This Changes Everything

Klein begins with the anecdote of a plane that gets stuck in the melting runway tarmac in Washington. A tow-truck is brought in to drag the plane free. The year was 2012, and the summer was “unusually hot,”which was the result of the “profligate burning of fossil fuels” (2).

The anecdote becomes a metaphor for the problem of climate change and our responses to it. Faced with the problems brought on by the burning of fossil fuels, our answer, like the airline’s, is to carry on as normal. We’re pushing the earth’s resources to breaking-point in the search for fossil fuels, the environment is throwing us warning signs, and we just carry on. Instead of facing the crisis, we are “doubling down on the thing that’s causing it” (3).

Klein says she herself was a climate denier, in the way that most of us are: by simply not focusing fully on the problem, by choosing to remain hazy about the details and continuing to live our lives as normal. She gives examples of the possible explanations we give ourselves: technology will come to the rescue, or all we can do is focus on our own individual efforts.