THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING A Book Review

This Changes Everything: Capitalism VS the Climate by Naomi Klein offers a look at how capitalism is fueling environmental destruction. This book offers real life examples of this as well as offers solutions. The book is split into 3 parts.

Part 1 takes an in depth look at the issues related to capitalism and environmental disasters such as super storm sandy. It mostly comes down to greed in the oil/coal industry has lead to people being willing to overlook glaring evidence of climate change. Who would be willing to support something that would cause their own business to cease to exist? Politicians are not willing to support scientific evidence when their reelection depends on these business succeeding enough to donate to their campaign.

Part two takes a look at what has happened in the past when business that destroy the environment claim to donate to environmental efforts. The reality is that after a company is done paying their employees as well as themselves there is not much left for environmental issues. She takes a look at at The Virgin Earth Challenge that offered a large amount of money for whoever could find a way to remove carbon dioxide from the air and discussed the problems related to geoengineering in general. Geoengineering is generally trying to find a way to removed carbon from the air, and this is not always as drastic as large fans sucking carbon out of the air but also includes re-forestry. However, the method discussed is one that mimics volcanic eruptions by spraying sulfur into the air in order to minimize the amount of sunlight making it down to earth. The issues with trying to diffuse sunlight is that it will effect precipitation and could cause further warming to occur if we were to stop once started. It would essentially be creating a greenhouse.

Part three looks at why we should still strive to make a difference when things seem to be pointing towards disaster. This section focuses a lot on environmental justice type issues.;' We look at examples of communities fighting against companies like Chevron that are polluting their areas. Anti tar sands has had a large movement behind it that speaks out about the destruction it causes. These activists speak about how these situations are effecting their communities and this is gaining support.
We look at the "war on science" and how experts are being silenced in order for governments to spread misinformation about everything being fine.

If you are interested in any of these ideas, I highly recommend you check out this book. Naomi Klien does a fabulous job of presenting scientific fact in an easy to digest and relatable way, even stating at one point that she herself was a climate change denier.