Hadrilled listeners. It's been a rough couple of weeks. I hope everyone is staying safe out there. I'm bringing you today an interview that I actually did a few months ago with Naomi Klein, the author of Shock Doctrine. I had some technical difficulties, but the files and then time got away from me, so it's coming a little bit later than I expected it to, but it actually completely
fits with the time that we're in right now. We're seeing the Shock Doctrine play out in the government and the fossil fuel industry's response to both the coronavirus pandemic and the protests, and Naomi will talk a little bit about what exactly that means and how it reminds her of what happened in the aftermath of Katrina. We also got into how all of that plays into her thoughts on the Green New Dia and in general on the climate movement and what needs to be done to move
it forward. I hope you enjoy our conversation that's coming up in just a minute after a message from this episode's sponsor, I'm Amy Westervelt and this is Drilled Hei. Naomi, thanks so much for being here. Really appreciated. I'm really excited to talk to you. So I wanted to start with maybe getting a little bit of your kind of origin story when it comes to climate. How did you find your way to the climate crisis.
So I'm not somebody who has been writing about the climate crisis for my entire career. I began, certainly for the first more than decade, focusing on economic injustices human
rights abuses. When I wrote my first book, No Logo, which came out twenty years ago, I was tracking the rise of the globalization of labor and this kind of newish way of producing the products that fill our lives, which used to be sort of focused in a factory where the whole production process would take place, and often that factory would be relatively close to where the products
were consumed. We started to see this rage for outsourcing in the nineteen nineties where our products were being made now through a web of global contractors and subcontractors. And so while I was focused on the effects on workers and driving down of labor standards, I was certainly aware that it was also an incredibly high carbon to produce our goods and to live our lives. But it wasn't my focus. And the turning point for me was really when I was in New Orleans in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina. I wasn't there out of a concern for climate change, to be perfectly frank with you, I was there because I was working on The Shock Doctrine, which is a book about a phenomenon that I called disaster capitalism, where in the aftermath of these you know, shocking events like wars, economic crises, and increasingly natural disasters, there is a kind of corporate feeding frenzy. And that was certainly
the case in New Orleans after Katrina. So I went there because Halliburton was there, and Blackwater was there, and Bechtol was there, and the charter school movement was there, and all of these private real estate developers were there,
and it was just like this insane, freeding frenzy. Before the water had even you know, drained from the streets, there was this talk of how they were going to turn New Orleans into this laboratory for a privatized, you know, frankly racially cleansed city, and so that's what I was focusing on. But when I was there, I definitely had this feeling that I was looking at our collective future.
If we stay on the road we're on, that we would be facing a future with more of these kinds of climate shocks intersecting with a weak and neglected public sphere, overlaid with systems of wide supremacy, and then disaster capitalists swooping in with plans to make it all more unequal. And that was the moment where I was like, Okay, I can't keep deferring this issue and telling myself that,
you know, the environmentalists are handling it. This is an economic rights issue, it's a racial justice issue, it's a human rights crisis, and we all need to be involved.
I feel like that leads into a lot of the discussion around the Green New Deal. I'm curious to hear your take on how the Green New Deal has been discussed in the media so far, and I'm really curious to hear what you think about specific policies that can be brought forth in the Green New Deal framework.
Sure. I mean, first of all, I think it's important to understand that that pretty much anything can be brought forward in a Green New Deal framework because it isn't it isn't simply a climate policy it's a framework for the next economy that we're going to have, right, It's an umbrella that pretty much every issue has to fit within.
And so you know, it starts with the science and the sort of fateful IPCC report that came out in twenty nineteen, the one point five report that said we need to cut global emissions in half in twelve years now eleven, and that in order to do so it would require transformation of pretty much every aspect of society.
I mean, that's their words, right, So if we need to transform housing, building, construction, transportation, energy, agri culture, and on and on and on, why wouldn't we, at the same time as we transform it to get it to zero emissions, transform it to make it a hell of a lot fairer on every front. Because the climate crisis isn't the only crisis that we face. We face multiple,
overlapping and intersecting crisis. So that's the way I see, you know, the Green New Deal, and I think we should think about it as expansively as possible and not be afraid of that, because if you're talking about new ways to live, you shouldn't be afraid to be making connections.
Most of my critiques of the Green New Deal, and I have my own have to do with things that are left out as opposed to the way it's so often discussed in the in the you know, you asked about media coverage, you know, I'd say that it's been really, really bad in the sense that we have right wing media.
