Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth Naomi Klein 20240713

Naomi, thank you for joining us here on cspan2 book tv in midtown manhattan where branding and marketing is big business. Let me begin with your first book, no logo. What did you learn about nike, microsoft and starbucks in branding . Guest its great to be with you and to have this time. When i was writing the no logo it came out at the very beginning of 2000, so its almost exactly 20 years old. The period when i was researching which was the four years before that it was a period where lot was changing in the corporate world and you have the first kind of fullblown lifestyle brand, which is an idea we take for granted now, but these were companies that for the first time were declaring that their Business Model was not sell products, but ideas, a lifestyle, a sense of belonging that they could then extend into kind of self enclosed branded cocoons and sort of sell everything along as it was branded with this logo. Nike was really the first one to do this. They didnt ever owned their factories and this the main thing i learned when researching no logo was that there was a relationship between this aggressive the marketing, it was constantly sort of trolling Youth Culture to lot by the most cuttingedge ideas to get ads into places that had never had ads like schools, to cobranded with every like a Music Festival and so on with an inverse relationship between that aggressive marketing and the kind of good jobs on offer in the economy because the way that these companies were free of money to spend on this more aggressive kind of Lifestyle Marketing was by divesting from their factories, from my did they should be producers of all. So, nike paved the way in this sense because they never owned their factories in the first place or did they made their Running Shoes through web of contractors and subcontractors who they pitted against one another for who could provide their shoes were the lowest price and this was such a profitable Business Model that the competitor started closing their factories and never reopening. That was the key thing they never reopened their factories. We often talk about factories moving from north america to mexico or china or vietnam, but in fact it wasnt just that they were moving location, its that they never owned their factories and didnt see themselves as producers, so i think its intimately related to the you know deindustrialization and precariousness of the work we sort of take for granted today. Host as you point out, nike in particular getting a lot of criticism from its customers. Guest at the time because it was new. This was coming this was still a america there remember the kind of manufacturing model where you understood that the products you buy in the car you were buying you knew where was made and understood it was economic anchor for the community, that the idea the people making the cars should have enough money to buy the cars and so it was culturally shocking for people to discover that these Companies Like nike or disney who were sitting so much money putting out images of themselves that were very progressive or in the case of disneys case very Family Friendly that you pull back the curtain and wait a minute in some cases children or people just a little bit out of being children, people in their early 20s who were making these products under really abusive conditions and so when that was exposed it was a scandal. 20 years later i think people take it for granted that almost all the products in our lives are made under conditions that are dubious you have electronic factories in china that have suicide nets to catch people when they commit suicide because they are so desperate on the job, so i think its one of the toughest things to think about. When i could about what has changed since no logo is the sense of shock that i was tracking like i cant believe these nike Running Shoes are made by children in indonesia who are sleeping in cramped dormitories and not getting paid for their overtime or having to urinate in bottles under their sewing machine and they were genuinely scandals and movements responding to them and i think people shock and outrage has been doled almost like a joke, in a television. Host couple examples in the book and one is starbucks and how a coffee shop opened up inspired by starbucks, but trying to edge you put in the book run away from the starbucks brand. Guest i think that was example from the 10 Year Anniversary edition of no logo where in the original edition that came out in 2000, i had a fair bit about this then relatively new company starbucks, that told us their brand meaning was that the what they called the third place, not home, not work, a place for people to gather and they were using the discourse of the public sphere almost like a town square and it was interesting this was happening in the 90s after you had this very aggressive kind of privatization of the public sphere and so corporations had to come along as a we are a pseudo town square which in a sense is what facebook is doing now, that corporate digital town square. And the 90s it was starbucks, cup of coffee and your pseudo public space, but then when i wrote an introduction for the 10th Anniversary Edition starbucks just opened up a coffee shop in seattle that was completely unbranded. You didnt see their logo anywhere which seemed a bit of a marker for how far they had fallen in a sense that if in order to recapture any sense of newness they had to end a brand themselves. Host lets look at the political sphere because in the 10th anniversary of the book he talked about president obama and one question is did he live up to his hope in change brand. Did he . Guest it was early in the obama years when i wrote that. There was always something a little bit nike about the obama brand in the sense that it was just a vague enough that it was hard to pin him down to a clear political platform another interesting measure where we are now because if you look at the democratic primaries right now i think there is more of an expectation that candidates have a really really specific and fully formed platform, economic platform, labor policy platform and environmental policy platform. If i think about the Obama Campaign of 2008 which i was writing about, it was pretty megan like im going to recapture a sense of optimism, you wont be ashamed of america, people are tired from eight years of bush and change feeling good so thats why wrote about that as a First Political campaign that used the same tools these Corporate Lifestyle brands had been using to sort of base themselves in an era of progressivism, so the question did obama live up to it, i mean, its a complicated question in the sense that it never was specific, so its hard to say if you lived up to it or not because there was not that much there there, but what he was promising although he did promise i would revise mainstreet and take on wall street and i think there was a huge amount of disappointment that it didnt really happen. People who hoped there was going to be a real reinvestment in small businesses, in maybe more factory jobs, we are very disappointed by that and i think its part of a global phenomenon where sort of centrist liberal politicians come to power with sort of a veneer of progressivism and change but the economy continues to make people feel excluded, disempowered, more precarious, more insecure and that sets the stage for the rightwing populism we see worldwide. Obviously there are specific pack factors related to obama being the first black president and the racial backlash in the United States, but his support to remember that there is a global one im in on of rightwing populism we see everywhere. Host you can join us on twitter book tv in our guest for the next two hours is naomi klein and also give us a phone call. You are teaching at rutgers university. How you frame this in the classroom in terms of your book, the original book and then its 10 Year Anniversary edition . Guest im actually teaching a course called the corporate self and it looks at the integration of the human and the corporation sort of corporation trying to act more like humans, which is the original brands we are all about that like putting sort of a comforting face like uncle ben moore and jemima, much of it racialized sort of nostalgia about plantation life so we look at the racial history of branding and then where no logo ends is remember this is written in the late 1990s. This thing completely new idea that humans everyday humans, not celebrities needed to become their own brand in order to succeed in this newly precarious job environment. No one can expect job security so the way to get ahead is to find your inner brand and projected onto the world and this was after we seen celebrities do this in the book i talk about Michael Jordan as the first super brand and then we look at whats happening with social media because when i wrote that 20 years ago it was a pretty notional idea, the idea anyone could be their own brand because anyone doesnt have the money to take advertisements and actually do the work of projecting an image of oneself, but today because of social media everyone who has computer access has the capacity to market themselves, to market an idea of themselves, to think about what is my brand, which is very different from who am i. What we are unpacking and i have a Wonderful Group of students its like first of all we talk about even though they have grown up with this idea its a relatively new idea. It was not always the case you would have been looked at if you are mad 30 years ago to say you know 15year old kid, but not what you want to be when you grow up, but what is your brand, you know. So, we try to make visible some of the things they take for granted and really think about what is it mean to have to separate yourself from the idea of yourself, to have that distancing and what does that do to friendships, what is it due to relationships, what is it due to social movements, so its been fascinating to unpack this with them because of course they know more about social media than i do so they are teaching me all the time. But, then the latest phase is this or intimately connected we have our lives online in this constant performance of our personal brand is that the Tech Industry sees data as the new oil as is often repeated, so they are mining ourselves, they are mining the information we are sharing for their Business Model that we are not getting any part of and we are not paid for the data that we are providing for free and so we are looking at these questions around surveillance, data mining which is called surveillance capitalism, so its interesting to once again see how much has changed since i wrote that now coming to book. Host your newest book on the on fire the burning case let me base this on terms of the original new deal because you write about how that essentially transforms the country in the world speech you i think there is inspiration to be taken in the original new deal and also very important warnings to heed from that era because so many people were excluded from this sort of protection under fdrs new deal took many africanamerican workers were excluded, domestic workers, women were excluded, our Cultural Workers were