The Left vs. the Climate Why Progressives Should Reject Naomi Klein's Pastoral Fantasy — and Embrace Our High-Energy Planet

Over the last few years, leading progressives have argued that solving global warming requires radical changes to how we live our lives. "Real climate solutions," wrote Naomi Klein in a celebrated essay for The Nation, "are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture, or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users…"
Now Klein has published a book-length case for what Will Boisvert, who reviews her book for Breakthrough Journal (reprinted below), calls climate "everythingism."

Given the vigor of the green movement and its impressive success at influencing policy makers and capturing the public imagination, these ideas will help shape the world’s response to global warming. Klein’s book therefore provokes a disturbing question: having done so much to put the crucial issue of climate change on the agenda, does the Left have anything coherent to say about it?

At the heart of the incoherence is Klein's rejection of modern energy. Boisvert notes that Klein celebrates the "Blockadia" campaign to stop the construction of a new nuclear plant in the southeastern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which some local groups, European parliamentarians, and Noam Chomsky say is too dangerous. Writes Boisvert: 

The risk of an accident at the seaside plant is the focus of opposition, but what’s never discussed [in Klein's book] is the plant’s role in reducing the much more serious risks stemming from Tamil Nadu’s chronic electricity shortages. A lack of electricity kills in all sorts of mundane ways, from intestinal infections that arise because there is no power for water and sewage treatment to lung ailments from cooking over smoky fires instead of clean electric burners. Kudankulam’s massive 2000-megawatt output helps relieve those shortages; not opening the plant arguably posed a worse public health risk than opening the plant. But according to Klein, “in Blockadia, risk assessment has been abandoned…replaced by a resurgence of the precautionary principle”—a turn she heartily endorses. That’s a tragic mistake in this case, because at Kudankulam there really is no contradiction between healthy sustainability and development — yet Blockadia has rejected both.

This is the fourth in a series of outstanding journalistic essays by Will Boisvert for The New York Observer, Dissent, and Breakthrough Journal, critically reconsidering long-held green shibboleths. It is long, and well-worth taking the time to read in its entirety.

— Michael and Ted

The Left vs. the Climate

Why Progressives Should Reject Naomi Klein's Pastoral Fantasy — and Embrace Our High-Energy Planet

http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/energy-and-climate/the-left-vs.-the-climate