A Q&A with the bestselling author before her visits to Melbourne and Sydney

Naomi Klein on climate change: 'I thought it best to write about my own raw terror'

Naomi Klein, the Canadian author, film-maker and social activist, will arrive in Australia this month for a series of events. The author of No Logo and the Shock Doctrine – a self-confessed fan of avocado on toast – will be discussing climate change and capitalism, the key topics in her new bestselling book This Changes Everything. She spoke to Guardian Australia’s Oliver Milman.



Oliver Milman: You write in the book that you were a “climate denier”, not in that you denied the science but that you just didn’t want to engage on the subject. Why did you, and others, do this, do you think?

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Naomi Klein: There are so many reasons, most of us tell ourselves multiple different stories each day. I’m flying to Australia so, just to get through the day, I’ll have to engage in climate denial. It’s just that I’m in a lot less denial than I used to be.

What changed?

Ten years ago I was in New Orleans covering hurricane Katrina, I was writing the Shock Doctrine at the time. The photographer I went to Iraq with said: “You have to get there, it’s just crazy here, people are being shot in the streets.”

It was this cocktail of heavy weather, racism, and crumbling infrastructure. It felt like I was looking into the future. People said it was like science fiction, with a rich country abandoning the residents of one of its cities, vigilantes roaming the streets, with anyone around after curfew fair game.

For someone with a background of economic justice, what scared me about climate change is not just that the sea level will rise and we’ll have more storms, it’s how this intersects with that cocktail of inequality and racism.

There are moments where the deep moral crisis of climate change breaks through

This is my attempt to lay out what disaster collectivism looks like. The primary reason people look away [from climate change] is that they don’t see a way out and are told that the solutions to climate change involves giving things up.

If we can chart a path to post-carbon economy, it will involve gaining a lot of other things. We can have a higher quality of life, more liveable cities, greater equality, heal historical wounds. It can be exciting.

Fear can’t be the driver. That’s the big mistake the environmental movement made – “we’ll scare the hell out of you and you’ll become an activist”.

There has to be a counter-narrative that we can have a different economy with more, better jobs.

Climate change prose can be a little, well, dry. How did you approach the task of writing this book in terms of style and tone?

It wasn’t so different from the way I always approach writing. When I was writing No Logo I thought people were generally bored about books on globalisation, so the task was to write in a way that wasn’t boring.

There is a triple layer of jargon when writing about climate change. You have the scientists, who are very cautious now because of the amount of climate denial. Then you have the UN jargon – I had to carry around a glossary of terms. It was like an alphabet soup.

Then there is the world of policy jargon. The US debated “cap and trade” legislation for a year. A poll was taken and just 13% of Australians knew it had anything to do with the environment. All of this conspires to make climate writing very insular.

Nature writing is another discipline – and it’s beautiful – but urban people can feel alienated because it all feels so goddamn removed.

So how did you get around that?

I just try to write for the person who doesn’t want to read the book. The decision to write more personally was a deliberate choice. A lot of the reason we tune out is that we feel this crisis deeply and it’s extremely emotional for someone to think that their homes are at risk.

A lot of the way we communicate climate change doesn’t acknowledge the emotional side of it. So I thought it was best to write about my own raw terror.

You spent time at the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009. How was that experience?

I remember a moment on climate refugees, where the concept of whole countries disappearing was talked about in a very matter of fact way.

There are moments where the deep moral crisis of climate change breaks through, though, moments when it breaks script. There are moments when it isn’t about percentages, it is about decisions that effect countless lives.

There were so many strange juxtapositions. There were the island nations holding protests saying “1.5C to survive” and then there were the US and European delegates averting their eyes like they were seeing a homeless person on the street.

Did your interaction with (well-funded climate change denial movement) the Heartland Institute disturb you?

I don’t know if it was weirder than a Republican party convention or Donald Trump leading in the polls, really.

My book is an argument for a deep ideological shift … the pendulum has swung so far in favour of market fundamentalism

I find it harder to deal with an UN negotiator who knows the science and chooses to do nothing. I find that more troubling than the Heartland crowd.

You’ve said capitalism needs to be reformed in order to deal with climate change. Why is this?

Well, my book is an argument for a deep ideological shift because the pendulum has swung so far in favour of market fundamentalism.

We have this constrained political debate and a political class that doesn’t believe it should be governing. It’s constantly looking for ways to get out of the way of markets. As long as that continues, we will just keep talking about this problem, as we’ve done for the past 25 years.

Climate change has been epically bad timing because it has landed in the lap of the peak of this ideological movement. Look what’s happening in southern Europe – brutal austerity has been imposed upon Greece and other countries and they are rolling back renewables, ramping up fracking and offshore drilling. That’s not the economic model we need to act on climate change.

So what needs to replace it?

We know what we need to do now. We have the policies that could get us there, things that won’t overthrow capitalism, such as a carbon tax, a revolution in renewables. My book is why we aren’t doing that and the ideological scaffolding behind that.

Australia has just announced its emissions reduction target before climate talks in Paris later this year. Do you think it’s sufficient?

This game of countries’ leaders saying about other countries “they are doing it too” is so childish. I’d say it was shocking but then [Tony] Abbott tried to keep climate off the agenda at the G20.

I think we need to be very careful raising expectations over Paris – there won’t be a deal in line with the science.

As sea levels rise that this mean streak and open racism is going to become more extreme

One part I find particularly shocking is that Australia is very much on the frontline of climate change. In Canada, most people don’t experience the extreme weather, but in Australia it is severe …

It’s not just about things getting hotter, it’s about things getting a lot meaner. You see that in Australia where the treatment of migrants is a profound moral crisis. It’s clear that as sea levels rise that this mean streak and open racism is going to become more extreme – climate change is an accelerant to all those other issues.

You’re a board member of the climate activist group 350.org. Do you think climate activism is making a tangible impact?

I’ve never seen a movement spread as fast as the fossil fuel divestment movement. The victories keep coming – the United Church of Canada just voted to divest from fossil fuels.

You’ve seen what’s happening with the Adani mine, they are saying activism is the reason why it won’t be built. The Keystone pipeline still hasn’t been approved and mining operations were scaled back because the companies weren’t sure they could get it out because of the strength of opposition.

It’s a movement on a roll, it’s just that it’s a race against time. If we had a few more decades I’d say we’re in great shape, but we’ve got to turn things around in this decade. So we always have to do more.

Naomi Klein is appearing at the Melbourne writers festival on 29 August and at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney on 5 September