and there was systemic discrimination and segregation in many of the new deal programs. Its also true that the United States transformed itself at a scale that is comparable to the kind of speed and scale of change that we need to embrace if were going to lower emissions in line with what sciences are telling us. A year ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, our foremost gathering of scientific experts who advised governments on this data Climate Science issued a report a year ago saying that we need to cut global emissions in half in a mere 12 years, which is now 11 years and they said and this is a quote from a summary of the report that it would require unprecedented transformation in virtually every aspect of society, energy, transportation, our culture, building construction. So, there are many points in history when you can say well, this is a time when we saw that skill of transformation. One west during the Second World War when you had americans planting Victory Gardens and getting 40 of their use from the gardens. We saw factories transform themselves rapidly, but the new deal is another era which is last taught down which is a useful allstar copresident s for us to look at because i dont think we want government telling everyone what to do. I think we should worry about that. During the new deal era he saw a rule america electrified. You saw more than 10 million americans directly employed, renaissance of publicly funded arts, all kinds of Public Infrastructure, schools, libraries, reservoirs and much of americas Public Infrastructure today is a legacy of the new deal here to another part this thats quite relevant in thinking about a Green New Deal is that fdr civilian conservation corps was probably the most popular of the new deal programs and its a reminder that the new deal was not only responding to an economic crisis, but also an ecological crisis because of the dust of all the crisis of d4 station, so the ccc spent more than 2 million is that more than 2 million poor young people to cities to hundreds of camps in rural parts of the us and did things like plant 2. 3 billion trees which is more than half the trees of her planet, so that kind of scale is important and its also the kind of thing we need to do to pull carbon out of the atmosphere in the face of the Climate Crisis. Host in the book you write, part of what makes Climate Change so very difficult for many of us to grasp is that we live in a culture of the perpetual present, when that deliberately severs itself from the past that created us in the future we are shaping with our action. Guest a lot of what im doing in this book is to make visible the Economic Systems and the relatively new economic and social models born of the particular kind of capitalism we have had since the reagan era which has been all about deregulation, privatization and venerating the individual consumers equating shopping with democracy of the good life and that has produced an extremely accelerated culture which then people point to and say well, its just human nature that we can deal with the crisis by Climate Change because clearly we are too selfish, too individualistic, think to shortterm and it requires us to have a longer timeframe, requires us to put the collective good ahead of something you might just want right now to satisfy an individual urge. So, theres been a lot written that has made this human nature argument about why we will never respond to this crisis and what i find when i am talking about what we need to do in the face of this crisis which i do a fair bit, i find the biggest obstacle that we are up against is not Climate Change denial, which is definitely on the wayne and its not the lack of technology or an understanding of what needs to be done, its really the sense of doom that we as human beings are incapable of doing the things that are necessary and that is why i think it is important to draw on these historical precedents that even if they are not exactly the kind of thing we would need to do now, they do show that there are different ways of being human and in the lifespan of people alive today people were able to think longerterm and were able to put the collective good ahead of their individual desires and there are people, Indigenous People in north america who teach their children to think seven generations into the future and seven generations into the past, so im trying to problem with ties this source of appeals to human nature that we hear a lot of it saying actually, thats equating a particular relatively recent form of deregulated consumer capitalism with the idea of what it means to be human and while we cant change the laws of nature we actually can set change the system that we humans did create ourselves if theyre threatening life on earth and in fact we need to do that. Not saying its easy, just that its possible. Host married with a son whose seven years old and you went apple picking yesterday. Guest spilled the beans. Host you move around a lot for those of you who dont know naomi klein im a spend a minute them your life story. Guest just a minute . Host two minutes. Guest i was born in canada in montreal. My parents are american. My parents were peace activists in the 1960s my father didnt want to go to vietnam and he had to choose between jail and canada and like many of his current he chose canada so we moved to montreal and later moved back to the United States for a few years when i was very young before i was five years old and they decided they liked canada better , so i sometimes say we left because of the war, but stayed for the universal public healthcare. My mother worked for the National Film board of canada. The first womens film studio. She made films for the feminist movement. I grew up with political parents. My father worked in the Canadian Health care system involved in doing things like bringing midwives into hospitals and a big advocate for natural childbirth. Family doctor also retired. Yeah, so i would say grew up in a radical you know i have friends who really had like sears radical parents and were home schooled than their parents you know really really walked about talk i kind of grew up between worlds with their values, i suppose, but going to regular school in the 1980s, so i felt pulled between the culture of the 1980s which was shiny and appealing to me and my home life where my parents were saying why do you want to hang out your with your friends at the mall, why would you want to do Something Like that. Maybe thats why i wrote no logo in my 20s. Host our conversation with naomi klein. Mike from port charles, florida, welcome to the conversation c3 nice to speak with you. Caller my main problem with the whole thing is the amount of energy thats required is impossible through these methods and the technologies just arent going to be there. This disses pieinthesky type thinking. We need fossil fuels. Theres no doubt about it for the foreseeable future and the other thing was just the environment itself. How do you explain like the little ice age . Host mike, thanks we will get a response. Guest can i answer . Thanks for your question. I would urge you to look up the work of Mark Jacobson at stanford university. Is a professor of engineering who got a big team and has been doing specific research about how in fact it is possible with existing technologies to get to 100 Renewable Energy very rapidly for electricity first and transportation afterwards in line with what scientists are telling us we need to do there have been huge breakthroughs in Battery Storage and price breakthroughs as well in the cost of Renewable Energy, so i would disagree. I think it is possible. Like i said, im not saying its easy, but i think the barriers are much more political than technological and that is what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is said with a set the target of global emissions in 12 years in that fateful report and i want to stress thats a report that drew on a 6000 sources of it peer reviewed, so its not just like a one off paper. It was coauthored almost by 100 authors and reviewers, so it is a state of the arts and science and they said actually we can meet these targets with existing technology. The barrier is political and in terms of the reasons for the little ice age, there is i think theres a few factors and one is a High Altitude of a volcano that dimmed the sun and this is why sometimes you have in my opinion quite frightening would be geo engineers talking about how one way we can deal with climate disruption is by imitating a highaltitude a volcano by spraying sulfur into the upper atmosphere and reflecting more of the suns rays away from earth, so that is one of the main reasons behind the little ice age. Another reason that i do talk about in the book was that this followed a genocide in against Indigenous People in the americas and there have been new science that looks at how this huge loss of life, many millions of people in the americas led it to a name station and revegetation and that it was part of it as well. Host norwalk, connecticut. Steve, go ahead, please. Steve, if you could turn the volume down and then go ahead with your question. Caller good morning, naomi. Can you hear me . Host yes, we sure can. Guest i can. Caller first, lets eliminate batteries. To make electric power to go into a battery using fossil fuel, you dont eliminate one molecule of co2, so i cant believe you would, but you evidently dont know that. I cannot believe that all these senators running for president never mentioned Hydrogen Fuel cells, which happens to be the only remedy to eliminate the co2 because there is no co2 when you use Hydrogen Fuel cells period. Its as simple. I have sent you messages on your facebook numerous times. I dont know if you actually read this or you just dismiss it or what you do, but anyway you never mention Hydrogen Fuel cells. None of the candidates mention Hydrogen Fuel cells. Its the only remedy. Im going to have a meeting with Hakeem Jeffries soon i hope to discuss this in the title of my book is reparations because what im suggesting is that there would need to be over a Million People necessary to do the work to completely change from fossil fuel electric power to Hydrogen Fuelcell cell electric power. Host thank you. We will get a response. Guest i think the reason why a call or isnt getting response from many candidates or why this idea isnt being taken seriously is because its not a tragically serious idea. Its true Renewable Power with Battery Power does radically reduce emissions, which is not to say there arent environmental costs to any technology. That includes the local environmental impacts of mining for rare metals or solar power and wind power, which is why the book i talk about the fact that we cant think of this as simply flipping a switch from fossil fuels to renewables and Everything Else staying the same. We do have a real problem of overconsumption particularly overconsumption with sort of a disposable mindsets in the wealthy world and there is going to have to be we are going to have to look as what greta said at the United Nation the fairytale infinite growth so when i say we arent talking about the 20 wealthiest people on the planet responsible for 70 of emissions we will have to consume less. It doesnt mean that we