You know, we have the sort of Fox and the echo chamber around it just lying about it, but lying about it a lot like talking about it all the time, right and completely misrepresenting it shamelessly right and just scaring their viewers and listeners and readers, depending on the media outlet, about how it is all going to be about loss, right, It is all about people taking things away from you
and making your life crappy. And the reason why they do that is because this has been a very successful way to defeat climate policies in the past, and they know that. Actually, over the past couple of decades, many of the ways that states and national governments did try to tackle the climate crisis within a very sort of free market neoliberal framework did actually increase the burdens on
working people. You had renewable energy plans that didn't make sure that low income consumers didn't face increases in their electricity bills. In France, you had, you know, Emmanuel McCall introducing a fuel tax at the same time as he's handing out tax breaks for millionaires and corporations, at the same time as he's attacking trade unions, at the same time as he's imposing austerity policies, all of which is
making life for workers harder. And then and then he says, oh, and the way to solve climate change is just for you all to pay more for gas. And so this message, you know that that Fox is pounding away on, you know, responding to climate change is going to make your lives harder, has been a really successful strategy all around the world in order to beat back neoliberal climate policies. They don't talk about all the jobs that's that are going to
be created. They don't talk about the protections for union jobs and and and the guarantees that workers will maintain their salary levels. They just talk about all the things you're going to lose. And the problem is that if you turn on CNN or NBC, you aren't getting a corrective to that. You mainly aren't hearing about the Green
New Deal at all. And the main way that it's been covered in like sort of serious you know, liberal print media has been to sort of soberly claim in our bed after our beed that it's not pragmatic, it's not realistic, because you know, it attaches all of these things that are unrelated, like healthcare and childcare and a job's guarantee without making any effort to figure out how they might be connected, right, And so yeah, it's been a big fail because you've got that, you've got the lies,
which we shouldn't be surprised by and which we will continue to see, and you don't have real similarly kind of high profile attempts to debunk those lies.
I know, it's so interesting to hear so called liberal media talking about how you can't solve all the social problems and also just not understanding the fact that climate really does intersect with all these other justice issues and.
Being very explicit about it, right, like we can't afford to deal with justice now. And it hasn't just been The New York Times. Michael Mann wrote that in Nature, it's interesting that there's being so explicit about like you're weighing us down by making this about justice. We don't have time, and I mean there's a couple of things
about it. Like I mean, first of all, if that's true, give us an example of a narrow carbon based approach to the climate crisis that has worked at the speed and scale that we need, right because what we're actually seeing is when you introduce only these market based approaches like a carbon tax or cap and trade, they often spark a popular backlash and you lose the policies. I mean, that's what happened in France that Colin was forced to repeal his inadequate gas tax in the face of this
huge popular backlash. I'm Canadian. I'm living in the States now now, but in Ontario we had a liberal government that introduced carbon policies that were widely perceived to have increased the price of energy. And there are big debates about whether that's true and why that is, and if it's really about the renewables push, or whether it's about various boondoggles that they got themselves in Meshtin. But the point is is that it was perceived to be just
increasing the cost of living. And now we have a right wing populist government whose very first act in office was to repeal it, right. So you know, you have a lot of people posing as you know, very very serious people who know how to get things done, but if you look at the track record, it doesn't get
the job done. Whereas linking climate policies with actually much more popular policies like medicare for all and job creation and you know, protecting labor rights that hasn't been tried, you know, and it's certainly worth a try because it might actually work.
I know, I don't understand why people think that the same approach that we've been trying for thirty years, an approach that hasn't worked, is going to be the thing that solves this problem.
You know. It also kind of feels like the folks who are making these arguments need to spend a little bit more time on the ground in disaster zones because you know, as a journalist like I come to this from just being in the places, right, and there's just no way to just say with a straight face, like what does healthcare have to do with climate? You know, unless you have never been in a disaster zone, you know, every and you know, I admit, you know, I run
to the fire. That's what I do as a journalist. And you know, whether it's New Orleans, you know, whether after Katrina, whether it's New York after Sandy, whether it is Puerto Rico after Maria. In all of these cases, what you see is a total breakdown of the healthcare sector. Right. We know what killed people post Maria, and it wasn't falling debris. It was and this is what all the research shows, right, it was the people who couldn't plug
in their oxygen machines and their dialysis machines. And that you know that the intersecting system collapse of the electricity system and the healthcare system, right that had both been systematically underfunded, partially privatized, and just left in such a state of decay that when the winds blew, the whole thing collapsed. And then of course you have all these interests that don't want to get them back up and running. You know, Vcus, the only hospital in Vicus, is still
closed two years after Maria. So people are still dying because of it. And this is why it just I just find it maddening that we that we would not see the connections. We had an event just at Rutgers where I teach called care workers, climate work.
