You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality -- not at the same time as you're bombing people, you can't.
Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.
Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.
Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction of humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature
It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.
Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you.
We live in this culture of endless extraction and disposal: extraction from the earth, extraction from people's bodies, from communities, as if there's no limit, as if there's no consequence to how we're taking and disposing, and as if it can go on endlessly. We are reaching the breaking point on multiple levels. Communities are breaking, the planet is breaking, people's bodies are breaking. We are taking too much.
We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer.
The task is clear: to create a culture of caretaking in which no one and nowhere is thrown away, in which the inherent value of people and all life is foundational.
I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity on an even greater scale.
The powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on that most rarefied delicacy: impunity.
Hope has never trickled down, it has always sprung up.
The reason why nothing sticks to Trump - or very little sticks to Trump - is that Trump created his brand idea that has to do with being the guy who gets away from it. It's this ultimate power through wealth and this dream that represents in an age of tremendous economic precariousness and constrained options for so many people - that watching Trump be able to do whatever he wants to whoever he wants is this obvious vicarious kind of thrill for a certain demographic.
We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature.
![[On climate change:] What if it's all a hoax and we've created a better world for nothing?](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/naomi-klein-74909.jpg)
[On climate change:] What if it's all a hoax and we've created a better world for nothing?
Our enslavement to oil has required the repression of millions of Arab people. As they shake off their bonds, so must we.
I do think that at this moment in late capitalism it is easier in our minds to imagine raising Florida 30 feet to escape the rising seas than it is to regulate capitalism to make it serve human beings.
In a world where profit is consistently put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do with ethics and morality.
It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power—specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities, which in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social force to change the balance of power.
Anybody who claims that they know where this whole thing is all going is just lying.
The deeper message that is resonating with people is that it is possible to build. It is possible to invest in people; it is possible to invest in green infrastructure; it's possible to change.
In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely.
The parties with the most gain never show up on the battlefield.
Most of you didn't think that helping people share books would be a subversive act...Yet the fact is that you have chosen a profession that has become radical.
Real climate solutions 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.
Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.
So if the meaning of the Trump brand is being the ultimate boss who has the power because he's so rich, the way you undermine that brand is by making him look like a puppet, and by showing that while he's playing gold and admiring his properties, it's actually other people making the key decisions and he doesn't really know what's going on.
People without memory are putty.
When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty.
Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age-privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending-are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels.
