Bishop Hill Klein babble
Sep 19, 2014 Climate: WG3 Greens Will Boisvert, writing at the Breakthrough Institute blog, has written a long and relentlessly detailed takedown of Naomi Klein's latest offering, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Boisvert is rather more mainstream on climate change than I think most BH readers are, but still finds Klein's positions self-indulgent, badly thought through and rather foolish.
Klein’s ...understands, rightly, that a thoroughgoing mobilization of public resources is necessary to confront the challenge of climate change. But her uninformed, dogmatic treatment of the substance of that problem, so typical of the Left’s approach, generates only confusion and misdirection. To make a useful contribution to changing everything, the Left could begin by changing itself. It could start by redoing its risk assessments and rethinking its phobic hostility to nuclear power. It could abandon the infatuation with populist insurrection and advance a serious politics of systematic state action. It could stop glamorizing austerity under the guise of spiritual authenticity and put development prominently on its environmental agenda. It could accept that industry and technology do indeed distance us from nature — and in doing so can protect nature from human extractions. And it could realize that, as obnoxious as capitalism can be, scapegoating it won’t spare us the hard thinking and hard trade-offs that a sustainable future requires.
Reader Comments (35)
So Heidi whats the footprint of the Hollywood film industry ?
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/09/16/United-Nations-Names-Leonardo-DiCaprio-Messenger-of-Peace-For-Addressing-Climate-Change
Did Leonardo get out his Private Jet to go from his Luxury 10 bedroom Mansion in Beverly Hills to his 5 Star Hotel in plush 5th Avenue New York to his grand UN Champagne Caviar reception to pick his Gong up.
Bet his great fellow pretty boy rival Matt Damon must be well pissed off Leonardo got his one first.
There is a classic clip of Leonardo Di Caprio at a press conference at The Cannes Film Festival promoting some Eco Drivel documentary having to defend Al Gore,s 5 Stately Mansions and all his heated Swimming Pools ,
I would love to find that on YouTube .Leonardo Squirming up and defiantly was not acting classic.
Yes, what the review brings out is the weird sexual and personal imagery which seems to get mixed up with ideas about politics, economy and environment. As in the long bits about her pregnancy, and as in what the review describes as
This is really weird new age stuff. Is it even new age? Where on earth does it come from? The incredibly self indulgent irrelevant pages about her musings while staring into a swamp thinking about her ectopic pregnancy?
If a man did this sort of thing, everything mixed in together with constant day dreams about sex and physical functions, while lamenting just about every aspect of modern life from soup to nuts, we would just say this is a confused nutter.
Its a real indictment actually - its a reflection of a common view of women as infantile and non-rigorous thinkers - that this sort of thing is given a free ride. Some of us who had real feminist mothers, aunts, wives will recall how the thing they always wanted was to be judged by the same intellectual standards, because they knew for damn sure they were up to them.
Unlike Klein.
Like Gore and Leo DiC, Klein is a dream come through. Won't be surprised if she got discovered on the pay of Heartland 8)
Russell Brand, in Jimmy Choo shoes and without the beard.
The thing that struck me about her argument was that she has rather marvellous breasts.
*sits back smiling as feminist drudges take offence at the irony*
http://blog.epa.gov/epaconnect/2014/06/reddit-ask-me-anything-with-epa-administrator-gina-mccarthy/
Copy and Paste this link its an online public consultation with Obama,s Climate Change strategist.
Google "Reddit ask me anything Climate Change".
Someone should have asked her if making Energy more restrictive and expensive and making thousands unemployed is really a good way to reduce CO2 and mitigate the effects of AGW and how many bedrooms she has in her private mansion?
"Boisvert is rather more mainstream on climate change"
Which is a good thing, as that much harder to dismiss.
It used to be that self-styled serious thinkers of the left were concerned to distinguish themselves from "vulgar Marxism" -- with Naomi Klein we have the phenomenon of "infantile Marxism" and she's proud of it!!
Boisvert is moderate on climate change in the same way that there are considered to be moderate religious voices within the Iranian theocracy.
The best introduction to Klein’s doombuster science fantasy epic is by Naomi herself at
http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/science-says-revolt
It begins:
She heard a talk which she found incomprehensible given by a scientist with pink hair and was converted.
Some of us had great fun poking fun at this rubbish in comments on the article. The Greens and the Klein fans were nowhere.
This has an effect. Journals like the New Statesman rely on hits on their websites, and the Klein article got them. But their journalists must sometimes look at the reactions of readers and take note.