will live in misery. We will have to live at about the level of your average european as Kevin Anderson one of the worlds leading mission reduction experts says. But that doesnt mean its all subtractions Greta Thuneberg from sweden, why do you think her voice has resonated . Its a complicated question. I think there are many voices as well as gretas who should be resonating and have been trying to get the worlds attention for a very long time. Ive been going to you and climate summits for about a decade now and there have been incredibly powerful moral voices coming from the marshall islands. There was an incredible speech made at the United Nations in 2014 by a woman from the marshall islands, a young woman named kathy jenner who wrote a poem to her ninemonthold baby and she read it to the assembled country representatives and it was an incredible speech that should have gone as a viral as any of gretas speeches so i point this out. There have been other moments like a few years later when typhoon john at the philippines at the moment that there was a un summit happening on Climate Change and the representative from the philippines didnt know whether his family was safe or not and he broke down crying in front of the entire assembly. That should have gotten gone as viral as any of gretas speeches so to be perfectly honest i think there is an issue around the fact that she is a white girl from sweden who, and thats part of why her voice breaks through when other voices who are really on the front lines of this crisis who are living it and for whom it feels absolutely existential as it does to greta have been ignored. I also think greta is an absolutely remarkable young woman. I have so much respect for her. I think she is a prosthetic voice and these other voices ive spoken about before like kathy jenner from the philippines are as well and i could point to many others. But greta is remarkable and i think theres something about greta and that she so clearly is not performing for anyone. She was not looking for anyone to like her. Coming back to what we were talking about earlier we live in a culture where everybody is constantly performing a version ofthemselves. Everybodys interested in being famous or promoting themselves. Greta could not be less interested in this. Shes so 100 percent focused on the science and she talks about how having been diagnosed with aspergers, she says im not interested in your social games as somebody on the autism spectrum so i think theres something about how uninterested greta is in our opinion of her that makes her a very trusted messenger for a lot of people. Obviously she faces massive attacks and shes clear minded about why she is being attacked by the likes of donald trump and Vladimir Putin and not to mention armies of trolls. Its because shes part of building a Global Movement that is growing with exponential speed. There were 7 Million People who participated in the World Climate strikes over an eight day period. Thats unprecedented in the history of the planet so greta is part of an Amazing Movement and she would be the first person to say its not about me. About a movement of young people coming together. In the book you say fossil fuels are not the sole driver of Climate Change, they are the biggest. You also write an incremental approach will not work but the question is can we afford the Green New Deal . Price tagging it its in the billions of dollars. It isnt just fossil fuels, its also agriculture. Can we afford it . There have been studies about what it would actually cost to stay on the road we are on and not try to avert a catastrophic level of warming. The road we are on leads to warming of around four degrees celsius. We warmed the planet by one degrees celsius on average. If we continue with whats called business as usual, just doing what were doing now which is nothing and making the problem worse and thats what donald trump has been doing, its what bolsonaro is doing, that leads to four degrees of warming, thats not compatible with anything you would describe as civilization, it would threaten every coastal city. But what time period though. Well before the end of the century. We need to recognize that a lot of the estimates about when things will start to get really serious have underestimated the speed which with things start to unravel. We were expecting to lose Arctic Sea Ice as rapidly as we are using it. Lets remember september is the hottest september on record, july was the hottest month ever recorded, june was the hottest june ever recorded. Its happening really fast. So you ask over what time period, there are different estimates. I would say in the time period of children alive on this planet we would be seeing catastrophic levels of warming under business as usual model. There actually isnt, when you start costing out what it would mean to lose new york city or shanghai, it literally is not enough money on that planet to cost it out so i could make an argument to you that its a bargain to invest in a Green New Deal which is yes, expensive but compared to what we would pay later its much cheaper but theres something also morally reprehensible about making a financial argument for this. Were talking about hundreds of millions of lives here that will be lost if we do not embrace the speed of change that is required and the depth of change thats required so yes, its expensive and it is in my view and moral imperative and doing nothingis even more expensive. ,from louisville kentucky, youre listening to naomi klein. Caller good afternoon miss klein. My question is about nuclear energy. I think any serious person who looks at replacing fossil fuels, the majority of them realizes that the only possible way to do it would be to go with generation three or generation for Nuclear Power plants that never killed a person on earth. I wonder what youthought. Guest where are these . Where are the generation three and four power plants mark. The number of force are developmental. Guest theyre not out there this point. Its a noshow technology, thats what they havent killed anybody. Caller we got a lot of Nuclear Power plants running now. Guest youre talking about next gen nuclear and in these discussions a notional future form of nuclear is held up as what is going to be built but what isbeing proposed is the same old Nuclear Technology that does have high risks. I think that im going to refer people once again to mark stanfords research which is very clear about the fact that we can do this with Renewable Energy and there are many benefits of doing it with renewables over nuclear. Including the fact that nuclear is a lot more expensive. Its prone tocrony capitalism and corruption. Weve seen this again and again. And what i think is great about Renewable Energy is that it lends itself to much more decentralized form of ownership so rather than having a few monopolistic players in the Energy Sector as we do today whether theyre in fossil fuels or nuclear, we have an amazing opportunity to have a much more democratically controlled energy grid which is built around the fact that the air and the sun is everywhere and so we can have micro grid. We can have community controlled energy, Energy Cooperative and the revenues from this can stay in communities to pay for other services and we can kill two birds with one stone if you will if we have a fair economy, more resources as well as getting ourselves zeroemissions. Host thank you for the question, battle for paradise is your book, who are the disaster capitalists . Guest the book i wrote after no logo, it took me a long time to research is the shock doctrine, the rise of disaster capitalism. And in that book i make an argument that we have seen in the aftermath of economic shock and large natural disasters a certain theory of political change which i call the shock doctrine. Using the sense of panic in a public that necessarily follows all war or completely destabilizing economic crisis or a hurricane or largescale hurricane to push through policies you wouldnt be able to push through under normal circumstances because people are focused on their daily emergencies. And were also seeing a whole infrastructure of people moving in who want to make quick cash in the aftermath of disasters and so the battle for paradise is kind of a case study of whati call the shock doctrine in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria which before it even made landfall we were already hearing talk of how this was a great opportunity to privatize puerto ricos energy grid. And it was also the island was already a site of an economic crisis which was being used to impose all kinds of austerity and the regulations so puerto rico had already become a tax haven and this was a way that was used during the debt crisis before Hurricane Maria hit to attract socalled High Net Worth individuals. Come to puerto rico, change your mailing address, you dont have to spend a whole year here was attracted to the Financial Sector andthe crypto currency sector because they didnt have to pay all kind of taxes they would have had to pay so the digester capitalists in the battle for paradise , a lot of them are these bitcoins entrepreneurs who wrote relocated to puerto rico to take advantage of cheap real estate and the fact that there crypto currency gains would not be taxed when they converted them to regular currency if they did so in puerto rico. Host trumps shock doctrine, explain what is a communal recovery. This has been the question ive been asking myself since i wrote shock doctrine that if this is a Clear Strategy weve seen again and again by wealthy players in the aftermath of disasters, i began that shock doctrine with Hurricane Katrina which is when i first started writing about Climate Change. A decade and a half ago. When i was in new orleans , its still partially underwater but there were already real estate speculators talking about what an opportunity it was to get rid of Public Housing projects, build condominiums and a lot of that happened in the aftermath. It was used by educational entrepreneurs who wanted to change Public Schools into Charter Schools and pretty soon new orleans had the most privatize School System in the United States so this raised for me and for a lot of local activists in new orleans what is the alternative to disaster capitalism . How can communities, democratically respond to crisis that in so many cases point to the need for deep solutions to put forward their vision for how their communities should be rebuilt in the face of these disasters that are going to improve lives and make up less disaster prone. Thats what i mean by collective response to disaster. Weve seen that in puerto rico quite powerfully where that little book the battle for paradise that all of the royalties in advance go to a coalition of groups in puerto rico who came together in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in order to put, to advance what they called a peoples platform or how puerto rico should actually be rebuilt and respond to its vulnerability to climate disruption and that includes no longer being dependent on overwhelmingly on imported food from florida. Its a very fertile island. I want to practice traditional agriculture and ecology so if theres a storm that knocks out the port people are starving that requires