Green activist Naomi Klein has a new book out today. If past form is anything to go by – No Logo; The Shock Doctrine – it will become an instant bestseller and will be informing liberal arguments for months and years to come. Here’s what you need to know about her latest, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.

1. It’s all about Naomi.

“At some point about seven years ago I realised I had become so convinced we were headed towards a grim ecological collapse that I was losing my capacity to enjoy my time in nature.”

Bomb the global economy back to the Dark Ages right now! We cannot, under any circumstances, allow Naomi’s feelings, mental health or picnics to be jeopardised by prosperity!

2. Even the BP spill is really about Naomi.

“After more tests, my doctor told me my hormone levels were much too low and I’d probably miscarry for the third time. My mind raced back to the Gulf – the toxic fumes I had breathed in for days and the contaminated water I had waded in. I searched on the chemicals BP was using in huge quantities and found reams of online chatter linking them to miscarriages. I had no doubt that it was my doing.”

(Though a bit later Naomi is forced to admit that, no, it was just an ectopic pregnancy which had nothing to do with the sins of Big Oil).

3. Naomi is a watermelon – green on the outside, red on the inside

“What the climate needs now is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.”

and [from an interview in the Guardian]

“We need an ideological battle. It is still considered politically unthinkable just to introduce straight-up, polluter-pays punitive measures – particularly in the US.” To Klein, environmentalists should have just gone to war on business, and on the whole concept of capitalism.

and [from an interview in Macleans]

“…we must confront the reigning, unquestioned ideology that sees privatization as always good, and doesn’t question the logic of austerity, doesn’t question the logic of pro-corporate, free trade deals that have stood in the way of progress on climate.”

4. Naomi has been watching the way Jay Z and Beyonce use Blue and learned a useful lesson.

“What gets me most are not the scary studies about melting glaciers, the ones I used to avoid. It’s the books I read to my two-year old. Looking for A Moose is one of his favourites. It’s about a bunch of kids who really want to see a moose. They search high and low – through a forest, a swamp, in brambly bushes and up a mountain. (The joke is that there are moose hiding on each page). In the end, the animals come out and the ecstatic kids proclaim: “We’ve never ever seen so many moose!” On about the 75th reading, it suddenly hit me: he might never see a moose.”

Naomi, you and your son live in Canada. The world’s moose population is currently over a million, half of it in Canada. You are more than rich enough to take a long vacation with your family to gaze wistfully at whatever species you want be it the marine iguanas of the Galapagos or the Siberian Tiger. So by what tortured logic do you imagine it is probable or even possible that your son might “never see a moose”?

Read the rest at Breitbart London

No Logo author Naomi Klein. . .

Klein: No Logo, No Shopping, No Freedom

. . . has a solution to climate change and it goes like this: punitive taxation; massive wealth re-distribution; the abolition of free trade and free markets; a state-enforced end to to the “cult of shopping”; the whole to be supervised by a New World Order of selfless illuminati (who presumably resemble Naomi Klein).

If it weren’t so scary it would almost be funny, the way the leftie Canadian activist on the basis of no evidence whatsoever declares that the time has come to strip the human race of all its hard-won freedoms in order to save the planet from a non-existent problem. Unfortunately, Klein means it and her audience takes her seriously. Just read the first comment below her screed:

I can’t say enough good things about this article. It’s a manifesto for the next 100 years. Corporate capitalism is doomed by the immutable fact of finite resources; it will require planning and sharing to sustain civilization in the future, which is heretical thinking in the boardrooms of elite capitalists.

O-K. And the rationale for doing all this stuff would be what, exactly, Naomi? Some new devastating proof you’ve managed to unearth, perhaps, showing once and for all that the measurements are wrong and global warming didn’t stop in 1998? A dazzling refutation of Svensmark’s cosmic ray theory? Surprising new data showing that, contrary to the false consciousness promoted by the running dog lackey capitalist pigs who write our history books, totalitarian planning regimes of the kind you advocate in fact brought nothing but bounty, happiness and environmental loveliness to Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Kim Il Sung’s North Korea?

Nope. All Naomi can manage by way of justification is this:

Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. The heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels are already causing temperatures to increase. If we are not on a radically different energy path by the end of this decade, we are in for a world of pain.

Er, Naomi. Here are some things you should know before you type out your next eco-fascistic horror rant. 1. That “97 per cent” figure: it’s kind of an urban myth. 2. The heat-trapping gas and fossil fuel theory: it’s at best moot, not least because the “feedbacks” – as you’d know if you’d bothered to do a scintilla of research – are still so ill-understood. 3. the “radically different energy path” bit: Says who? And on what evidence? 4. “a world of pain”. Right. And you’ll have done a cost benefit analysis here will you? You can show us that the freedom-destroying, economy-ruining totalitarianism you advocate will a) make the blindest bit of difference to global mean temperatures and b) cause less pain than a world where it’s ever so slightly warmer and where people are free to shop without jackbooted Canadian eco-activists stamping up and down shrieking: “Das ist Verboten!”?

I don’t think so.

One thought on “Only a totalitarian New World Order can save us now says Naomi Klein”

Duane Phillips says:19th November 2011 at 2:01 amNaomi Klein is a credit to hypocrites everywhere; she takes hypocrisy to new levels only matched by Al Gore himself. She must believe that come the Millenium she and her fellows will be flying around in electric Zeppelins, dropping carbon credits on the peons below while they drink fair trade champagne and plan their next forays into utopian activism. They are truly a disease, but also the cure; their plans will see to it that their pampered sort will have a hard time surviving to the next millenium. Unluckily, they’ll be dragging a lot of us down that same oubliette.

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