Klein is magnitudes more famoius and influential than Mann or Cook or any of our other favourite punching balls. Going wherevever she gets publicity and pointing out what a load of green manure she’s spreading may be the most effective way of getting our message across.
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.....the title says all we need to know to understand her, and their true motives.
Global warming / Climate Change never was about a alleged piffling alteration in global temperatures. It's all about power, influence, control. Same old, same old.
At least someone is willing, no matter their problems buying into the climate kook assertions, to question the lefty presumptions that somehow a dictatorship of the proletariat would solve anything, much less climate.
No matter how many times I see the phrase - any phrase - with the word sustainable in it I just lose the will to live. The dictionary definition is able to be maintained at a certain rate or level: so, wtf is a 'sustainable future'?
I mean, I can well understand the need of the left have a 'sustainable under-class' - to do their bidding; or of a capitalist to have 'sustainable profits' - to maintain a nation's wealth; but other than that it's just a meaningless construct: a codeword for the Left.
Klein's babble and Boisviert's bloviating alike are merely different approaches to the same undesirable goal.
'Sustainability' is a mantra for superstitious savages.
'Innovation' is the reason every forecast from the savages has failed.
It's time for the adults to abandon what has repeatedly failed. Let's work with purpose toward what has always succeeded.
Klein's positions self-indulgent, badly thought through and rather foolish. so normal for Klein then.
Still more fodder for the coffee tables of the chatter classes , because like her other work her readership is very much this ‘elite ‘ chatter classes , amongst which are the Guardian journalists currently given this book a free plug, has opposed ‘to the working classes ‘ who in realty have little time for her and her ideas.
I hate to carp, but wouldn't a better title be "Klein battle"? To play on "Klein bottle", as Klein's argument does not hold water, and her vision can not exist in the real world, but only in a fourth dimension.
Two more reports on Klein's new book:
Alex Cull's blog - Klein, bottled and sold. "Hence the Klein bottle paradox – inside is outside and outside is inside, as it were, and hence the contradictions of someone travelling great distances to sell a book that tells the rest of us we shouldn’t be travelling great distances to sell stuff."
Steven Poole at New Statesman - Could climate change action rejuvenate worldwide democracy? "cynics will be gladdened by Naomi Klein’s new book. For in it she does explicitly argue that the present “climate emergency” provides an excellent excuse for global revolution."
"Unfortunately, Klein periodically veers into hippie-ish mumbo-jumbo."
I have not read Klein's latest book yet - but "infantile Marxism" certainly describes her earlier tree eating tomes. What I didn't see in Boisvert's lengthy review was an assessment of what "This" is. The little I have gleaned from other reviews strongly suggests that Klein does not know what she is talking about when it comes to current climate processes as well as energy supply and demand. For example, she apparently goes on about the fisheries that have moved from Washington to Hawaii because of increases in acidity of the water in the estuaries used for aqua-farming. I have looked at the research. It is due to cyclical up-welling not climate driven changes in water acidity - as is essentially proven by the fact that the folks who moved are aqua-farming in Hawaii.
One final coincidence: Mann highlights her book on his Facebook page. The infantile tag seems to be appropriate.
I don't think Klein's testiculation* is sustainable.
* talking bollocks
We know what level of scientific debate is at large in the Climate game. When the late Ugo Cheves of Venezuela turned up at Copenhagen in December 2009, stood at the lecturn & Announced that "Capitalism has caused Climate Change!", & got a standing ovation from all 4,000 delegates, it becomes oh so obvious!
I read through an extract of her book in the Globe and Mail and was astonished at the conclusion regarding the effect of globalization on manufacturing solar panels in Ontario.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/naomi-klein-the-price-of-free-trade-is-unchecked-climate-change/article20578823/?page=1
She basically maintains that high cost solar panels from Ontario would be better for climate change than lower cost solar panels from China. And it's all capitalism's fault for undermining the battle against climate change.
Sebastian's comment made me wonder if Naomi Klein is the Sarah Palin of the left.
@potentilla We noticed a while ago that bizarrely the new left exhibits "right wing" characteristics : simplistic kneejerk reactions, anger, intolerance and hate.
...15 years ago in Australia I worked at a conference where she spoke. Her lecture was absolute drivel , yet the room seemed to be full of starstruck youngsters who were in awe of herThey behave like new Alf Garnetts
"Sebastian's comment made me wonder if Naomi Klein is the Sarah Palin of the left."
Actually, that's simply an unfair and ignorant comparison.
