Richard Branson has pledged $3bn to fight climate change,
and delivered just $230m. Naomi Klein looks at the 'greenwashing'
of big business and its effects – on the planet, and our own bodies
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| Naomi Klein: 'My doctor told me that my hormone levels were too low and that I'd probably miscarry, for the third time. My mind raced back to the Gulf.' Photograph: Anya Chibis for the Guardian Anya Chibis/Guardian |
I
denied climate change for longer than I care to admit. I knew it was
happening, sure. But I stayed pretty hazy on the details and only
skimmed most news stories. I told myself the science was too complicated
and the environmentalists were dealing with it. And I continued to
behave as if there was nothing wrong with the shiny card in my wallet
attesting to my "elite" frequent-flyer status.
A
great many of us engage in this kind of denial. We look for a split
second and then we look away. Or maybe we do really look, but then we
forget. We engage in this odd form of on-again-off-again ecological
amnesia for perfectly rational reasons. We deny because we fear that
letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything.
And
we are right. If we continue on our current path of allowing emissions
to rise year after year, major cities will drown, ancient cultures will
be swallowed by the seas; our children will spend much of their lives
fleeing and recovering from vicious storms and extreme droughts. Yet we
continue all the same.
What
is wrong with us? I think the answer is far more simple than many have
led us to believe: we have not done the things needed to cut emissions
because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism,
the reigning ideology for the entire period we have struggled to find a
way out of this crisis. We are stuck, because the actions that would
give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and benefit the vast
majority – are threatening to an elite minority with a stranglehold over
our economy, political process and media.
That
problem might not have been insurmountable had it presented itself at
another point in our history. But it is our collective misfortune that
governments and scientists began talking seriously about radical cuts to
greenhouse gas emissions in 1988 – the exact year that marked the
dawning of "globalisation". The numbers are striking: in the 1990s, as
the market integration project ramped up, global emissions were going up
an average of 1% a year; by the 2000s, with "emerging markets" such as
China fully integrated into the world economy, emissions growth had sped
up disastrously, reaching 3.4% a year.
That
rapid growth rate has continued, interrupted only briefly, in 2009, by
the world financial crisis. What the climate needs now is a contraction
in humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands is
unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed,
and it's not the laws of nature.
What
gets me most are not the scary studies about melting glaciers, the ones
I used to avoid. It's the books I read to my two-year-old. Looking For A Moose is
one of his favourites. It's about a bunch of kids who really want to
see a moose. They search high and low – through a forest, a swamp, in
brambly bushes and up a mountain. (The joke is that there are moose
hiding on each page.) In the end, the animals all come out and the
ecstatic kids proclaim: "We've never ever seen so many moose!" On about
the 75th reading, it suddenly hit me: he might never see a moose.
I went to my computer and began to write about my time in northern Alberta, Canadian tar sands country, where members of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation told
me how the moose had changed. A woman killed one on a hunting trip,
only to find the flesh had turned green. I heard a lot about strange
tumours, which locals assumed had to do with the animals drinking water
contaminated by tar sand toxins. But mostly I heard about how the moose
were simply gone.
And not just in Alberta. Rapid Climate Changes Turn North Woods into Moose Graveyard read a May 2012 headline in Scientific American. A year and a half later, the New York Times reported that one of Minnesota's two moose populations had declined from 4,000 in the 1990s to just 100.
Will my son ever see a moose?
In our desire to
deal with climate change without questioning the logic of growth, we've
been eager to look both to technology and the market for saviours. And
the world's celebrity billionaires have been happy to play their part.
In his autobiography/new age business manifesto Screw It, Let's Do It, Richard Branson shared the inside story of his road to Damascus conversion to the fight against climate change. It was 2006 and Al Gore, on tour with An Inconvenient Truth,
came to the billionaire's home to impress upon him the dangers of
global warming."It was quite an experience," Branson writes. "As I
listened to Gore, I saw that we were looking at Armageddon."
As
he tells it, his first move was to summon Will Whitehorn, then Virgin
Group's corporate and brand development director. "We took the decision
to change the way Virgin operates on a corporate and global level. We
called this new approach Gaia Capitalism in honour of James Lovelock and
his revolutionary scientific view" (this is that the Earth is "one
single enormous living organism"). Not only would Gaia Capitalism "help
Virgin to make a real difference in the next decade and not be ashamed
to make money at the same time", but Branson believed it could become
"a new way of doing business on a global level".
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