land redistribution in puerto rico because so much of the land is in this moment being sold off to tourist developers and other private interests. They also want like we talked about, decentralized Renewable Energy owned by communities so that various proposals for that. Thats the kind of thing i mean and on a large scale what it would mean is a Green New Deal which is a way of responding to our collective Climate Crisis ina way that battles systemicinequalities. Lets go to edward, seaport new jersey, your next. It seems you pretty much covered what i was going to talk about, i just wanted to say about being an advocate for the future and i see this disconnect about harnessing the social energy that goes into invading iraq on one grainy tv picture and being scared of all these little stupid things that i guess the corporate, how do we cut through this corporate noise about the things theyre telling us weshould be afraid of when its a one in 53,000 chance youre going to be killed by a terrorist but yet we cant be scared of the loss of biodiversity or any of these other things that youre covering and thank you for your work. Host thank you. Guest its a great way of putting it. But yes, it seems possible to harness huge amounts of Public Wealth if its to wage a war and as that caller mentioned based on pretty dubious evidence that was later disproven. And yet we are demanding like a report with sources from 6000 peerreviewed articles isseen as not good enough for us, were still waiting for the evidence to come in. And i think it has to do with who the Climate Crisis threatens. The fact that this is , if we were to take the science seriously, whether its loss of biodiversity, whether its climate disruption and their certainly interrelated. It would mean a lot of very wealthy people, very wealthy interests in the Global Economy would have to make some very serious sacrifices which is why they want to change the subset to it all being about whether or not youre going to beable to eat hamburgers or not. This is about the fact that exxon mobil is threatened, shell oil is threatened. These are the most powerful businesses in the Global Economy who have a Business Model that is reliant on the continued extraction and exploitation of fossil fuels. There are other ways, organizing a business but theyre not as profitable. Its not as profitable to have a solar business than is to have an oil and gas business. So we have had this deliberate spread of misinformation on the airwaves and in print, weve had the fossil fuel Companies Funding the Disinformation Campaign i would argue weve heard evidence of on this show. And it has slowed us down area weve lost wonders we will never get back because of it. And now we are in a moment where regular people are declaring an emergency from below. That is what we are seeing with the climate strikes that Greta Thuneberg started with her alone act in front of the Swedish Parliament just a little bit more than a year ago. This is at this point she was 15 years old. She had learned about Climate Change in school and watched a lot of nature documentaries and learn about biodiversity laws, all these crises and looked around and this isby her own telling , but that the world didnt make sense. She thought if this were true wouldnt everybody be talking about it all the time if we were destabilizing our one and only home, wouldnt all the politicians he focused on this all the time . Wouldnt this be on the front page of every newspaper every day and yet everywhere she looked people were talking about anything else and thats pretty much still true even though we have a little bit of an improvement in the climate coverage so she decided to declare her own emergency and as a student , the one thing she had power over, the one thing she was able to disrupt business as usual was to not do the one thing every kid is expected to do which is go to schoolso she stopped going to school on fridays. She held her loan sign saying School Strike for climate and more people came and people in different cities including new york city audit having their own climate strikes. And within a short period, she started in august last year by september of this year, so just a little bit more than a year there were 7 Million People participating in climate strikes. These are people saying were not going to wait for politicians to realize this is an emergency, were goingto declare the emergency and put pressure on politicians and some governments have declared a state of Climate Emergency , whether theyre following that up with the kind of policies that that would demand, we will see. I think it has completely redrawn the map in the democratic primary. The scale of change that is being debated within the Democratic Party right now is nothing like what we were talking about just a few years ago when it was a debate about and trade versus a carbon tax. Now were talking about whos spending, how many trillions of dollars on their Green New Deal plan. And how many jobs can be created and how quickly we can move and whose targets are more ambitious and this is not just because these politicians have seen the light read it because theres a social movement putting pressure on those politiciansto up their game. And of course Greta Thuneberg. Animated at the un. How do you approach writing a book . What is the naomi klein style . There were seven years between my first three books, no logo, shock doctrine and the change of everything. And each of those books i sort of think of as a phd thesis in its own right even though i didnt get a phd. But i was lucky enough with my first book with no logo and the fact that it sold the way itdid , put me in a privileged position as an author where i was able to get an advance that was large enough that i was able to block offseveral years to do research, to put together a research team. And to build barriers around Everything Else in my life because of what you get speaking requests, to write the shock doctrine, i hauled off in the woods in British Columbia where my family lives. Not a bad place to hole up, British Columbia is a beautiful place but it was quite isolated, i was in the uk without taking the ferry and driving for anhour , another hour and its really quite isolated. And that makes it easy to say no to things when people ask you to come out and do things. So i usually spendabout three years on the research and two years on the writing. And when im writing a book , its kind of all that i do. Now there are apps that turn off the internet and i use those because i can get easily distracted but before those there were apps like that, my husband put Parental Controls on my computer so every time i would go online before the one hour i was allowed to go on a day i would be confronted with a teddy bear in chains while i was writing the shock doctrine so thatshow i write books. Host your next book is what . I dont know because this process im describing does require to write a book with 70 pages and endnotes like those books, it does require removing ones self for a few years and this isnt a moment where i feel like i can remove myself from the political debate and i think these are such fateful years, particularly leading up to the elections that im not going to be locking myself away. Ive just done about i hope is contributing to the debate right now about why we need transformational Climate Action , why we need to marry the struggle to lower emissions in line with science but the need to build a much fairer economy and making the argument for why that doesnt slow us down but speed us up because people are hurting so much economically that if we dont bring together these two imperatives that people are going to resist it as they did in france with the yellow vest movement. But yes, im focused on 20 20 i have to say and i think its going to be a little while before i feel like i can just hide myself away in the forest, much as im drawn to it. Host lets go to john joining us from Putnam Valley new york, youre on with naomi klein. Caller thank you. Thank you very much naomi for your work. Its only going to get tougher, isnt it . A lot. Im mostly calling just to, the answers are in nature and with like the solar stuff, the other gentleman mentioned its not going to be enough but you just fell off the bible based on 40 percent, not 90 percent like we have now which is a waste of material. 99 percent is worth it. Until things are going to pick up but the main thing i want to mention is a book calledhidden nature. Its a startling insights victor strasburg, written by alec bartholomew. And he developed the implosion motor and was captured by the nazis and the people that he workedwith built his crafts and everything but its based on the stream. When you straighten out the stream you kill it. Now the stream goes around the corner and there are horses on the inside and outside of the curve and theres six other little boys, one side of the stream is in the negative and the other side is the positive. And as for the electronics, the acts in that water that keeps nutrition and everything, the micro stuff that would not be normally bought client and its not just moving into the water , its the fact that the water is actually alive with energy. I think theres a lot of answers in nature but you have to step back and realize im a 73yearold, veteran. I was in vietnam. Only took me 25 years to get ptsd which is pretty much just a negative response to a reflex. Host let me jump in, well get a response and i also want to welcome our listeners on cspan radio. Guest i think its an important observation and i think we are seeing Many Solutions coming from paying attention to the Natural World. Kind of mimicry of nature. Which is a paradigm shift from the kind of dominant that seeing our rule as being to dominate the Natural World. To bend it to our will. And that brute force engineering behind the damning of great rivers and really the fossil fuel economy that we could dig up life, burn it and send waste up into the atmosphere and tell ourselves that we had conquered nature. Was the whole promise of fossil fuel age. You are no longer tossed around by mother nature. You are the boss area if you read the marketing materials of the first commercial steam engines it was all about you are now the boss. You dont have to wait for the winds that blow to sail your ship. You can sale them whenever you want. You dont have to build your factories next to rushing rivers because factories used to be powered by water wheels. Build your factories wherever you want. The idea was you had your portable climate and you could control the temperature, you could master the winds and waves and what Climate Change tells us is maybe where not the boss after all because all of the carbon that we admitted over the hundreds of years of the Industrial Age have accumulating in the atmosphere and now comes the response and the response takes the form of storms like Hurricane Dorian that part over the bahamas. Absolutely unprecedented for a storm to behave that way. And whether its the storms, whether its fires, whether its the heat wave, we are up against forces that are far more powerful than us and i think the message of this is everything in nature, every action as a reaction and fossil fuels allow us to tell ourselves a fairytale about the fact that we know