So they’re faced with the problem that either the science is true and their ideology is in deep trouble, or the science must be a vast conspiracy and there ideology is fine. And they’ve chosen the latter for obvious reasons. But I do believe they understand that if we were to take the science seriously it would require upending the neoliberal consensus.

Shaban: In your last book, The Shock Doctrine, you argue that in the past four decades, corporate interests have used extreme shocks—natural disasters, wars, financial meltdowns—to ram through policies that blunt regulations, cut social spending, and push the privatization of public projects. Now you argue that climate change can be the “people’s shock.” What do you mean by that?

Klein: What I’m arguing in this book is that we need to return to the progressive tradition of responding to deep crisis by trying to get at the root causes of the crisis.

And the best example of that is the way in which the progressive movement responded to the Great Depression. It became an opportunity to change the way we organized our economies, to regulate banks, to launch social programs that got at the roots of inequality.

If we really believed that climate change is an existential crisis, if we believed climate change is a weapon of mass destruction, as John Kerry said, why on Earth would you leave it to the vagaries of the market? Can you imagine if after 9/11 if President Bush had just said: “You know, our liberty and way of life has been threatened so I’m going to propose a market solution to terrorism.” The truth is when our elites really believe that they face a crisis, as they did when the banks collapsed, they bend all kinds of free-market rules. That’s why the climate march happening this weekend is significant. Because it’s regular people literally sounding the climate alarm: We consider this to be a crisis even if our leaders are behaving as if it’s not. And I think that our only hope is in mobilizing from below, to say we believe in science, we believe that this is a crisis, and therefore we want to act like it.

Shaban: One of the developments in climate politics is the acceptance by liberal politicians and elites of an “all-of-the-above” energy policy, the idea of clean coal, incrementalism, minor lifestyle changes, carbon trading, and reducing the issue to the narrow frame of energy security. Do you think this is doomed to fail? Is this another kind of climate denialism?

Klein: Just to be clear, I think this is denying the politics of climate change, not denying the science. But I don’t think it’s doomed to fail; I think it’s failed.

A large part of the wonky climate-change world is still trying to prove that you can respond to climate change within the context of neoliberal orthodoxy. That it can be solved by putting just a few market mechanisms in place and then you can, as they say, “tax and relax,” and then we don’t need to have a full-throated ideological debate about what kinds of values we want to govern our society. And that’s where I think there is a form of liberal climate denial going on. They may not be denying the science, but they may be denying the implications of the science.