On a tour for her most recent book, renowned journalist Naomi Klein laid out the complexity of environmental issues and their relationship to capitalism at a campus lecture Tuesday.
Klein, an award-winning journalist and highly-recognized author, spoke at the Memorial Union Tuesday evening for a Distinguished Lecture Series event. The author is best known for her most recently published book, “This Changes Everything” and her international bestseller, “The Shock Doctrine.”
She said her new book was not marketed as a sequel, but that she definitely sees it as such.
“Some of my friends in the environmental committee have scolded me since this came out,” Klein said. “They said ‘This is already a big enough issue. Did you have to make it about capitalism?’ It’s not like we’re talking about an economy that is working beautifully except for the small matter of rising sea levels.”
She said the capitalist system, free trade and privatization leading to smaller government are the main issues actually contributing to the larger picture of climate change.
Klein said she went to the Heartland Institute, a free market think-tank, which she said admitted to seeing the science behind climate change, but said they could not publicly support it because it would cause their entire economic system to collapse.
However, Klein noted that 97 percent of scientists say humans are contributing to climate change, so the think-tank’s reluctance was misinformed.
Along those lines, her earlier book, “The Shock Doctrine,” outlined a meeting in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Heritage Foundation that was supposed to come up with a list of free market solutions. Klein said those solutions ended up including a rolling back of labor standards, a tax on education, a tax on healthcare and a call to drill for more oil while building more refineries.
Klein advocated for collective action.
She said regulating industry for pollution and labor issues, subsidizing green energy, increasing public transportation with government funding and regulating the food industry specifically are important ways that the U.S. government should combat climate change.
“This is how Europe went to universal health care after World War II,” she said. “This is the story of the new deal in this kind of country after the market crash of 1929, the regulation of the banking sector, the launch of social security … were in response to crisis and attempts to actually get at the root cause,” she said.
Klein used Hurricane Katrina as an example of when people really needed their government and it failed them. People without money did not escape and were stranded on their rooftops awaiting rescue, she said.
On an international scale, this occurred in Greece and Spain with the spread of the Occupy movement once again, she said, as people were unwilling to pay for their government’s debt crisis.
“The ‘no’ only gets us so far,” Klein said. “There has to be an alternative vision. We need disaster collectivism. We need our own responses to crisis that really brings us together rather than apart and reduced inequality.”