where at thedrivers seat dominating there would be no downside to this. I think the beauty of Renewable Energy is it putsus back in dialogue with the Natural World. And its about suppressing the power of nature, not just bending it and breaking it. Host every month we go in depth with a leading author, our guest this week is naomi klein. Join us on twitter tv or book tv, where can people follow you . Guest were on twitter at naomiaklein. I dont really do any other social media. I sometimes say on instagram that im on twitter. I dont need that now the rhythm and the. Host lets go to danny, go ahead. Caller have you noticed that theres an activist group over in the uk that was preemptively rated, apparently they had a warehouse with signs and what have you and the authorities to prevent them from doing a protest rated them over the weekend. Now, im a republican. Im a conservative. This bothers me because this is like going into a church and taking my antiabortion signs. And its chilling. I know itshappening in england. There are resting them for conspiracy to commit a public nuisance. Have you got any comment on that . Guest thank you for that and i appreciate your nonpartisan solidarity. The group is called Extinction Rebellion and theyre a fairly young group, they havent been around that long but they engage in nine violent civil disobedience to try to express that we are in a Climate Emergency. Demanding that climate declare a climateemergency , and they have shut down bridges and roads but they are a completely nonviolent group and they were planning on taking off or are planning on kicking off a new wave of civil disobedience october 7 so this was a redemptive raid that i agree is a violation of their rights to peaceful assembly. 11 years ago the new yorker had a profile of you and it says the following. Naomi klein is not interested in making the left part of the mainstream. Instead she wants to convince the leftthat it does not need the mainstream. That was 11 years ago area all relevant today . Guest i dont know that i agreed with it then. I think that she also wrote that michael was to move the center and i think thats more accurate. It depends on how you define the mainstream. If you define the mainstream as this punditocracy and these serious opinion makers who actively police the parameters of acceptable discourse, i have been telling people that we should ignore them. And we should allow ourselves to be guided by what we know is right, what we know is needed. And that we need to move where the center is and i think that thats actually been happening in the 11 years as we look at whats happening in the democratic primaries once again and the range of policies under discussion and the sorts of things Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are putting on the table. They would have beenuntenable 10 years ago so theres been a transformation. I never tell people they shouldnt worry about the mainstream because that would be where most people are but i think ive been consistent about ignoring the punditocracy that tells you what you can and cant say. Host i wont create any sibling rivalry but id point out that your brotherwas a good activist child and you were not. Is that fair . Guest my brother was kind of like the young climate strikers in high school he was focused on nuclear war. He was part of the Antinuclear Movement which my parents were part of and he started it a Student Group when he was in high school. And he was part of this generation that would wake up in the middle of the night terrified of a nuclear war. And its still terrifying. And i guess for me and my family dynamic, he had definitely had a good activist thing covered so i was much more social kid. I just was interested in my friends and having fun and i did start, it wasnt that i didnt care about fairness for, its not that i didnt care about politics. I didnt care about organized politics. But i was really concerned with racism, sexism. Things that were, that i perceived to be unfair. But i wasnt a joiner. I didnt join groups and things like that area andis probably why i became a writer. So yes. I dont know what that says. Im going to leave it there, doug from laramie wyoming. Did you share. , did she hear him argue that the economic crisis stuff of the Great Depression was caused by governmental interference in Americas Free market economy. What are her thoughts about burke. s argument in the midst of the robber barons and when you look at the rise of big business in america. You very much. Thank you doug. I hope i dont offend anybody but i didnt see that. I cant respond directly andi am familiar. Im not familiar with his work specifically but i am familiar with that apartment. That we are created the great spot of 1929 was not this the regulation of markets as virtually everybody else believes but that theres a smallish group of free market economists who make the argument that the problem was the regulation. That wasnt what Government Intervention as opposed to deregulation. Im not convinced by that area i think the breaking up of the banks, under fdr was a big part of stabilizing the Financial Sector so i dont agree with that. Know is not enough. You begin with one word on theelection of donald trump. Shock. So no is not enough, you asked me how i write books. And no is not enough was definitely not following the pattern of taking years and years to write a book area i wrote it in a bit of a fever over i think seven months after trumps election. And i wrote it because i was really terrified, having researched the ways in which shock for my book the shock doctrine create these endless sort of state of exception and the state of distraction where it becomes possible to get away with all kinds of things precisely because everybody is trying to get there but in. And when trump was, that word shock was used really again and again after the election because it shocked many of us area it defied all the polls. Defied expectations. It came as such a huge shock and hes such an untraditional political player and i was worried at this idea of trump as this bolt out of the blue that if we accepted that narrative of him as a sort of interruption , of everything that was understood about america, and i want to stress this is not everybodys reaction. There were a lot particularly africanamericans, a lot of women who said im not surprised. My lived experience in this country would tell me, would indicate that theres a pretty big appetite for this sort of message that trump is pedaling and were surprised by the fact that the one. Such as greed is good, money is what matters in life and white men are better than the rest. I was trying to do with those lines in the book was that too, these are some of the messages that we get. Either explicitly or implicitly from the trump presidency. Making arguments that these are pretty widespread ideas. And that he is a kind of a logical conclusion of a lot of trends which is not to say that he isnt something new, a new generation but that we have been worshiping at the altar of wealth. We have been venerating billionaires, just because their billionaires. Lifting them to the status of gods. I made the argument in that book that through the sort of full and procapitalist infrastructure, that Gates Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative that pairs super wealthy individuals with social problems and says we can fix thiswithout governments. The Gates Foundation which sort of evidence gates knowledge in the computer skiers to him being an expert on global health, reproduction, agriculture in africa. Just because youre good at one thing that mean youre good at everything but we live in a culture that seems to assume that just by becoming a billionaire , youre treated as if you know everything and the argument i make a netbook, among other arguments is that that created a context where someone like donald trump stand before the American People and say i have no experience in government whatsoever that im really rich and the fact of my richness and the fact that i ran this company that i claim to be successful and the fact that i at least play a very successful businessmanon a tv show that you all watch , that is why you should vote for me. So what i tried to do in that book is really explore the various roads that we should lead to trump, to make him lessshocking because we are in a state of shock , were pretty malleable and distractible area where not very focused and i sometimes say that a shock is a gap between event and our narrative about the event, that if you dont have a story that explains the event and youre in that malleable state of dislocation and shock. So i guess i was trying to do my part in helping get americans out of shock that we could protect ourselves from the trump, a lot of what is happening behind the scenes, behind the shock. The trump is a nonstop distraction machine area theres a pretty clear pattern to what hes been doing on the economic sphere. No president has deregulated as much of the american economy, Environmental Standards as donald trump. Nobody has given more to millionaires and billionaires in tax cuts and donald trump. So in the book i call it a corporate to. And this is i think the story that we often miss when were so focused on whats the new shocking thing that donald trump has done mark whats the latest tweet and i think he knows that, i think thats why he tweets so much. Its a constant look over there sort of strategy. Hemay have taken it a little too far. And he may pay the price for that. Host you make the book the trump brand is not even that top 10 of Luxury Brands and hotels in the world and you begin by talking about Election Night so the lower classes at the javits center, both of thenominees in new york city , your half a world away. Your reaction when you heard the news. Where were you and whatwas your reaction . I was in australia. I had been awarded the sydney peace prize so i was in australia for the better part of the month. I was doing research. I made a documentary called austerity on the Great Barrier read which had just experienced a massive die off and most of the reef is bleached. Half of it is dead. So sort of combining the speaking that i was doing with new research, and political organizing, i was in a meeting in australia with a group of organizations who were interested in putting together a coalition to push for an australian Green New Deal or someversion of the Green New Deal in australia. So were taking in leaders and indigenous rights activists and organizers, climate activists all in this room and we were having a forwardlooking meeting about how do we do this . How do we get our forwardlooking agenda together and this has been my focus since i wrote the change of everything. And in the middle of the meeting, everybody started, everyones phones started vibrating because here in new york the Election Results were coming in in the evening but it was midmorning in australia when the results started coming in and it became clear that trump, it looked like trump was going to win and this meeting which was all about imperatives to embrace bold Climate Action just sort of faded away as everybody realized that we were in completely New Territory and everyone went away to go find bigger screens than their phones to watch this in real