Naomi Klein: Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism?
it’s pretty much taken as a given in climate policy circles that if there’s to be any hope at all of hewing to 2 degrees, the EU and the US will have to cut their emissions drastically—by 80 percent or more over the coming
.. Klein contends not just that emission trends can be turned around in time, but that pretty much everything else that’s wrong with society today—inequality, unemployment, the lack of access in large parts of the world to electricity or clean water or health care—can be righted in the process. Climate change, she writes, “if treated as a true planetary emergency,” could “become a galvanizing force for humanity, leaving us all not just safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are safer and fairer in all kinds of other ways as well.”
.. All you really need to know to understand the plan is that, if you’re American, you currently live in a 12,000-watt society; if you’re Dutch, you live in an 8,000-watt society; if you’re Swiss, you live in a 5,000-watt society; and if you’re Bangladeshi you live in a 300-watt society.