Essay Questions

According to Klein, what is the one word with magical political properties that could completely transform the way it is addressed?

The author reminds readers that slavery went unattended to except for extreme radicals for centuries. Racial discrimination was systemized into the political landscape for decades after the abolition of slavery. Sexism still exists, of course, but is hardly at the same everyday exhibitions of misogyny as in the 1950’s. She doesn’t mention opioid addiction an example, of course, since the book was published in 2014, but the rule still applies. What all these problems have in common is that they went unaddressed until the point at which the political powers-that-be decided they had become a “crisis” which presented such an immediate threat that they required serious attention. It is not enough to simply declare that a problem has reached crisis potential, the political capital must be spent to propagandize the extent of the crisis for public consumption. In other words, for climate change to carry out its full destructive potential, all that is really required "is not react as if this is a full-blown crisis.”

What does Klein identify as the three pillars of capitalist political policy which serve to sabotage a crisis response to climate change?

The focus of Klein’s text is climate change, but the subject of the book is the link between capitalism and the response to looming devastation which is clearly coming, but not being addressed in any serious way. So the central question situated at the core is why not? Why does 21st century capitalism inherently lack the capacity to effectively implement policy changes that can efficiently respond to any or all of the potential threats facing the planet? More to the point: why does capitalism not just lack the capacity for response, but actually contributes to the lack of a response. To this question, Klein provides an answer steeped in the holy trinity of modern-day neoconservative economic fulfillment of wishes. The movement toward privatizing ever more programs currently operating within the public sphere, the massive commitment to deregulation every time a new Republican administration moves into the White House and the jaw-dropping reduction in the corporate tax rate which is inevitably made up for by cutting spending on publicly funded programs. These three pillar of capitalism all come together to make it difficult for governments to fund programs which could effectively address the problem, thus transforming the job into a for-profit mechanism of the private sector.

What is the significance of the numbers “97” and “47” to the manufactured debate over whether climate change is happening or not?

As is often reported, “97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.” When climate change deniers are presented with this factual reality, the response often turns to other statistical data which serves to undermine that figure and support their contention that climate change is a hoax. One of the figures often forwarded to counter the startling near-universal agreement of climate scientists is one in which the figure dwindles down to 47% of scientists supporting the idea that climate change is man-made. Independent of context and specifics, when reported merely as a percentage of “scientists” on the subject, both figures are accurate and cannot be effectively denied. Context and specificity make all the difference in the world, however. The nearly one-hundred percent of scientists reference as supporting evidence that human are responsible to some large degree in climate change over the last century are specifically those whose field of study is actually climate and weather. By contrast, the 53% of scientists participating in the study of whether humans contribute to climate change who have concluded that we are not are work not in the field of climate and weather, but are specifically identified as “economic geologists” whose are paid to “study natural formations so that they can be commercially exploited by the extractive industries.”