time. Lets go to robert in vancouver washington. Hi, thanks for taking my question. Ive had a book published in 2003 called plan b and it was written by lester brown who is retired since then but he was talking about mobilizing a wartime mobilization to address Climate Change. I wonder if you read that or are familiar with his workand if so , what influenced does he have on the current crop of Green New Deal . I am familiar with his work and the literature that draws on world war ii as a historical precedent that shows us that it is possible to retool factories at an incredible clip. Youve all heard the stories of going from producing fighter jets overnight and there are also many parallels with the ways that people change. I mention Victory Gardens that 40 percent of americans were getting their products from Victory Gardens. Americans and canadians and british people also radically changed the way they moved around because of all the fuel needed to be conserved for the war effort. So leisure driving was knocked on. People drove very little compared to before. I think Public Transit increased by more than 80 percent. In this country more than 90 percent in canada so there are really important parallels. Bernie sanders talks about these parallels as well. It is informing the debate and i think at this point the fact that what were calling the Green New Deal is not an idea. Its been floating around the Climate Movement for along time, the Climate Justice movement. The reason why i think the precedent of the Green New Deal is a little bit more useful than the world war ii precedent is simply that this was so topdown. And i think that i wouldnt want federal governments to have that much power. I think we need a model that is so decentralized, that empowers subnational governments more. But the truth is that i argue we need to look at that whole era to look for precedents for this kind of rapid change. The new deal and the transition to the mobilizations and the Marshall Plan. Resources were martial because people understood the threat. Whether it was the Great Depression and the dustbowl, whether it was the threat of fascism and in the case of the Marshall Plan what the us was worried about was a lot of countries were falling under the control of the soviet union so they wanted to rebuild western europe in a way that would make socialism less appealing which meant rebuilding the public sphere, having mixed economies strong safety net, strong trade union rights so they felt like we cant just have the regulated capitalism, it has to be a more mixed economy that has a much stronger social protection or people will go a fullblown socialist and will lose it all to the socialists. See one was there a book or author that influenced or change your thinking on any subject . Guest yes, so many books. I dont know where to begin but certainly when i was writing this changes everything, reading silent spring was really important. Also some indigenous fingers, i recognize im canadian as we talked about and i dedicate this book on fire to a man named Arthur Emanuel was an important indigenous reader and author in canada and he was a former chief and he was a mentor of mine, wrote acouple of books. His posthumously published book that i think is incredibly important is called the reconciliation manifesto. Its about the centrality of land rights on many fronts including fighting Climate Change. That indigenous land rights and indigenous knowledge is very important if we are going to rise to this challenge. The book that had the biggest impact on me recently as a novel that called the over story which itold everybody to have to read. Host because . Magnificence, i think its the finest modern novel, and or bbq. I read a lot of fiction that helps me think about the work that im doing around climate and barbara kingsolver, climate behavior is one of the best books of Climate Change but for most recent novel i think is underappreciated called on sheltered because shes really kind of getting at what it means to live in a house thats falling apart and her novel is a physical house but the physical house is a manifestation of our collective house, the planet itself so i recommend that. But the over story, its just magnificent and the science of forests and understanding how trees communicate with each other and really live in communities is also one of the most beautiful descriptions of activism that ive ever read. So i dont think activists get a fair shake in our society. People who really do put the collective good ahead of their own freedom. And he writes about people who feel so passionately about protecting forests that they engage in direct action, move into trees, living trees keep them from being down and he writes about them not uncritically but with a lot of respect and compassion and its beautiful to see that you mention your husbandwho places restrictions on your web access when youre writing a book. Is he one of your editors mark. Host guest youfind a typo . Yes, hes always edited me. I think earlier on, he would be more and he, but the result everything before it goes out and i added him as well. And we collaborated. He directed a film that, when i was writing this changes everything, he made a film to go with the book. In a way, the products were in parallel. We wereexperimenting , usually write a book and then you make a film about it. If youre going to make a film about it which i did with the shock doctrine. And its something a little bit funny about that because youre necessarily retracing your footsteps so you dont have the same sense of discovery you had when youre doing research and being changed by your Research Area your mimicking sense of discovery for the camera and for me, i never want to go backwards, i always want to go forward though i didnt like the idea of making something after id already written a book and we had i think it was tough to build around the shock doctrine. So we decided to do Something Different and i was writing the book and he was making the film. That meant that we were both busy and so he had less time at me andhe had four previous books and hes a great editor. Will collect calls, i mention this because he pathway, Cokie Roberts the biggest challenge was writing a book with her husband. I believe it. And it was hard enough to make the film and the book together that im not sure. I definitely know, im not sure if i could cowrite a book with anyone but i wouldnt do it with my husband as i value our life too much. Mike from gainesville new york, your next. Id like to know your thoughts on where all the people going to work in the future . It seems as though last few decades, the emphasis has been on doing away with middleclass jobs and personally i think the lack of jobs is the root of all evil. Thank you mike. Its a great question. And i think we have, i think that is not exactly a lack of jobs. Its a lack of jobs that pay salaries that can support families, that provide benefits, that provide a sense of security area there is pretty low unemployment and very low unemployment right now but theres an epidemic of underemployment, a lot of people are having to havemultiple jobs. Theres this contradiction where people who support the president want to claim everything great in the economy becausetheres low unemployment. But that doesnt explain why theres a much excess stress, when people are pulling into poverty. Why theres an epidemic of depression, of addiction. Clearly not everything is going well with the kind of jobs people are getting. Its clear that what we invest in Renewable Energy, Energy Efficiency, and public transportation, we create many times more jobs than when we invest in fossil fuels and already there are more jobs in renewables in the United States that are directly employed in the fuel sector but i think too often, we havent made sure that the jobs these newer jobs pay the same kind of salaries that people had working at an auto plant or for eggs on. These are good jobs. Although theyre getting worse which is why we have a strike right now of dw workers so we need to make sure this is in theoriginal Green New Deal resolution , that they say that workers who are moving from high carbon jobs to these new jobs in renewables and Energy Efficiency need to maintain their salary levels, need to maintain their levels and so thats key. Another part of it is we have a lot of jobs in the service sector, particularly in whats called the parent economy, teaching, nursing, overwhelmingly womens work and because its been womens work, i havent seen any women colors that because its womens work its devalued in our economy. So if there are any womenout there , im lonely. Its tom next from illinois and lets hear from margaret rea go ahead tom. No offense, none taken. Ill have to blame my mother for that. I want to thank you for your clarity of thought. And communication. On the existential crisis of our lifetime. And also on urgency on youtube and other venues about what is sacred. And the demarcation that happens in the new age as we come more scientifically based and got away from older , more religious ways of thinking. Can we separate the supernatural and superstitious from the sacred and, with a new vision of what were going to see in our future. And the new Life Expectancy and clean new deal for our future and particularly for our kids andgrandkids. Thank you very much for your time area. What a great big question. And you know, i think thats the dawn of the scientific revolution and the Industrial Age, there was a shift in worldview away from the Natural World i think. And i appreciate the caller, using the word sacred because i dont think it is just about religion or organized religion. And once again, its a relatively new and on and on. To not see the Natural World as sacred as a little bit scary. As alive and deserving of our respect. Pretty much every other cosmology that the modern Industrial Age saw the Natural World thatway and when you do see the Natural World that way youre a little bit more careful. Your messing with god, you dont want to make too big of a mess. So i think thats draining away of the sacred and this is part of the reason why i love the over store because it is sort of a reinjection, part of a reinjection of the Natural World that a lot of people, i believe a lot of people are drawn to. There drawn to grade, understand part of our crisis , the crisis that were in with Climate Change has to deal with imagining with the world as a machine and ourselves as engineers. That made us believe we could take without limit or repercussions. So i do believe that it is not just, and ive written this before that it isnt just, that climate disruption is not just an ecological crisis or an economic crisis. It really is a spiritual crisis and a narrative crisis and the narrative that we could dominate nature, seeing the Natural World as a machine for us to dominate. It really begins withfrancis bacon. It is how we ended up where we are. And its going to be a return to older stories, combined with newer ones that are going to be part of getting us out of there. Two other books, in a sentence described them. Guest identity windows is a collection of essays i wrote after no logo came out when i was on the front lines about the debate over globalization. Host this changes everything. Guest this