This Changes Everything argues that the period during which gradual, incremental alterations to individual lifestyles might have had an effect on reversing global warming has passed.

Yet, as the author makes clear in an exhaustively researched exploration of our current dependence on the structures of capitalism and energy consumption (the two are, Klein demonstrates, inextricably connected), the alternative is rendering our planet uninhabitable. Klein recognizes her own part in this phenomenon when, a few pages later, she refers to her belief that “there was nothing wrong with the shiny card in my wallet attesting to my ‘elite’ frequent flyer status.”įor a writer like Klein, the word “elite” is charged with meaning: the argument underpinning her new volume (which has just been shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-fiction) is that if we are to put the brakes on an accelerating process of ecological ravishment, a lot of very rich people stand to lose. The image is impressive both in vividly capturing the nature of the catastrophe at the heart of the book, and in highlighting the cognitive dissonance facing those who attempt to address the realities of global warming: the very fossil fuels used to power the plane are responsible for the predicament in which the travellers found themselves. The reason? The plane’s wheels had literally sunk into the melting tarmac. Airways Flight 3935 who were forced to disembark at the airport in Washington, D.C., during the summer of 2012. Klein opens her book on climate change with a sobering image: passengers on U.S. The author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, and a self-confessed former climate change skeptic, comes out swinging in a book that takes direct aim at corporations, governments, and – surprisingly – climate activists responsible for promulgating an existential crisis that, in the words of one scientist “poses a clear and present danger to civilization.”

Klein author this changes everything