I watched all 90 minutes of Palin's gubernatorial debates, and her knowledge of the ins and outs of Interior Department (that's a federal level department) were tough, tough going for me. I was left unsure of what was being said, Alaska being rather far away from me.
But environmental science is my master's field, and a buddy of mine is an environmental lawyer vetting regulations for the Western Solicitor General's Office, which does cover Alaska. But "the dolt" Palin grasped the substance of these matters for Alaska more thoroughly than we - the over-educated - do!
Boisvert has this back-asswards, as do swathes of comfortable Western environmentalists.
Industry and technology protects humans from nature.
It provides heat, light, food, and shelter. It provides electricity, health care, transport and the internet. A lot of the world still doesn't have these things. They are at the mercy of nature, and the vagaries of weather-climate. It's much worse than a week-end camping trip gone wrong. It is reflected in human life expectancy.
From the German; klein = small; insignificant. If only...
Actually, the first illustration of a klein bottle on the Wiki page makes a wonderful symbol for the cranio-fundamentally challenged.
Technology also protects nature from us. When everyone lived out in little farms in the US, people hunted everything: squirrels, rabbits, deer, turkey, turtles and the turkey almost went extinct and even deer became scarce. In Africa people eat bush-meat because they must. But it is lots of work and as soon as their economy improves they will stop, just like in the US. Recent immigrants to the US who live in the suburbs are often amazed at all the animals running around (like so many geese they are a nuisance where I live) that no one is eating.
In 2008 Sara Palin said something to the effect that she wasn't one to blame all of climate change on man. You've fallen for the MSM narrative about her. She was an inspired executive.
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" It could stop glamorizing austerity under the guise of spiritual authenticity"
Klein, like Monbiot is on the anti progress, anti capitalist extreme right. It's extremely common among environmentalists. The rabid ones (including the seemingly conciliatory types like Mike Hulme) are generally of that persuasion.
I skimmed Klein's book at the local book store and have it on order from my local library. I went looking for what she meant by the "This" in "This changes everything". It refers to climate change but there is only a vague allusion to what it is. I looked for what she took to be indicators of the type of climate change that could possibly change everything. She says in her introduction that she had largely ignored climate change until a conversation with a young Bolivian bureaucrat in Geneva told her that La Paz was in danger of running out of water because of the shrinking glaciers it depended upon for its water supply. I checked. The glacier is disappearing and its melt water did feed into the La Paz water supply. However, if Klein or her two research assistants had bothered to check she would have discovered that the Chacaltaya glacier was all of 0.22 km2 in 1940 and would have been adding a miniscule amount of water to the city's water supply. The glacier had entirely disappeared by 2009, largely due to a lack of precipitation. The GISS temperature is very spotty but there is no indication of global warming for La Paz.
Mark me down as totally unimpressed.
bernie1815
Good research and it highlights the dangers of jumping to conclusions in the battle to look cool and caring.
Naomi Klein is the Naomi Klein of the climate obsessed left. She is uniquely reactionary, ignorant, aggressively resistant to new information, dogmatic, impractical, untested, bloviating: She is one of a kind. There is no need to compare her reality with the deceptive parody of anyone that Naomi's pals have fabricated.
It is interesting to calculate just how much water Chacaltaya glacier may have provided La Paz with back in 1940. Of course a "sustainable" glacier can only provide water from melting snow, not from the glacier itself. It is quite dry on the altiplano in winter, but let us assume that the glacier was covered by one meter of snow every winter (density 0.4, at the top end for wind.packed snow) , that all of this melted over a 6-month period without any evaporation loss and that all of it reached the La Paz water supply system without any loss or leakage. This would amount to 220,000 x 1 x 0,4 = 88,000 cubic meters. Spread out evenly over six months this is just over one gallon per second. Not a lot of water for a city of about a million inhabitants (though of course they were rather fewer in 1940).
"The left ...could accept that industry and technology do indeed distance us from nature — and in doing so can protect nature from human extractions."
Don't forget that industry and technology are also required to protect Humanity from nature, I guess even the left humanity...
Boisvert comments are pertinent.
Why do I get a feeling of Marie-Antoinette-does-therapy-while-chanting-Chomsky?
Her first book No Lego sets the scene of a childhood without toys or friends.
Then in the Shock Doctrine she dabbles in Chomskyism. Like bell-ringers going through every permutation of the bells she endlessly re-arranges the words "neo-con", "Friedman", "Chicago", "capitalism", "globalisation".
And now this. 576 pages of woo. I really hope that one day she comes out of her therapy and finds some inner peace. She could do something fulfilling like aromatherapy or looking after pets.