I wanted to ask you about that because I saw the announcement for it, and I was really excited to see it because I've written for a long time about both gender and climate, which a lot of times people don't understand how the those things intersect in a really basic way. But then I would often have editors kind of ask, you know, what does care work have to do with climate staff? And it was really enjoying, so happy to see this event.
It's so annoying because these you know, nurses, home care workers, teachers, become first responders in the midst of disasters, right, you know, whether it's driving their students on school buses through wildfires in Alberta or California, or whether it's homecare workers who have died in fires with their patients who they refuse to abandon. I mean, there's so many examples of this. But it's also low carbon work. It doesn't it doesn't take a lot of carbon to just take care of
each other. These are sectors where we can expand and this is this is a really important response to the Fox News talking point of it's all going to be pain, it's all going to be suffering, right, Like, let's identify the parts of our economy that we can have abundance in, right, and where we can make sure that these jobs which have been systematically devalued because it's women's work, because it's work overwhelmingly done by immigrant women, how about if we
make them good jobs, right. And so that was just a really fruitful discussion among teachers and nurses and home care workers and disability rights advocates, and it was abundantly clear that, of course they are, they're already on the front lines of the climate crisis. You know what, We've got schools that in this country that are having to send kids home because they're so hot and they're failing.
Infrastructure can't cope with the heat. There's no air circulation, they're ac either doesn't work, you know, or doesn't exist. And in some of the schools in communities of color, there's lead in the water, so you know, you've got students who are choosing between dehydration and getting poisoned from drinking from the water fountain. Right, And this, of course, schools should be at the center, you know, of the
Green New Deal. And at the end of the panel, I just asked, you know, the everybody, I said you know, it seems so clear that this is connected. Why do you think you haven't been included in so many of the discussions around the Green New Deal, And several of the speakers said this was the first time anyone asked them to reflect on it or to share ideas, and they all have ideas about how to green their various sectors. Wow.
And Emily Comer, who's one of the speakers, she and she's you know, kind of a legend because she led the West Virginia teacher strikee you know, in red state West Virginia coal country, right, connected the dots between the fact that the oil and gas sector, you know, they don't pay their taxes, to the fact that their schools were falling apart, and said pay your taxes. You know. Emily said, you know, we're left out because it's women's work.
And you know, they also pointed out that the original New Deal excluded domestic workers because it was overwhelmingly black women doing that work and we just can't do this again.
Exactly. Yes, I'm curious, just as someone who's watched corporations kind of behave worse and worse over the years, what you think needs to be done with the fossil fuel industry in order to implement some of the ideas around the Green New Deal.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know and your listeners know that we have a really big problem with the fact that their business model is incompatible with any definition of an organized civilization because they will lead us straight to four to six degrees of warming, and they're quite open about that. They that they see a future of business as usual for themselves and even increased demands. They are laughing at non binding targets set at the United Nations.
They think they can get around it. And the reason they think they can get around it is because of all the money they have. This is a very very profitable business model that requires constant expansion of the fossil fuel frontier in order to not go into crisis. They have, you know, what's called the reserve replacement ratio that to worry about, which is telling their investors that they have more in reserve than they have in production, or at
least as much. And given that, what we know is that if we are to have any hope of keeping warming below one point five degrees celsius, we need a managed decline of existing production. We just have a fundamental incompatibility of what these businesses need to not go into crisis and what we as a species need to not spiral into crisis. It's not resolvable. And that's why the strategy of to create a crisis, a market crisis for these companies has has been very important. And that's what
the fossil fuel devestment movement has been about. But it's like, to me, the fossil field investment movement has never been about an idea that we were going to actually kind of bankrupt them just by getting people to pull their funds.
And you know, I've said this to students over the years when I go to campuses and meet a wonderful group of divestment, you know, a great fossil fueld divestment group who's been at it for you know, four years, and their university won't just won't listen to them and is completely intransigent. And there's many cases like Harvard, and I mean, there's lots of cases where it's been really tough, right, And what I always say to them is you, yeah,
we want your university to divest. Like it is good when that happens, and it's great that the UC system just just just announced finally after seven years, that they're going to divest.
Yeah, that's a huge win.
