Her thesis is that the climate movement has been a victim of appalling timing. Scientists came to a decisive view on the dangers of global warming in the 1980s, a decade when faith in the power of unfettered markets surged and it was harder than ever to make the case for collective action, market regulation and a strong role for the state.
Now, she argues, a looming climate crisis has created a “historic opportunity” to attack globalisation, privatisation and other aspects of an economic model that is fundamentally at odds with a habitable climate. Just as the disasters of the Great Depression and the second world war ushered in a swath of social and economic reforms, from retirement pensions to public housing, Klein hopes the climate threat will galvanise a grassroots movement to revive vigorous market interventionism.
This is, of course, precisely the type of thinking that some conservative writers have long claimed underpins a “watermelon” climate movement (green on the outside, red on the inside) filled with closet socialists using global warming to advance their ideological aims. On this, Klein is frank: “I have long been greatly concerned about the science of global warming – but I was propelled into a deeper engagement with it partly because I realized it could be a catalyst for forms of social and economic justice in which I already believed.”
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