Greta Thunberg’s Clarion Call
The siren whose voice warns the loudest to many about the danger of climate and which is the most piercingly unpleasant to the deniers of climate change is Greta Thunberg. She began her activism against those who put economics ahead of saving the future of the planet at very tender age and all while struggling publicly with the effects of autism. Her clarion call provides the book with its title:
“I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.”
Climate Change and Conservatism
Among those identifying themselves as liberal in their politics, denial of climate change and human contribution is almost unknown. On the other hand, denial of climate change is essentially a fundamental tenet of modern conservatism. One of the most infamous spokesmen of the right-wing attack against climate change is Anders Breivik. While Breivik is notorious for savagely hunting children on a Norwegian island hosting a summer camp, the views he expresses in his extensive “manifesto” are not so easily dismissed as extremist and are, in fact, positioned centrally within the mainstream of conservative opposition:
“he casts demands for climate financing as an attempt to ‘punish’ European countries (US included) for capitalism and success.’ Climate action, he asserts, `is the new Redistribution of Wealth.’”
The Pope Enters the Fray
In 2015, the Vatican officially jumped into the fray. The second encyclical of Pope Francis officially recognized climate change as a real issue presenting a clear and present threat and then went even further. Doubtlessly, the document placed the Pope on any enemies’ list people like Breivik might keep with his contention that climate change was not a problem in itself, but merely a symptomatic of the unchecked regulation of consumer capitalism. Klein writes of being particularly moved by a metaphor in the document’s opening paragraph:
“our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us.”
Silos
Silos used to be a term specifically intended to describe warehouses for agricultural crops. The Cold War transform the term into hidey holes for ICBM missiles spread across the country. In the world of the new millennium, silo has become a metaphor for compartmentalizing knowledge, information, ideas or issues so that they are self-contained and not allowed to be shared or blended. Opposition to the Green New Deal by some opponents is based not so much on what it contains and what it seems like it isn’t designed to contain:
“the Green New Deal is being characterized as an unrelated grab bag because most of us have been trained to avoid a systemic and historical analysis of capitalism and to divide pretty much every crisis our system produces (economic inequality, violence against women, white supremacy, unending wars, ecological unraveling) into walled-off silos.”
Climate Change and Exploitation
Like the Pope’s encyclical, Klein’s book positions climate change as inextricably linked to economics. The problem would not exist without exploitation policies and cannot be addressed without impacting the prevailing economic ideology. The problem is that this economic ideology has only been worsened by capitalism; its origins trace back to the era of mercantilism:
“It was in this context that the so-called New World was imagined as a sort of spare continent, to use for parts.”
