In which we're all going to die

 After I hit Peak Nonfiction, got sick, and recovered by reading two whole fiction books, I was back on the torturing-myself-with-politics train with Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, whining like I wasn't the one who a) started this book club and b) suggested this particular book. 

 

If you've been around on Planet Earth lately, you've probably been subjected to some weird weather and are likely aware that we're all going to die. This Changes Everything explains, over the course of 500 distressingly detailed pages, precisely why we're all going to die. For this reason, it is a bit of a tough read if you have climate anxiety (and if you don't have climate anxiety... why not?). Apart from the existential terror induced by the subject matter, however, it's a very readable book — deeply reported, not really theoretically dense, lots of interviews and illustrative anecdotes, and there's even the occasional bit of humor (mostly of the "corny sarcasm" variety — my favorite joke in the book is the observation that horizontal drilling is "the technology that has finally allowed the fossil fuel industry to screw us sideways"). 

 

This Changes Everything covers just about everything besides the science of the greenhouse effect; it's somewhat assumed that if you're reading the book you've probably at least heard about how the greenhouse effect works, probably in fourth grade Earth science — and if not, lots and lots of scientists have spilled lots and lots of ink explaining the science of climate change. The focus on this book is more about why we as a society aren't listening or responding to the science. Klein's thesis: Seriously dealing with climate change is in conflict with the fundamental building blocks of modern capitalism, and as long as there's so much money to be made in fossil fuel extraction, the fossil fuel companies will continue to use every tool at their disposal to keep drilling. Since fossil fuel billionaires have effectively captured our political system as well — which we read about last summer in Dark Money — the attempts by the political class to deal with climate change have consisted of 30 years of setting non-binding emissions reduction targets and then promptly ignoring them, and a couple subsidies for solar panel development around 2009. The rest of the world's political classes aren't much better. 

 

Chapter by chapter, Klein breaks down several important aspects of the political discussion (or lack thereof) around climate change: The fossil fuel money funding climate denialism; the capitulation of "Big Green" groups to the corporate-friendly greenwashing trend of the '90s, the various silver bullets that people think will swoop in and save us at the last minute (billionaire "messiahs" like Richard Branson or technological advancement that will suck carbon out of the air without tanking anyone's profits or, uh, blotting out the sun?), the role of free-market fundamentalism in undercutting the momentum for collective action, and the various grassroots movements that have grown to municipalize utilities and switch them to renewables, to block new mines and pipelines and fracking sites, to defend Indigenous treaty rights (including all the white people who finally decided to be less racist now that they've realized that Indigenous land rights might be the only thing that will save our collective sorry asses). Climate change is very complex and there's probably additional stuff that people will wish she'd covered — for example, in contrast to the recent IPCC report, she hardly talks about animal agriculture at all — but considering the book is already five friggin' hundred pages long, I think it covers the basics pretty well for a single volume.