Marshall Plan For Earth, By Naomi Klein

In Naomi Klein book she mentions that there have been many attempts at global cooperation to address climate change. Klein gave a speech at the United Nations climate conference where she mentions that we need a “Marshall Plan for Earth.” The plan need to mobilize finance and technology transfer on scales that have never been seen before. It must get technology onto the ground in about every single country to make sure we reduce emission while raising people’s quality of life. Climate change has never received the crisis treatment from our leaders even though it carries the risk of destroying lives on a very large margin. Today, what gets declared as a crisis is an expression of power and priorities, but politicians aren’t the only ones with

Many times United Nations have helped governments to come together to tackle challenges. The resources needed to move away from fossil fuels, and prepare for the coming heavy weather could pull a huge wave of humanity out of poverty. This can be from clean water to electricity. This is a vision of the future that goes way beyond just surviving or enduring climate change beyond “mitigation” and “adapting” to it. It’s a vision in which we collectively use the crisis to leap somewhere that seems better than where we are right now. Going to the United Nations conference Klein saw climate change as a way that it can become a force for positive change. It can be the best argument for locals to demand rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to block harmful new free trade deals and rewrite old ones; and to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts. All of this would help end levels of inequality within our nations and between

They can allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change almost everything about our economy to avoid that fate. With this in mind we have to remember that since we have been in denial for decades no incremental options are now available to us. Either we will change our ways and build and entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us. This challenges something more powerful than capitalism which is centrism. Climate change presents a profound challenge to this cautious centrism because half measures won’t cut it. Climate change also poses a battle between capitalism and the planet. The battle is already occurring, but capitalism is winning. It wins every time the need for economic growth is used as the excuse for putting off climate action yet again, or for breaking emission reduction commitments already made. It wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: poisoning or poverty. The challenge, is not simply that we need to spend a lot of money and change a lot of policies. Rich countries dig in their heels and declare that they won’t cut emissions and risk losing their vaulted position in the global hierarchy. Poorer countries declare that they won’t give up their right to pollute as much as rich countries did on their way to wealth, even if that means deepening a disaster that hurts the poor most of all.