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Parts of Naomi Klein’s new climate-revolution/kill-capitalism manifesto, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, make for damn good reading. Especially worthy are chapters and sections that explore the group-grope shenanigans of big corporations and pro-business environmental groups as they spent much of the last decade jumping into bed with one another.
But the good bits are not enough to salvage This Changes Everything, a 560-page call-to-arms in which Ms. Klein proposes to overthrow four centuries of Enlightenment-driven human achievement. Down with Francis Bacon, Adam Smith, the scientific method and pretty much all of the core ideas that created the Western world. Notwithstanding all the media attention she’s been getting on the book for the last few weeks, it’s a campaign that’s doomed to fail for any number of reasons.
But there is enough in Ms. Klein’s latest work to keep readers of all ideological stripes engaged, if not enraged. And that includes the free-marketers she wants to put out of business.
A major Klein target is Richard Branson, the media-darling head of Virgin Group who — after a personal PowerPoint presentation from Al Gore on climate change at the Branson mansion — concluded that “we are looking at Armageddon.” Mr. Branson was so alarmed at this pending end of the world shock that he decided to launch a “new Virgin approach to business.” He called it Gaia Capitalism, and made a high-profile pledge at the 2006 Clinton Global Initiative in Manhattan to spend $3-billion to develop bio-fuels as an alternative to climate-destroying oil and gas. Mr. Branson also launched the Virgin Earth Challenge and the Carbon War Room.
Great plans, but all hilariously exposed in meticulous detail by Ms. Klein as a bunch of self-serving corporate public relations. In a 25-page chapter sub-titled “The Green Billionaires Won’t Save Us,” Ms. Klein documents the various failures of Mr. Branson to live up to any of his own climate hype. Billions were never invested, profits were not diverted, the earth challenges fizzled and the war rooms were empty.
Meanwhile, Virgin’s carbon emissions rose as the airline expanded with ever more aircraft and fossil fuel consumption.
Ms. Klein tries to give Mr. Branson the benefit of the doubt — maybe his intentions were good — but eventually concludes that there’s no hope for these and other capitalists who talk a good green game but are still playing in the carbon big leagues.
Other green billionaries skewered are Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and T. Boone Pickens, each of whom has a history of cozying up to the climate issue while their feet remained firmly planted in the fossil fuel world. Ms. Klein describes them as a “parade of billionaires who were going to invent a new form of enlightened capitalism but decided that, on second thought, the old one was just too profitable to surrender.”
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