Quotes from Naomi Klein

Not only do fossil fuel companies receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies, but they pay nothing for the privilege of treating our shared atmosphere as a free waste dump—a fact that has been described by the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change as "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen." That freebie is the real distortion, that theft of the sky the real subsidy.13

As Scott Parkin, a climate organizer with the Rainforest Action Network, puts it: "People are hungry for climate action that does more than asks you to send emails to your climate-denying congressperson or update your Facebook status with some clever message about fossil fuels. Now, a new antiestablishment movement has broken with Washington's embedded elites and has energized a new generation to stand in front of the bulldozers and coal trucks.

And the real surprise, for all involved, is that we are so much more than we have been told we are - that we long for more and in that longing have more company than we ever imagined.

Although climate change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and worst

we have an economic system that fetishizes GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, while failing to place value on those things that most of us cherish above all—a decent standard of living, a measure of future security, and our relationships with one another.

It is on-line that the purest brands are being built: liberated from the real world burdens of stores and product manufacturingg, these brands are free to soar, less as the disseminations of goods or services than as collective hallucinations.

We are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absord their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture.

The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"36

The fact that the earth's atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out, it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract.

The vast majority of the victims of the Southern Cone's terror apparatus were not members of armed groups but non-violent activists working in factories, farms, shantytowns and universities. They were economists, artists, psychologists and left-wing party loyalists. They were killed not because of their weapons (which most didn't have) but because of their beliefs. In the Southern Cone, where contemporary capitalism was born, the War on Terror was a war against all obstacles to the new order

Indeed, the climate crisis, by presenting our species with an existential threat and putting us on a firm and unyielding science-based deadline, might just be the catalyst we need to knit together a great many powerful movements bound together by a belief in the inherent worth and value of all people and united by a rejection of the sacrifice zone mentality, whether it applies to peoples or to places.

Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us. —Richard Thomas, U.K. information commissioner, November 2006

We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature.

la crise du climat pourrait susciter un sursaut citoyen, une secousse venue de la base, capable de répartir le pouvoir entre les mains du plus grand nombre et d'élargir considérablement le domaine des biens communs, lesquels cesseraient ainsi d'être vendus au plus offrant, morceau par morceau.

the global food system now accounts for between 19 and 29 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions.

After paying for the crisis of the bankers with cuts to education, health care, and social safety nets, is it any wonder that a beleaguered public is in no mood to bail out the fossil fuel companies from the crisis that they not only created but continue to actively worsen?

Finding new ways to privatize the commons and profit from disaster is what our current system is built to do; left to its own devices, it is capable of nothing else.

research in Canada has found that an investment of $1.3 billion (the amount the Canadian government spends on subsidies to oil and gas companies) could create seventeen to twenty thousand jobs in renewable energy, public transit, or energy efficiency—six to eight times as many jobs as that money generates in the oil and gas sector.

The kind of transformation that is now required [to address the climate crisis] will happen only if it is treated as a civilizational mission, in our country and in every major economy on earth.

The bottom line is this: As we get clean, we have to get fair. More than that, as we get clean, we can begin to redress the founding crimes of our nations: Land theft, genocide, slavery.

A colonial economy by definition is a dependent economy; a centralized, lopsided, and distorted economy. And as we have seen, an intensely vulnerable economy.

Yet the grinding logic of austerity—passing on the bankers' bills to the people in the form of public sector layoffs, school closures, and the like—had not yet been normalized.

The Nature Conservancy, for its part, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from JP Morgan to come up with voluntary rules for fracking.