Naomi Klein has spent decades recording and analysing the darker edges of neoliberal capitalism. No Logo focused on the way that corporations use branding to convince people to buy things that we don’t really need. The Shock Doctrine looked at the way ‘disaster capitalism’ engineers crises and then profits from them, imposing what Klein describes as the “three policy pillars of the neoliberal age” on desperate nations which would previously have been reluctant to make such radical changes.
This Changes Everything analysed the way that the short-term priorities of ‘the market’ means that not only has neoliberal capitalism not been an ally in the fight againt climate change, the system has often thrown up roadblocks to taking serious action to deal with climate change.
The quote in the infographic is not highly placed in the book (taken from Chapter Two, page 72), but it struck me as a good summary of the problems neoliberal capitalism creates for those of us who would like to prevent a potentially disastrous climate breakdown.
Happy Sisyphus 