changes everything the subtitle is capitalism versus the climate about the class that we have between an Economic System that requires expansion in order to not be in crisis and a Natural World that requires that we can track in order to not be in crisis. Lets go to margaret, fayetteville arkansas. Weve been waiting to hear from you. Thank you, thank you and thank tom for his question and naomi for her reply this morning , my phone received two alerts for flash floods in my area. I think greta is a prophetic voice and it seems to me some religious denominations are listening and hearing and studying to know the truth. And im unsure about my own denomination, the southern baptists. I dont really know what their opinion is now, but some of us believe that education is the first bible and we would do well to read the scriptures of nature and accurately interpret them. Host hard to hear whatyou were saying and i think we got the essence, thank you for the call. Guest i absolutely agree that we need faith leaders in this conversation and it isnt just about politics, it isnt just about economics. We need to people whole selves. I dont think its just organized religion but i have a chapter in all fire that describes a very unlikely visit i took as a secular jewish feminist which was to the vatican. After pope francis released his cyclical on ecology which is an incredible document i would encourage everyone to read. And i never, like i said i never thought i would be recommending catholic texts but its an amazing text that draws on the teachings of francis of asissi and i attended a conference about the encyclical where it was a profound debate about reexamining the idea of, that the earth is human dominion. That its just here for us. And really what pope francis was saying clearly was nature has value in and of itself. And that was pretty radical. Was seen as radical to parts of the catholic church. We need that kind of leadership from all faith leaders. Host your first book came out 20 years ago so if we were to sit here 20 years from now how do you think history will judgepresident from this moment in history . Guest wow. This moment in history. I think it will depend on what we do area we are at a profound moral crossroads and what i am worried about in this moment is not just the weather. Im not just worried about the flash letting that the previous caller mentioned when the forest fires that have ravaged part of the continent where my family is or the historic storms that are pounding the caribbean as we speak. Im worried about all that but what scares me the most is the intersection of heavy weather with this rising climate of hate and i dont think theyre unrelated. I think we are seeing figures like trump emerge, but also balsonaro in brazil, even modi in india, these figures that are good at defining a protected in group and defining these threatening others, the outgroup within their National Orders and also aswe know with trump , the socalled invading armies of others so were seeing a fortress and a borders, not just in the us. Were seeing it in the European Union where thousands have been left to drown in themediterranean. I dont think its coincidence that these kind of two fires are happening at the same time, the fires of climate disruption and these fires of unmasked xena phobic hatred. I think people understand that we are entering or are in an era of ecological disruption that the four safe human habitability on this planet is contracting and people are going to have to move and theres a couple of waysthat we can respond to that. The danger of how we will look back on this moment 20 years from now, my fear is this will be the moment where we decided that we were going to only protect ourselves, our own and that we are entering an era where people are going to be okay with seeing an unspeakable number of people die. Or we go on another road and the other road is based on the idea that absolutely every human life has equal value, that everybody has the right to seek safety and this is a crisis that was created in the rich world, being felt in the poorest parts of the world. That we know each other a lot by right of being human. But we are in a web of interconnection so i hope 20 years from now what were seeing about this moment is this is the moment where we chose not to boardbut to share. And to figure out how to live together, to live on less land, but with more generosity, more humanity. I believe its possible but its hard, but the alternative is not just climate disruption. The alternative is being a type of human that we want to be. Host and if the president is reelected . Guest all i know is that every waking moment or me its focus on that not happening. Because we dont have another four years. To spend cracking open new pieces of wilderness to drilling and building new fortresses and unleashing more hatred against the most vulnerable. I think getting rid of trump is an absolute moral imperative. And that means making sure that the candidate emerges from the democratic primaries who is a trusted messenger for standing up to corporate power, not being mired in the swamp of washington and really seen as somebody is going to have a different set of moral values and ill leave it to your viewers and listeners to think about who it is who best meets that criteria but i think its incredibly important that they really be such a sharp alternative and not have a lot of baggagegoing into this race. Because this is a big change thats ahead of us. There are very powerful forces that are going to try and stop anybody who tries to do the right thing. And so if you look at the candidates, make sure that youre choosing a candidate who has a very, very defined and strong appetite for taking on our infrastructure. Host john, your next with naomi klein. Caller its a pleasure to speak with you. I wanted to turn the conversation to my favorite subject lately is russia. The ukraine and the 2016 election. And the following collusion delusion with russia and i specifically wonder where you stand on the collusion delusion part but let me say that the revolution happened in my don in 2014, i see it as the classical regime change operation that was run out of the state department, john mccain, victoria newland, the whole gang and then on top of it you had the victoria newland over here conversation where she lays out the whole leadership of those in and whos out. Thats crucial because as we talk about the ukraine and its role that its now being talked about, you have to go back and realize that was a coup dctat and that we supported neofascists and protofascist elements in the ukraine that are still active and are still strong area now, jump forward to the 2016 election and you have paul metaphors who becomes Trumps Campaign manager. The Hillary Campaign who is completely in bed with the ukrainians from the coup dctat, joe biden etc. Theyre basically doing maneuvers to get paul metaphors indicted which he was indicted, the indictment was pulled after trump came president. Now we fast forward to hear where we have the two years of mueller and this whole idea that from was a russian public. Well, even looking over every stone, they couldnt prove that which just goes to show it was a bunk accusation from the beginning. So now im going to get jump in and get a response, thank youfor the question. Im not sure that i agree that theres absolutely nothing there. But i do, i obviously they didnt make the case, an individual case around russia. But whats going on now with ukraine relates to what i was talking about earlier in terms of who the candidate is that runs against trump area i would encourage anybody who has trouble with mister trump to go find a reasonable trump supporter, and tell them the story, tell them the ukraine story and the biden story and why he should be impeached. And then tell me how you feel about biden. Because i dont think you can tell this story in a way that in which they both dont look bad you which is not the same as saying that biden has done anything illegal, ithink he probably hasnt. And i do think that trump has committed and Impeachable Offense and i think he should be impeached for you i think hes committed other Impeachable Offenses that could have been impeached for. But given that this is the one that the democrats have seemingly chosen, i think its a huge problem for biden. Because even if its not illegal, its not illegal, i keep reading these stories saying theres no evidence of wrongdoing. If im wrong. Theres no evidence of illegality but that is not the same as wrongdoing. And i think that we are in a Climate Crisis. We were in a Climate Crisis during the obama years. The obama biden presidency was all about natural gas. There interesting ukraine were all aboutincreasing natural gas production. And the fact that its a sitting Vice President s son would be on the board of a Energy Company of any kind but a foreign Energy Company, Natural Gas Company getting 50,000 a year is the kind of fossil fuel nepotism that isnt good for politics or the planet. And i think we need a much cleaner brick with this kind of, i think its a cesspool frankly and i think that when , after the 2016 election, the New York Times asked me to write an oped responding to the claim that hillarys loss meant that no woman could be president and addressing a sort of, there was, there are a lot of women who took it very personally and what am i going to tell my daughters. Does this mean that the United States is just too misogynist to ever have a woman . Please, and i wrote an oped making argument that i do not think that is what we should take from the 2016 election because i feel that Hillary Clinton was to compromise candidate on a lot of fronts to run as hard as she needed to run against trump and one of the things that, one of the ways in which trump was vulnerable was that he had multiple women accusing him of Sexual Misconduct and Hillary Clinton was not able to go after him on that was to compromise because of bill clinton and that was one of the reasons among many others that she lost the election. The point is that her hands were tied behind her back the cause of her own compromises. And i would say that one of the things that trump is most vulnerable on is his own self dealing and this nepotism in his own family which maybe not be illegal but is certainly improper and certainly flies in the face of him claiming that hes standing up for working america and is just all about those workers. One of the areas that hes multiple normal on having to deal with the various ways in which his family has profited from the presidency to ask yourself is joe biden a trusted messenger for that message and what were learning about undermining or are his hands tied behind his back in the way Hillary Clinton were tied behind her back on multiple fronts, you mention trade and other funds. We need a candidate whose hands are tied behind their backs. Please, dont make joe biden. I just would like to say that will go to frank from kentucky, your next. Id like to get back to what they were discussing about fdr and the new deal because i just think that he was aware that the Economic Stabilization board was run by trump and the men who did that was the treasurer, he was a congressman who helped pass the 16th amendment which is the income tax amendment