Naomi Klein Admits in Her Climate Change Screed that ‘Global Warming’ is All About Anti-Capitalist Polemics, And Has Nothing to Do, Really, With Science

Liberal writer Naomi Klein’s magnum opus on the environment, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, is a must-read for conservatives and libertarians.  The mask is off. Klein admits progressive policies on the environment are really about what Marx and Lenin said the communist revolution desired 100 years ago — the overthrow of capitalism. This is not about science, or health, at all.  “Our economic model is at war with the Earth,” writes Klein. “We cannot change the laws of nature. But we can change our economy. Climate change is our best chance to demand and build a better world.”

Not that it is an easy read. Making it through even the first chapter of this screed was a shock to the system for me, and probably for any other reasonable person. The turgid, dialectical writing style of Das Kapital is refreshing compared to this book.

Klein, who jets around on airplanes from one clandestine progressive confab to another, cavorting with indigenous people, rock stars, and U.N. minions, had her epiphany on the environment when her airplane was stuck a few years back on the tarmac at an airport. The wheels were caught in melted asphalt, and the plane had to be towed down the runway.

For the author, this completely boring, run-of-the-mill flight delay became a flight of fancy, inspiring her new work. This flight delay, she reasoned, was evidence of climate change. Who cares, she added, if we know that the solar cycles impact the planet, even more than CO2 emissions ever could. Science is not the point, but it makes for a great alibi. “The really inconvenient truth is that it’s not about carbon—it’s about capitalism. The convenient truth is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better,” she writes.

Another motivational moment for Klein, a single mother, happened when she was reading a children’s book to her son. The story was about a moose. She worried that the young lad would “never seen a moose” in his life. Then, reading another children’s book, this one about bats, she worried that the boy would “never see a bat.” Her overly emotional reactions to everyday things — plane delays, reading bed time stories to junior — are something that she feels must motivate us all to give up our way of life.

This is one goofy gospel.

Who knows what Klein would have written had that plane not been delayed, and if her kid had read some Dr. Seuss classics, rather then the literary garbage she gave him?

“We have been told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. We have been told it’s impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we know exactly how to do it—it just requires breaking every rule in the ‘free-market’ playbook: reining in corporate power, rebuilding local economies, and reclaiming our democracies,” she writes.

Klein’s marketing team — one homage to capitalism she seems to be okay with — believes this book will “redefine” this era, as they think her earlier work,  No Logo did for globalization, and other tome, The Shock Doctrine changed the way “we think about austerity.” I wouldn’t bet on that. I’m planning to do some market research and open it up on the plane later this month, and see how others react, as I head to Las Vegas with James Taylor to the National Energy Summit. I just hope the flight isn’t delayed. 

Leftist author Naomi Klein recently joined the Pope in his climate change crusade.