But you know what I say to them is every time you go out there and make the argument that this is a rogue business, that you're basically turning them into a kind of a pariah the way tobacco companies were. You are helping to create the political space that we need to tax them, increase their royalties, and if they really resist us, nationalize them. Because making that argument for why there is a fundamental incompatibility between our health and theirs, right,
the more you create that political space. And I think it's because so many young people have been out making that argument that they've also been able to pivot to the demand that politicians not take their money right, and many many of the people who are doing that now through the Sunrise movement started in the Fossil Fueld divestment movement. You know, there's a lot of folks who's who as university activists. Varshy Precaucious one of them, at Will Lawrence
is another of them. You know, these are some of the co founders of Sunrise. They started in the Fossil fueld divestment movement, and now they're focusing on getting politicians not to take their money. And that's really significant because if we can get politicians to divest, it's going to be a lot more likely that they are willing to propose the policies that we actually need instead of you know, fake solutions that that are doing things like presenting natural
gases a bridge fuel. The other side of it is like fossil fuel companies and all of their excess cash from their from their illegitimate business model. They've always had the carrot and the stick, right, Like the carrot is we will fund your campaign and help you directly if you give us the policies that we want, right, and the stick is if you don't, we will take out all of these attack ads and destroy you and fund
your opponent. Right. And so the getting Democrats to divest and getting Democratic politicians to divest deals with the carrot, right, But it doesn't deal with the stick, because they can still Even if you get politicians not to take their money and they start being willing to entertain real climate policies like a Green New Deal and bands on fracking and so on, they're still going to be afraid that these companies can spend unlimited funds buying TV ads attacking them.
And that's where Amy, your work's been so important, right, because we need to really, really really talk about media divesting because you know, in the same way that we don't turn it on CNN and see ads for Marlbros, why should we turn on CNN and see ads for Exxon?
And if we can cut off these two streams, because we have in fact turned this into a pariah industry, you know, the streams going directly to politicians and the streams that allow them to buy the attack ads, I actually think we buy ourselves some significant policy oxygen.
Right, Thank you. We've been working on that a lot, this idea of pushing media to take some responsibility here for what we might be enabling, especially outlets that go the extra step and actually make oil companies ads for them. The thing I think people need to remember is that these companies are not advertising a product. It's not the same as other types of advertising. They're advertising ideas.
You know. And this first started driving me nuts around the Keystone Fight, where we would have a hell of a time getting on MSNBC, you know, for two minutes to explain why we were opposed to the pipeline, and when you would manage to do it, you know, and it would just be so we get we got so little airtime to make the case against Keystone, but then it would just always be followed by much longer you know,
ex on ahead. Well, mostly they're advertising the opposite of their product, right, Like they're advertising like wind turbines and solar powers that are like point so solar powers that are point three percent of their businesses.
Yes, exactly, yes.
Yeah, And I mean if and if you look at this what's happening at the state level where when you know, whenever there's a resolution or you know, some kind of referendum on a local climate policy, the amount of money that is being spent to defeat these measures and the plans are getting better, Like Washington State's latest attempt at carbon pricing was you know, that should have won, and the only reason it didn't win was because of this
gusher of money. Yeah, and it's like we may not be able to keep these companies from being rich, but we you know, I think we can keep them from having access to the airwaves and destroying democracy in this way, you know, and then maybe we can have a fair fight.
Okay, The last thing I want to get your take on is just how the climate movement has evolved in recent years from your perspective and where you think it needs to go next. Yeah.
I mean, there's no doubt that there's some good indicators. You know, seven million people worldwide participating in the Global Climate strikes over a period of eight days. And I think what's really significant about that is not just that it's like the largest climate mobilization that we've ever seen,
but how quickly it came together. You know, you had the People's Climate March in twenty fourteen, which was amazing, and it was four hundred thousand people, but that was like a year in the making, you know, and it
was a lot. It was many, many millions of dollars from different groups and you know, bus loads of people, and it was it was just huge effort, right, And these strikes were huge efforts too, but really only got moving in August, right, And like in Montreal there were six hundred thousand people, which is two hundred thousand more
than at the People's Climate March. And I think that what that speaks to is you're just tapping into a zeitgeys like everybody in the city wants to come, you know, so as opposed to like we need to like move our troops, you know, and we're seeing it in the polling as you know, right that it's that this sense of urgency is way way different than it was even two years ago, when people, you know, even Democrats who said they cared about climate change would rank it at
the bottom of their list of priorities, and now you know, it's up there with health care and jobs. I still think it's completely ridiculous to ask people to rank their issues like that, and that we should be thinking about anything. But yeah, we have to figure out how we can you know, merge these issues because we shouldn't have to
rank and choose. But still, you know, that, unfortunately, is what it takes to get the attention of politicians, because you know, when you say you care about an issue but rank it nineteenth or twentieth on a list, then what that tells your elected representatives is, well, I can I can throw this one under the bus and not pay a political price, And that's what they did, and then that's what they've consistently done. So I think that is why we have these much bolder plans on the table.
