148 pages 4 hours read

Naomi Klein

This Changes Everything

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014

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Important Quotes

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“All of us who live high consumer lifestyles […] are metaphorically passengers on flight 3935. Faced with a crisis that threatens our survival as a species, our entire culture is continuing to do the very thing that caused the crisis, only with an extra dose of elbow grease.” 


(Introduction, Page 2)

A favourite rhetorical device of Klein’s in this book is to use an anecdote like this to introduce a point, or even make of it an extended metaphor for the point she’s making. It’s remarkably effective because it brings a bit of color and life into the argument. The case of flight 3935, which sank in the hot tarmac and had to be towed out by another fossil-fuelled vehicle becomes an image for the absurdity of not seeing the climate danger signs, and just carrying on as normal, or rather even burning more fossil fuels to get us out of the problem burning fossil fuels created in the first place. The image is effective in gently implicating us all as “passengers” of this process, passively continuing along a destructive path without questioning it sufficiently.

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“Finding new ways to pirate the commons and profit from disaster is what our current system is built to do, left to its own devices it is capable of nothing else.” 


(Introduction, Page 9)

Here, Klein is discussing what she calls “disaster capitalism.”This is the grim scenario where, as climate change begins to impact and destabilise our societies, companies set themselves up to benefit from this, be that through re-insurance schemes in likely disaster zones, luxury disaster prevention for the wealthy, or patents on drought-resistant crops. Klein points out that these things are already underway, and this is one model of the future we could be facing.