This Changes Everything Insights

The must-read analysis of the key insights from "This Changes Everything" by Naomi Klein — presented by Athena.

Averting disaster isn’t about carbon, it’s about capitalism, and the solution requires nothing less than remaking the economy.

Naomi Klein, an award-winning Canadian author, journalist, activist, and filmmaker, has made a career of exposing the gnarly underbelly of capitalism and consumer culture. Her first book, No Logo (1999), took a hard look at brand-oriented hyper-consumer culture, worker exploitation and corporate dominance. Klein followed it up with The Shock Doctrine (2007), in which she examined the way harmful free market policies tend to be adopted in the wake of disaster, when desperate citizens are vulnerable to exploitation.

With This Changes Everything (2014), the third in Klein’s anti-globalization trilogy, she turns her attention to climate change and global warming. Klein’s thesis is that neoliberal capitalism is the true source of climate change — and that we must transform this failed economic system if we’re to have any hope of addressing global warming.

The New York Times Book Review called This Changes Everything “the most momentous and contentious environmental book since Silent Spring,” which, in 1962, caused major controversy for exposing the harmful effects of pesticides. This Changes Everything — adapted into a feature documentary directed by Klein’s husband — paints the climate crisis as a confrontation between capitalism and the planet, and finds a glimmer of hope in climate justice movements and social mobilization that might lead to an alternative future.