The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine
a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free
market” ideology of our time restructure the global economy and remake our political systems.
In short either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon
our physical world. The status quo is no longer an option. In This Changes Everything Naomi
Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and
health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us
in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse
emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities re-imagine our
broken democracies and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological
desperation of the climate-change deniers the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers
and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates
precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things
worse with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods accompanied by
rampant disaster capitalism. Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature
and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be
viewed as grim penance but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic
and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the
inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just
refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next
regeneration-based economies right now. Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is
certain. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time the
nature of that change is still up to us.