An incredible mobilization from groups like Sunrise building all on you know, the intellectual and grassroots group, grassroots work of a network of environmental justice organizations who have been putting these ideas out there and putting them into practice in their communities, and the Climate Justice Alliance deserves a huge
amount of credit. In my book, I talk about how many of these ideas really come from the global South, from places like Ecuador and Bolivia and Nigeria where you've had really really dirty drilling and massive environmental disasters, and you have you know, movements, many of them led by indigenous people who have been talking about the notion of
ecological debt, of climate debt, and how you know. I quote Anaholica Navarro in a speech she made exactly ten years ago at the UN calling for a Marshall Plan for planet Earth and mobilizing funds on a scale never seen before, or to help countries like hers leap frog to clean energy leave their forests intact. So, you know, when I think about where we are, amy like I
have mixed emotions. I feel like if a helica had been listened to ten years ago, maybe maybe Brazil's forests wouldn't be on fire right now, and maybe they'd have more of a chance of protecting their glaciers, you know, on which you know, millions of people depend for fresh water. We have lost so much and we're not going to get it back, and we are on such a tight deadline.
So we need to just move. We need like a kind of a scale of change that is, you know, a term I first heard from Leanne Simpson, who's an amazing on a shnabe writer thinker in Canada, and she talks about punctuated transformation, right that things need to shift very quickly, and it needs to be a paradigm shift. And so when I think about how we get there, it's I think we can't think about this as something
that is about the climate movement. I think the climate movement is part of this, but I think it has to be about really engaging people who are outside of any definition of what the climate movement is now, but who have shown that they are able to organize large
numbers of people and mobilize large numbers of people. You know, the migrant rights movement should be central to this debate, and the reason they are not is not because people doing that organizing don't understand that they're also on the front lines of the climate crisis. Of course they know, right, It's because they are in a NonStop state of emergency dealing with family separation and human rights atrocities on the border.
And so we have to I think we really need to focus on how do we just really rethink this. And this is why you know, we had that on care work right and thinking about how do we tap into this wave of teacher mobilizations. You know, it's like I said, when we had this panel, a lot of folks were saying, this is the first time anyone's asked us about the Green New Deal. You know, it's so crazy and like and so it just can't it can't just be the climate movement. We have to look who's
who's kicking ass out there. Teachers are, you know, nurses are, Migrant rights organizers are, and and on and on and on, the Poor People's Campaign is. And it's like, how do we turn all of these streams into like a rushing river that is going in the same direction and is really about transforming the economy. Because I don't think we have time to think about how do we just build out the climate movement. I think it's about how do
we get all of these streams together. And I think we have to be honest about the fact that part of the reason that this hasn't happened is because a lot of the ways that folks get funding it encourages us to stay in our sort of issue silo and in our little narrow lane, and we don't have a lot of infrastructure, like movement infrastructure that creates spaces for people to kind of get to face to face and do that sort of hard work of getting on the
same page and dealing with you know, difficult history and past mistakes. We spend a lot of time online, less and less of it face to face. So this is I think the work, and you know, I don't feel sanguine about it. I feel like, gosh, we have a hell of a lot to do and not a lot of time. What I feel hopeful about is that I feel like the appetite for transformational change is greater than
at any point in my lifetime. I think there's a widespread understanding that, you know, we shouldn't be afraid of deep change because this sort of safe centrism is what has produced the kind of radicalism of Trump. So especially with younger folks, you know, I really see a difference, Like when I speak to people to audiences, like the younger folks in the audience are like really up for it. They're not afraid of the connections. They want an intersectional movement.
They love making the connections. The more the better. And it's sort of you know my generation and older who are just like, really are you making this harder?
You know, right?
Right? You would think that building a broader movement is generally something movements want. And if that's not the case, like what is going on kind of ideologically, and what's the subtext of that, Like what are you afraid of?
Who are you afraid of? And you know, a lot of it, like I think some of it is like kind of the legacy of McCarthyism, red baiting, Like you know, this country has been through various wars on the left right, and that's part of what put people into their sort of issue silos right where it's like, you know, no, we don't want we don't want to change society. We just want to change this one thing, right, Like we want this one group to have you know, better acts
or whatever it is. And there's sort of a fear when you start talking about systems and like a shift in actually the operating system that's governing society. And there's a history to that fear that I think maybe needs to be made visible and legible before we actually will be willing to build the kind of movement that we need.
That's great. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it, and it was great. It was just great talking to you.
Thanks so much for doing this and for all your work.
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