Why naomi klein is wrong

And now this right-wing friendly model is being pushed in Washington State, thanks to Initiative What Klein labels right-wing is actually friendly to and designed for the very groups she purports to care about: families below or near the poverty line; undocumented immigrants; over-leveraged folks struggling to stay middle-class.

CTC: Klein turns logic on its head. Following a decade of nearly total legislative silence on carbon taxes — a silence imposed not just by Republican denialists but by a myopic U. The evidence proves otherwise. In British Columbia, two-thirds of the tax cuts have ended up in corporate pockets, while carbon emissions have been rising in recent years and the fracking industry has boomed.

In any case, I is explicitly and intentionally structured differently, to apply 75 percent of carbon tax revenues to cut the Washington sales tax. In contrast, the Washington carbon tax would rise 3. Klein Paragraph 5: By some estimates, I would raise gasoline and electricity prices less than 15 percent by in Washington State—hardly enough to jumpstart an urgent, sweeping phase-out of fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, it would offset carbon revenues by cutting taxes for big corporations, including major polluters.

According to the Seattle Times, Boeing could see windfalls of tens of millions annually. The whole point of the Washington state initiative is to establish a template for other states or, if control of Congress can be flipped, for a national carbon tax that can rise briskly and deliver massive carbon reductions, as we noted in a blog post last month. But governments at the time were seized with the idea that there should be no restraints on industry.

When we meet in her Toronto home, Klein is juggling a schedule that combines the standard author book readings and television interviews and planning for an event in New York City billed as the biggest climate march ever seen. Her husband, film-maker Avi Lewis, is out shooting a companion film due for release in January.

The two text back and forth during our chat. She drives a car it is a hybrid. There is a brightly coloured plastic playhouse in the garden that was probably made in China. Yet she confesses to getting weepy when she thinks about the future under climate change.

In a long conversation over the dining table, Klein says she is not about to purge her life of plastics or fossil fuels. And she is definitely not going to subscribe to the idea that climate change ranks above all other causes. It is written much more for people who would never read a book about climate change but are engaged with economic justice of other kinds.

That is where Klein believes she can do the most good. People who are sitting out for whatever reasons. The idea of writing about climate change took hold of Klein around the time of the Copenhagen climate summit — legendary now as a failure of international diplomacy. Klein came to the meeting planning to write about the great fight between rich and poor countries over the historic responsibility the US and Europe bore for causing climate change.

She had dared to hope at one point that a climate deal would be the great equaliser — compensating Africa and Asia for colonialism. But the summit collapsed under the weight of those expectations. Leaders from Africa and small south Pacific Island states, which are slowly drowning under rising sea levels, wanted a more aggressive action that would limit the temperature rise to 1.

It was a difficult time for Klein personally as well. After the publication of Shock Doctrine, she was on the road for almost two years.

She barely saw her husband. While she was travelling the world giving speeches and being hailed as an inspirational figure, Klein found herself in a rut. But I have seen it enough that I have told myself that if I ever get to that point, I will stay home. There were other difficulties. In her new book, This Changes Everything , Naomi Klein lays out her view that climate change should be used as a catalyst for broad social reform.

She also offers a harsh critique of those who choose other strategies, including Environmental Defense Fund. Klein and EDF agree that climate change is a grave threat. And we agree that it represents a profound market failure, because the social cost of carbon pollution is generally not factored into the price of doing business.

But we disagree on whether we need to radically restructure the entire economic system her view or correct the failures of the market and harness its power ours. Both are true of EDF, but her book leaves out a great deal of important information, with the result that those strategies look sinister when in fact they are open, straightforward and effective. She talks about our alliances with some companies, which we undertake when we think they will help the environment, without mentioning the many times we pressure, protest, and sue companies, or go toe to toe with their lobbyists.

For instance, we did join with Duke Energy and others to push Congress to pass limits on carbon pollution — but at the same time we sued Duke Energy all the way to the Supreme Court and won, forcing them to clean up some of their dirtiest coal plants.

Shortly after, when American Electric Power was trying to gut clean air protections in Capitol Hill, we leafleted, marched on their corporate headquarters, and rented a billboard across the street from it, asking how many lives AEP was willing to sacrifice by fighting clean air rules.