Earth’s Billionaire Saviors
Klein describes a photo of Richard Branson launching his Virgin Earth Challenge in which is flashing a toothy grin as he tosses a globe of the earth into the air like a beach ball. Notably, Al Gore is standing nearby, the look on his face not so much a grin as studious concern about the optics as if aware in the moment of the symbolism of this imagery. For those who may not quite get it, Klein lays out the hidden meaning of the image in straightforward language:
“the perfect snapshot of the first incarnation of the climate movement: a wealthy and powerful man with the whole world literally in his hands, promising to save the fragile blue planet on our behalf.”
This Is Planet Earth
Klein turns to a noted novelist noted for his twisted views which transform the way most other people see things into a reality starkly different from the conventional. The view in this case are those of earth from far above; NASA images of the big blue marble know as planet earth. The awe and wonder of these magnificent portraits of an entire world captured in an 8x5 is brought crashing down to earth (as in dirt) through the imagery provided by Kurt Vonnegut’s poisonously truthful pen:
“Earth is such a pretty blue and pink and white pearl in the pictures NASA sent me. It looks so clean. You can’t see all the hungry, angry earthlings down there—and the smoke and the sewage and trash and sophisticated weaponry.”
Getting Personal
Unbeknownst to her at the time, while Klein was covering the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico she was in the early stages of a doomed pregnancy. After the fact, she is able to introduce her own personal life into the description of that trip aboard a boat in imagery that commingles the private and the professional in a way which undercuts neither:
“As our boat rocked in that terrible place—the sky buzzing with Black Hawk helicopters and snowy white egrets—I had the distinct feeling that we were suspended not in water but in amniotic fluid, immersed in a massive multi-species miscarriage. When I learned that I too was in the early stages of creating an ill-fated embryo, I started to think of that time in the marsh as my miscarriage inside a miscarriage.”
Climate Change Deniers
In a rather stupendously remarkable display of efficiency, the author is able to encapsulate within one rather short paragraph the extent to which the climate change denial minority is susceptible to the most extreme conspiracy theories imaginable. The profile of the definitive climate change denier—those who shout the loudest and longest—is presented through a simple catalogue of images of those most likely to represent them at a “climate conference” where in just one two-day period environmentalists will be compare to:
“virtually every mass-murderous chapter in human history, from the Catholic Inquisition to Nazi Germany to Stalin’s Russia…Obama’s campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was akin to Chairman Mao’s scheme to put `a pig iron furnace in everybody’s backyard’…climate change is `a stalking horse for National Socialism’ (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt, referencing the Nazis)…environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather.”
