Naomi Klein: there is a deep denialism in the environmental movement
Canadian author Naomi Klein has accused big green
groups of wrongly aligning with corporations and promoting insufficient
measures that have led to poor results, in a way that she argues is more
damaging than right-wing denialism.
In an interview with the Guardian, Klein,
the author of No Logo and the Shock
Doctrine, said her
next book will be about climate change. Following the idea outlined in Shock
Doctrine, where she suggested that neoliberal governments often use
crises and shocks to promote unpopular free market policies, Klein will examine
climate change as one of the possible ‘shocks’ and investigate the effects of
extreme weather events on global populations.
She also criticised the attitude of the ‘big green groups’, which she
said are perpetrating a form of denialism that is worse than that from
right-wing parties.“I
think if we look at the track record of Kyoto, of the UN Clean Development
Mechanism, the European Union’s emissions trading scheme – we now have close to
a decade that we can measure these schemes against, and it’s disastrous”,
Klein said.
“Not only are emissions up,
but you have no end of scams to point to, which gives fodder to the right. The
right took on cap-and-trade by saying it’s going to bankrupt us, it’s handouts
to corporations, and, by the way, it’s not going to work. And they were right
on all counts.”When asked why environmental movements have become
so accommodating with governments and corporations, Klein claimed that after
the victories of the 60s and 70s, green groups had to face the post-cold war
feeling that environmentalism was the next Communism.
“The movement at that stage
could have responded in one of the two ways. It could have fought back and
defended the values it stood for at that point, and tried to resist the
steamroller that was neoliberalism in its early days. Or it could have adapted
itself to this new reality, and changed itself to fit the rise of corporatist
government. And it did the latter”, Klein
said.
“We
now understand it’s about corporate partnerships. It’s not, ‘sue the
bastards;’ it’s, ‘work through corporate partnerships with the bastards.’
There is no enemy anymore.”
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