Naomi Klein applauds climate change demonstration as the start of a worldwide popular resistance movement

The hundreds of thousands of protesters demanding action against climate change who marched in New York last Sunday were joined by smaller groups in an estimated 2,700 events in 158 other countries. A special meeting of the United Nations General Assembly heard pledges from political leaders to address what its secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, described as “a defining issue of our age”. Barack Obama said ours is the “last generation that can do something about it”.

This is an impressive demonstration of popular and political will to tackle the threat which could irreversibly change life on earth unless the carbon emissions causing global warming are radically curbed in the next 20 years. Another UN meeting in Paris at the end of next year is intended to reach a global agreement limiting temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius.

Profound questions of agency are raised by the threat and the promised official response. Among the speakers at the New York rally was Naomi Klein, author of a new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate. She applauds this biggest climate change demonstration as at least the beginning of a worldwide popular resistance movement to put pressure on political leaders.

Popular resistan ce

Her book argues that the deregulated capitalism dominant since the 1980s cannot reverse but rather causes climate change because of its addiction to short term profitability, fossil fuels and indefinite consumption-led growth. It must be re-regulated at global, regional and national levels if these trends are to be stopped. And that political process must be harnessed to popular – and scientific – resistance.

She welcomes the commitment to social and political activism made by such famous climate scientists as James Hansen of NASA, Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin of the UK Tyndall Centre and Brad Werner of the University of California. They are convinced there is barely enough time left to reverse global warming before catastrophic climate change occurs. Anderson says immediate annual cuts of 8 or 10 per cent in greenhouse gas emissions are needed in the wealthiest countries to head that off. It is quite beyond the capacity of existing governmental plans, or of decarbonising green capitalism. These cannot handle such drastic de-growth coming out of financial crashes and amid greater inequalities.

Klein’s book valuably raises these questions but does not satisfactorily resolve them. Her definition of capitalism is limited to the mainly Anglo-American variety and assumes re-regulation is doable. But her emphasis on popular protest and resistance is surely correct. Unless ordinary people are made more aware of the dangers and become capable of political action to change them it will be too late.

Other voices in this debate are more optimistic about the corporate, market and technological means of change even if equally convinced there is only 15-20 years to execute it. Nicholas Stern, of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, has just published a new report underlining the fateful choices involved.

He speaks of two major trends we must confront: a world that will have 70 per cent of its nine billion population living in cities by 2050 puts huge pressure on energy, water and land; and a world that must create a non-carbon future confronted by a possible 4 degrees Celsius rise in temperatures which has not had this warmth for at least 10 million years – homo sapiens has been here for a mere quarter of a million.

Stern points to major examples of eliminating smog in London, reforestation in Brazil and Ethiopia and the transition to renewables in California to show rapid change is possible. Carbon pricing is crucial, as is harnessing technology change to renewed non-carbon growth and strong political action to promote alternatives. Otherwise there will be huge competition for diminishing resources, large crisis migration and conflict.

The sociologist Anthony Giddens also talks of unprecedented risks and opportunities facing the world over the next 20 years which bear on climate change and bring us "off the edge of history" because of their extent and rapidity (see iiea.com).

Technological change driven by the convergence of supercomputers and robotics could transform work and society, while deregulated financialised capitalism is already subject to the same dynamics.

He does not see an alternative to this global market economy, but asks whether it will be controlled by states and new “sovereignty-plus” political networks such as the European Union, or by unaccountable corporations with global reach in a much more unequal world.

Here too politics must be reinvented to cope with such a pace of change. pegillespie@gmail.com