Naomi Klein's Message to the Media Covering Houston: Now is the Time to Talk About Climate Change

It is vital that we listen to the voices that know, that are conscious, that are grounded in integrity, truth, and illuminating what we most need to see and understand and act upon. - Molly

Naomi Klein on Democracy Now! in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

The World Meteorological Organization on Tuesday announced that Hurricane Harvey’s devastation is linked to climate change. All past U.S. rainfall records have been shattered, and the devastating storm is expected to bring even more rainfall to Louisiana and Texas in the coming days. And yet, the corporate networks have avoided linking the record-breaking storm to climate change. We examine storm coverage with Naomi Klein, best-selling author of several books, including "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate."

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Renée Feltz, who, well, is from Houston, Texas. Renée?

RENÉE FELTZ: Thanks, Amy. As we continue our coverage of the devastating floods in Texas, we’re joined now by Naomi Klein, the best-selling author of several books, including This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Her latest piece for The Intercept is titled "Harvey Didn’t Come Out of the Blue. Now is the Time to Talk About Climate Change."

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein writes, "Now is exactly the time to talk about climate change, and all the other systemic injustices—from racial profiling to economic austerity—that turn disasters like Harvey into human catastrophes." Naomi Klein joins us now from her home in Toronto.

Naomi, welcome to Democracy Now! You have a message to the media.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. Hi, Amy, and hi, Renée. It’s really good to be with you. And I want to thank your earlier guest, Bryan, for all of the tremendous work he’s been doing for so many years in exposing the toxic risks and the unequal burdens of this extremely toxic industry.

So, you know, my message is, this is not a time for some misguided idea of what is polite and what is appropriate about what we can talk about in the midst of a disaster. You hear this from a lot of journalists, that they don’t want to politicize a human catastrophe by talking about climate change, which they know is a controversial subject, although it really should not be, especially in the midst of a storm that they’re saying, over and over and over again, is unprecedented. I mean, you turn on any coverage, and you hear that word over and over again, but what you don’t hear, or you hear very, very rarely, is an explanation for why the word "unprecedented," "record-breaking"—why these words have become, you know, meteorological clichés. We hear them all the time, because we’re breaking heat records year after year. We’re seeing record-breaking wildfires, record-breaking droughts, record-breaking storms, because the baseline is higher.

So, nobody is saying that climate change caused this storm. What we’re talking about are what are the superchargers of this storm, the accelerants that took what would have been a disaster, in any situation, and turned it into this human catastrophe. One of those chargers, one of those accelerants, is climate change. Another, as we heard from Bryan, is the presence of this highly unregulated, toxic industry that is so unevenly distributed, with communities of color bearing the greatest risks. Another accelerant is poverty. I mean, if you don’t have the ability to organize your own evacuation because you don’t have a car, then you’re stuck. Another one is racism. If you are an immigrant and you want to get to dry land, but you’re hearing that the border checkpoints are staying open everywhere where the highway isn’t flooded, as we showed at The Intercept, then you are not—you are less likely to seek safety. So these are accelerants to a disaster that would have happened anyway.

And it’s the job of journalism, Amy, to provide key facts and context for people to understand their world. And without these contexts, particularly without a fulsome discussion of climate change, without hearing from people like James Hansen, who we’re about to hear from here, then it seems like an act of God. It seems like it came from nowhere. And if that’s the case, well, then we’re going to avoid a discussion of who—what could have been done to prevent this, which is a very important discussion to have. And we’re also not going to talk about what we can still do to lower emissions very, very rapidly to prevent a future filled with many more such megastorms and other climate-accelerated disasters.

Please continue this transcript, or to watch the full video interview, please go here: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/30/naomi_kleins_message_to_the_media