The Story of Capitalism
The story of the revolution of capitalism which put the final nail in the coffin of feudalism is, the author argues, the story of fuel. Fuel is energy and energy is what allowed the Industrial Revolution expand and take over the world. Coal lay at the heart of this expansion because it could be exploited to stimulate energy in a way that water or beasts could not. With this in mind, the story of capitalism is summed up in one felicitous metaphor:
“coal was the black ink in which the story of modern capitalism was written.”
Burning Down the House
In the Introduction, Klein poses the fundamental question relative to the threat posed by climate change. She places the question within a metaphorical framework, but the answer is literally related to the significance of coal—and its successor, oil—in the dominance of global economic conditions:
“What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house?”
Sacrifice Zones
Sacrifice zones a term used to describe those areas of the world which are considered open to environmental devastation because, simply put, the people who live in them don’t really count. They are sacrificial in the sense that they are a necessary offset for the economic progress of those that do matter and, equally important, they represent fractional percentages of the planet as a whole. But, as the author points out:
“Like an oil spill that spreads from open water into wetlands, beaches, riverbeds, and down to the ocean floor, its toxins reverberating through the life- cycles of countless species, the sacrifice zones created by our collective fossil fuel dependence are creeping and spreading like great shadows over the earth.”
Time Magazine’s Planet of the Year
The author traces the true beginning of the climate change movement to 1989, noting its coinciding with the fall of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War. The match which lit the flame is pinpointed upon a singularly unusual event late in 1988 when Time Magazine broke with its traditional “Man of the Year” by naming the Earth its “Planet of the Year” with an accompanying essay considered far outside the mainstream at the time which included a dire warning set in Biblical metaphor:
“This year the earth spoke, like God warning Noah of the deluge.”
The Mr. Burns Plan
Although it may sound like some sort of joke, the Klein writes of attending a conference on geo-engineering presented by the prestigious Royal Society, the British academy of science, in which various concepts for controlling the actual volume of heat reaching the earth’s atmosphere were presented. Or, put another way, plans for dimming the sun. Such plans are forwarded as a sort of last-resort idea akin to turning on indoor sprinkler systems when a fire cannot be extinguished using less destruction measures. Klein takes this simple metaphor and reveals the complexity beneath:
“dimming the sun is nothing like installing a sprinkler system—unless we are willing to accept that some of those sprinklers could very well spray gasoline instead of water…once turned on, we might not be able to turn off the system without triggering an inferno that could burn down the entire building.”
