This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

This Changes Everything Review

This Changes Everything is Naomi Klein’s argument that climate change is the most powerful catalyst for progressive political change in a generation, if the left is willing to take it seriously as such. Published in 2014, it arrived as the gap between scientific urgency and political action had become impossible to ignore, and its central thesis — that the market-based solutions that have dominated environmental policy are structurally incapable of producing change at the required scale — is stated with unusual bluntness.

Klein’s argument has two main pillars. The first is historical and empirical: the mechanisms that neoliberal environmentalism favored — carbon markets, offsets, public-private partnerships — have, over thirty years of earnest effort, produced negligible reductions in greenhouse gas emissions while generating considerable profit for a small number of actors. The reason, Klein argues, is structural: these mechanisms were designed to accommodate capitalism rather than challenge it, and capitalism’s growth imperative is incompatible with the emissions reductions that climate science requires.

The second pillar is political: the climate crisis, properly understood, is not separable from the other crises of our era — austerity, inequality, the erosion of public goods, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the sacrifice of poor communities’ health for industrial convenience. A movement that recognizes these connections is both more honest and more likely to build the political coalition that change at this scale requires.

Klein’s critics argue that her rejection of market mechanisms is ideologically predetermined — that she would oppose cap-and-trade even if it worked — and that her alternative vision is underspecified. These are fair challenges. But as a diagnosis of why thirty years of mainstream environmentalism failed to produce proportionate change, This Changes Everything remains essential.

Klein’s Project and Place in Her Work

This Changes Everything is the third in an informal trilogy of big-argument books by Naomi Klein, following No Logo (1999), her anti-corporate manifesto, and The Shock Doctrine (2007), her account of how political and economic elites exploit crises to push through unpopular free-market policies. Climate is, in a sense, the logical destination of that earlier work: here Klein argues that the same neoliberal worldview she dissected in The Shock Doctrine — deregulation, privatisation, the supremacy of markets — is precisely what has prevented humanity from responding to the gravest crisis it faces. The book spent months on the bestseller lists, won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and was adapted into a 2015 documentary directed by Klein’s husband, Avi Lewis. Klein went on to extend its arguments in On Fire (2019), framing the Green New Deal as the kind of justice-centred response she calls for here.

What gives the book its authority is the reporting behind it. Klein spent years among frontline movements — Indigenous land defenders, anti-fracking campaigners, communities fighting pipelines — and the phrase “Blockadia” she coins for this dispersed grassroots resistance has entered the climate vocabulary. The book is not abstract polemic; it is built from specific places, lawsuits, and confrontations.

The Central Argument and Its Critics

Klein’s thesis is bracingly direct: the climate crisis is not a problem that capitalism can solve from within, because the growth imperative at the heart of the system is fundamentally incompatible with the deep, rapid emissions cuts that physics demands. She marshals the failure of three decades of market-based remedies — carbon trading, offsets, public-private partnerships — as evidence, arguing they were designed to accommodate the existing order rather than challenge it, and that they have enriched a few while emissions kept climbing. From this she draws a second, more hopeful claim: that the only response equal to the scale of the crisis is one that also addresses inequality, Indigenous dispossession, and the erosion of public goods — that climate action and social justice are not competing priorities but a single project. Critics on the right and centre have argued that her rejection of market mechanisms is ideologically predetermined, that she would oppose a carbon price even if it worked, and that her positive vision of a “just transition” is sketched far more thinly than her critique. These are fair objections. But as a diagnosis of why mainstream environmentalism failed to produce change proportionate to the danger, the book remains difficult to dismiss, and its insistence that the powerless bear the heaviest climate costs has only grown more evidently true.

Who Should Read It and How

This Changes Everything is written for the general reader rather than the specialist, and it assumes no prior grounding in climate science or economics — Klein explains as she goes, and her prose is urgent and lucid without tipping into apocalyptic alarmism. It will most reward readers already persuaded that climate change is real and serious but frustrated by the gap between scientific urgency and political paralysis, and looking for an explanation of why that gap has proved so stubborn. At 566 pages it is long, and the argument is made more capaciously than it strictly needs to be, so readers pressed for time can move through the documentary middle sections more quickly without losing the thread. It is best approached in dialogue with other recent climate writing — David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth for the stakes, Klein’s own The Shock Doctrine for the political backstory — and read critically, weighing her structural diagnosis against the objections of those who believe markets can be harnessed rather than abandoned. Taken that way, it remains one of the most influential and provoking statements of the climate-justice position yet written.

Limitations

Critics argue Klein’s rejection of market mechanisms is ideologically predetermined rather than empirically derived. The positive vision of what a just transition would look like is less developed than the critique. At 566 pages, the argument could be made more economically. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.0/5 — The most ambitious political argument about climate change — Klein’s thesis that capitalism and the climate are fundamentally incompatible is controversial but rigorously argued and difficult to dismiss.