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.