of tuned out. That’s the denial we need to address.

We’re all guilty of that. How do we get people to look climate change in the eye without feeling helpless?

What we look away from isn’t just the crisis, it’s the lack of political response to it. We will really only be able to look when we see a path forward that’s inspiring. That’s why it’s so heartening that a new climate movement is finding its voice there’s a convergence of the fossil fuel divestment movement and frontline communities dealing with the impacts of a fossil-fuel-based economy.

You bring up an inconvenient truth that hardcore conservatives may actually understand the significance of climate action more than liberal “warmists.”

I spent a fair bit of time with the hardcore deniers at the Heartland Institute. They’re dead wrong about the science, but they understand that if the science is true, it presents a fundamental challenge to our growth-based economic system. The people who are in some of the most powerful positions in the environmental movement, particularly in the United States, have consistently advocated an approach to climate change starting from the premise that we should try to respond in the way that changes our economic model the least. They’re constantly touting green growth and climate action that’s good for business. If you look at the discourse coming out of the UN Summit in New York City [this week], it’s all about this [approach]. That’s another form of denialism – economic denialism.

You found some big green groups not just figuratively sleeping with the enemy but drilling with them, too.

I came across a story from 2003 on how the Nature Conservancy [the largest green group in the world, operating in 35 countries], after being given land, had decided to drill [there] for gas. I found that pretty shocking, but also really telling. This is a green group that has all kinds of partnerships with fossil fuel companies and has defended fracking. This thinking that polluters are going to be our partners – that we can do this without friction or conflict – has been guiding our approach to climate change for a couple of decades. Over that period, our emissions have gone up 61 per cent. It’s time for another approach.

What other approach?

Let’s try leaving fossil fuel in the ground instead of emitting it, offsetting it, trading it or trying to find another form of fossil fuel like natural gas. Let’s actually switch our economy to decentralized renewables. That doesn’t mean crashing the economy, but it is a challenge to the hyper-profitable model of fossil fuels. The good news is that the profits stay in communities. That’s the model we’re starting to see in places like Germany, which has encouraged hundreds of new energy cooperatives and publicly controlled utilities. This is inspiring.

If the free trade dream has become a climate nightmare, how do we untangle ourselves from trade deals? How realistic is that?

Free trade deals are standing in the way of some good green policies. Ontario was taken to the World Trade Organization by Japan and the EU, which claimed that buy-local production requirements in our Green Energy Act discriminate against Japanese and European technology. It’s extraordinary. We’re knocking down each other’s windmills when we’re supposed to be moving toward renewable technology.

The problem in Ontario is that the Canadian government didn’t defend Ontario policy. It could have aggressively stood up to the WTO, but instead it caved, for obvious reasons: it’s basically an extension of the oil and gas industry, which sees all of this as competition.

At this point Canadians are told they have to choose between jobs and the planet.

That’s a false dichotomy. If we took the $1.3 billion spent by the federal government on fossil fuel subsidies and put it into a green economic transition, whether it’s renewables, public transit or energy efficiency, we would create six to eight times as many jobs. This past week, Merrill Lynch issued a report describing Canada’s loonie as a petro-currency and talked specifically about the collapse in manufacturing employment because of the petroleum boom. Yeah, it’s creating some jobs, [but] it’s destroying far more. This is how oil dependency works: it kind of destroys everything around it, and then people become more dependent.

Mulcair, Trudeau and, of course, Harper are all pro-oil-sands. So how should Canadians vote next year?

Trudeau and Mulcair are both failing to chart a future for Canada that doesn’t involve our continuing to be a climate criminal. They have both picked their pipelines and are cheering for them. Now is the time for them to hear from their supporters, loud and clear, that this is not acceptable.

The Blockadia Rising movement is increasingly relying on indigenous people to be the legal barrier to high-carbon projects. Empowered alliance or “extractive” relationship?

As governments try to push through high-risk projects without local consent, it is becoming clear to more people that indigenous land rights – if backed by muscular mass movements – are the most potent legal barrier. But there is a risk of those rights being seen simply as a kind of useful tool by green NGOs, not as part of a broader anti-colonial movement fighting for real sovereignty. It’s crucial to recognize that a debt is owed to indigenous peoples for past and ongoing land theft. Only when that is recognized will there be the resources to build good economic alternatives to extraction.

You say it’s not an anti-fossil fuel movement but a pro-water movement.

Water is the uniter of all of these movements against fracking, open-pit mining, tar sands pipelines and tankers. What animates communities is the threat to their water system. It’s also what binds us together in really powerful ways.

You say the scale of needed reductions and changes can’t be left to the lifestyle decisions of earnest upcyling urbanites shopping at farmers’ markets. That’s my community, for sure. What should earnest urbanites be doing to be more helpful?

I’m not saying farmers’ markets don’t matter or that it doesn’t matter how we live. It does. We need to show that responding to this crisis isn’t grim and can actually build stronger communities and happier lives, but we also need to be going to climate marches and engaging with policy to stop the tar sands. A lot of Canadians have changed their lives and lowered their carbon footprint in meaningful ways, yet we know that Canada has emissions that are 27 per cent higher than they should be under the commitments our government made under Kyoto. We have to do both – it’s that simple.

This interview has been condensed and edited.


JOIN THE PEOPLE’S CLIMATE MARCH

It’s time to rise to the challenge of saving our planet. Be part of the Toronto People’s Climate March, starting at 1 pm in Nathan Phillips Square on Sunday (September 21). The same day, the People’s Climate Forum kicks off Sustainable Canada Dialogues at 9:30 am at Ryerson’s Ted Rogers School of Management (55 Dundas West).


adriav@nowtoronto.com | @ecoholicnation

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