and i think a lot of what he wants to accomplish could be done using article 5 of the constitution. After missed gives and quit being the treasurer, after he leftcongress , past the 16th amendment and became treasurer or fdr, it was not the 1929 crash happened before fdr became president. And Economic Stabilization board was in response to the depression. So after they got back realized, Mister Brinson went on to sit on the supreme court. He was from kentucky. Kentuckys had a long history withrussia because they are our largest neighbors. It cut alaska into you have to states then texas. Host are you with your powerpoint . Nancy, thank you for the call. I think ill treat it like a comment. Go to margaret joining us from california, thanks for waiting. So naomi had mentioned about the power of corporations i just wanted to make her and people aware that there is a movement of flicks to amend the constitution to say that corporations are not people with rights. A corporation is a useful device for organizing people and money and resources, but it should be in the public interest. A corporation is formed by an act of government, a corporate charter and since we have a government of the peoplesupposedly , the people should, there corporations should serve the people rather than the other way around. So there is an Organization Called move to amend which is working on passing a constitutional amendment to make it clear. That corporations have privileges which can be granted by law but they dont have the same inherent rights aspeople. So i just like to say that. Its a great initiative, moved to amend. I would recommend that people check it out, i was aware of it and i think its a big piece of the puzzle in terms of having all the levers that are needed to change things as quickly as we need you. That corporations having the same status of people. Host from massachusetts, karen, goodafternoon. Caller good afternoon and thank you so much cspan, you have mind expanding programs and guestsevery day. Miss klein, i share your last name so thats fun but its spelled a different way. Anda former poet laureate of my town and i wanted to know ,just a twopart question. I want to know if you will ever write poetry. Did poetry contribute anything to your writing in the past or how you started writing because many writers say that they started with poetry before they went to pros. The other part is because of yourcanadian upbringing , i have relatives from canada myself and i wondered if you think having your son the age of school, do you have , do you see a value of Canadian School education over American Education Public Private or charter . Id like to know your opinion and ill hang up and listen on the air. Host before you hang up, can you stay on the line for a minute mark i was going to ask her to read a verse from one of her poems see five would have been nice. I have to admit i didwrite some bad poetry before i started writing pros. It was definitely my first sort of writing passion. But i havent done it in many years. I think that would be hard, poetry area. It sort of fit my team asked very well. I appreciated it and one of the things that i talk about around what a Green New Deal should mean is that i think the original new deal led to a renaissance of public funding for the arts including funding for poets and playwrights and novelists and anchors and minimalists and so on. And this is actually a good low carbon work that we need to invest in. That solar panels. Poets, thats a green job that i would say to our previous color. So i am living in the United States right now. Because im on record. And we just moved a little more than a year ago we experienced both the canadian public School Systemand the American Public School System. I think its tricky because i would say that i dont, with canadian Public Schoolsystem , its less unequal then the us one is my perception. I think because its all based on property taxes here. Police where im living, so much is based on property taxes and there are these absolutely massive discrepancies between thekind of public cool education you get. And separating them by just a mile. You have differences and they , as here in the us it follows racial faultlines. And schools and wealthier neighborhoods can be better resourced and theyre certainly able toraise more money and so on. But its not quite as unequal as it is in the United States. There are definitely things about the us public system that i find are better than the canadian system i feel very disloyal saying that but my son has special needs and hes special support and you have the american disabilities act which is a strong legal instrument that has given students and parents stronger tools to require that schools provide those supports. And to be honest and i know people have their views about canada and id be happy to talk about how much enter our Healthcare System is. When it comes to special needs, the us has a speech. Host ill talk about your students and whether or not they have influence. Lets go to heidi joining us frommaine. Its an honor to join you today. Im very blessed to have met you at cooper union years ago. I have a lot of ground to cover but basically, i want to ask you about your concepts of silencing of the sciences from canada. Your thoughts, the whole concept of fossil fuels as a corporate sponsorship of laws that clamp down on environmentalists, especially indigenouspeople. And in this spirit of the unity of sacredness standing rock, im asking you how can we call on our leaders, especially in new york city, massachusetts and maine that wants to base their Green New Deals on the genocide and ecological cleansing of some of our indigenous neighbors such as, weve had based on the situation with the Alberta Canadian tar sands stuff, but like talking more about the green in your neighbors about your and the james bay ecosystem has been lensed by hydro mega dams and how can we find a more Sustainable Way to offer them an olive branch so that the people that are working in those fossil fuels and all these other industries and hydro can find another way to find an income that would help them also help their people to be living sustainably. Host thank you, you a lot on the table and we will get a response. Guest theres a lot there. So the Core Principles of what Climate Justice would do is that the people who one, the people who got the worst deal under the current extractive fossil fuel based economy meeting the people who have the dirtiest industries in their backyards , who had the highest cancer rates, highest as the rates are bearing the burden of this economy, need to be first in line to benefit from the transformations including owning and controlling their own energy projects, getting the jobs as this color was alerting alluding to but also that no worker should be left behind in this transition. We talked earlier about the language in alexandria ocasio cortez, having those workers maintain their salary levels but this completely in addition to a job that will be created, the huge number of jobs created, Bernie Sanders estimates 5 million jobs in Energy Efficiency area building affordable green housing, in really investing in Public Transit and rails and of course Renewable Energy, you have other sectors where as i was talking about economy teaching, thats already low carbon but in addition theres a lot of cleanup work that needs to be done so the caller mentioned this isnt only true, its true in any region where you have intensive fossil fuel extraction, fracking and youve got a lot of abandoned wealth. Youve got a lot of land rehabilitation to do. There are tens of thousands of abandoned well heads in alberta and theres actually hundreds of thousands of jobs that can be created just by getting the polluters to pay for the mess that they created. That doesnt require a lot of retraining because these are workers that would be on job sites where they put in the wealth. They know how to the wealth and clean them up. The problem is were not getting fossil fuel companies financing cleanup so theres plenty of work to be done. The frontline communities including individual Indigenous People need to be first in mind when we bake in equity but as i mentioned earlier , its really important that indigenous knowledge and land rights be respected as part of our response to the Climate Crisis. We know we need huge reforestation, land rehabilitation. This shouldnt be done on the same model dispossessed Indigenous People of their lands and people who have access to their lands, there has to be a way that we respect indigenous land rights and indigenous leaderships as part of the huge conservation work ahead s. Host we have a minute or two left, jess, you get the last question. If youcould be brief. About 9 11, they stopped airplanes from flying and the planet heated up a little bit so im wondering in minnesota today the with the hunters staying around later in the spring just a comment about that and less light, even thoughthe planet is heating up, less light is getting through and is that going to affect plants . Host thank you. Guest im not sure i understood the question about less light getting through. Host what about getting colder earlier . Guest Climate Change has gone from being this future threat off in the distance to something that is impacting the lives of pretty much everybody now. In some cases its noticing these subtle changes around the weather, why is it so hot , flash flooding but for Many Americans theres entire cities flooded. Theyve lost massive infrastructure. Or on the west coast, they are blanketed in wildfire smoke. Summer after summer. I was recently in paradise california which was razed to the ground by this historic campfire so this is not an abstract issue, this is not a faroff issue and we see this reflected in the poll and this is a huge shift, americans are ranking, concern about Climate Change at the top of their concerns alongside healthcare. Host let me go back to my final question, the role students play in influencing your thinking or shaping your questions. Guest well, i think young people generally, the young people who i talked to, my students also, i meet young people everywhere i go. I partnered for this book tour with the Sunrise Movement which is a youth Climate Justice movement that has been demanding a Green New Deal and everywhere i go i have a private meeting with them before i do my Public Events and theyre worried about everything from weather makes sense to be going to college. Theyre so uncertain about the future, whether they should have kids. I get questions like this because there can so concerned about what the future might hold. I think young people are living with such a sense of insecurity about work but also this sort of broader existential sense of is there a future at all and we are not taking this seriously enough in terms of what it means for their Mental Health and their right to the future and being in contact with them is what fuels me. Host in depth with naomi klein. Now, booktvs monthly in Depth Program with author and historian, joanne freeman. Her books include, affairs of honor, the essential hamilton, and most recently, the field of blood. Violence in congress and the road to civil war. Road to civil war. Joanne freeman, youre going to hate this opening question