Quotes from Naomi Klein

A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centers, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat.

And yet in the most powerful parts of the environmental movement, in the key decades during which we have been confronting the climate threat, these voices of warning have gone unheeded. The movement did not reckon with limits of growth in an economic system built on maximizing profits, it instead tried to prove that saving the planet could be a great new business opportunity. The

society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization.

We have been trained to see our issues in silos; they never belonged there.

the only way" negotiators "can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy."48

According to a 2009 Harvard Medical School study, as many as 45,000 people die annually in the United States because they lack health insurance. As one of the study's coauthors pointed out, this works out to about one death every twelve minutes. It's

Intersectionality, the term coined by black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, is the only path forward. We cannot play my crisis is more urgent than your crisis—war trumps climate; climate trumps class; class trumps gender; gender trumps race. That trumping game, my friends, is how you end up with a Trump.

Bast, who has little of the swagger common to so many denialists, is equally honest about the fact he and his colleagues did not become engaged with climate issues because they found flaws in the scientific facts. Rather, they became alarmed about the economic and political implications of those facts and set out to disprove them.

It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power—specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities, which in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social force to change the balance of power.

Climate change pits what the planet needs to maintain stability against what our economic model needs to sustain itself. But since that economic model is failing the vast majority of the people on the planet on multiple fronts that might not be such a bad thing. Put another way, if there has ever been a moment to advance a plan to heal the planet that also heals our broken economies and our shattered communities, this is it.

I email a friend in Seattle, a prominent environmentalist, to ask him how he is faring in the smoke. He reports that the birds have stopped singing, and he is mad all the time. At least I'm not the only one.

All around the world, the hard realities of a warming world are crashing up against the brutal logic of austerity, revealing just how untenable it is to starve the public sphere at the very moment we need it most.

environmental movement sought to distance themselves from Leopold's "radical" suggestion that nature had an inherent value beyond its utility to man. If watersheds and old-growth forests had a "right to continued existence," as Leopold argued (a preview of the "rights of nature" debates that would emerge several decades later), then an owner's right to do what he wished with his land could be called into question.

When Hillary Clinton called out identifiable groups at every rally, declaring that she would "stand up" for each of them, it was too tepid an offering to build the ground-swell of support she needed. So while white identity politics pumped up Trump's base, trickle-down identity politics fell flat for his opponent.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, played the part of the free-spending venture capitalist of that same heady era. Whereas in the nineties the goal was to develop the killer application, the "next new new thing," and sell it to Microsoft or Oracle, now it was to come up with a new "search and nail" terrorist-catching technology and sell it to the Department of Homeland Security or the Pentagon.

Carson's writing inspired a new, much more radical generation of environmentalists to see themselves as part of a fragile planetary ecosystem rather than as its engineers or mechanics, giving birth to the field of Ecological Economics. It was in this context that the underlying logic of extractivism—that there would always be more earth for us to consume—began to be forcefully challenged within the mainstream.

Kader was the worst fire in industrial history, taking more lives than the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire that killed 146 young workers in New York City in 1911. The parallels between Triangle and Kader — separated from each other by half a world, and eighty-two years of so-called development — are chilling: it was as if time hadn't moved forward, but had simply shifted locations.

In crucial states such as Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin, Clinton drew 15 to 20 percent fewer Democratic voters than Barack Obama had in 2012.

Corporations have to be responsive to price signals. We are not public service.

As the Guardian's George Monbiot puts it, our planet's resources can provide us with private sufficiency and public luxury, in the forms of wonderful parks and playgrounds, public sports centres and swimming pools, galleries, allotments and public transport networks. The earth cannot, however, sustain the impossible dream of private luxury for all.

changing the earth's climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.

the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.

too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.

The term "shock doctrine" describes the quite brutal tactic of systematically using the public's disorientation following a collective shock—wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes, or natural disasters—to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called "shock therapy.