My grandfather was actually a union organizer at Walt Disney. He was an animator. He used to draw Donald Duck for Walt Disney.
— Naomi Klein
I am about safety for the people and the planet.
When you start talking about sacrifices, pretty soon people start feeling like chumps.
Everybody that's trying to get anything progressive done in this country knows that the biggest barrier is getting money out of politics.
I've been trying to pinpoint what keeps drawing me back to the Gulf of Mexico, because I'm Canadian, and I can draw no ancestral ties.
My sister lives in Oklahoma. And, you know, it is so shocking that James Inhofe, the foremost climate-denying senator, is from the state that is so deeply climate-affected.
He was about building up the Trump name and then selling it and leasing it in as many different ways as possible.
I think the fossil fuel industry is genuinely freaked out by the combination of the price collapse, the divestment movement, and that fact that renewable energy is getting so cheap so fast.
Before I had Toma, I was one of those people who had no interest in other people's kids. I was. 'Don't hand me that baby!'
Even though I believe in mass social movements, I'm uncomfortable in crowds.
The growth in emissions is coming from the developing world. So if we are going to get out of this, it's going to come out of a process of cooperation and collaboration. That's why it really requires a paradigm shift.
In terms of Hurricane Sandy, I really do see some hopeful grassroots responses, particularly in the Rockaways, where people were very organized right from the beginning, where Occupy Sandy was very strong, where new networks emerged.
We have to change the kind of free trade deals we sign. We would have to change the absolutely central role of frenetic consumption in our culture. We would have to change the role of money in politics and our political system.
It's really, really hard to get in rooms with people you don't usually work with and try to find common ground.
One of the ideas that I wanted to highlight, which is actually a very bipartisan idea - it's not just about conservatives - is this worship of wealth, the CEO saviour.
After the Pearl Harbor attacks, around 120,000 Japanese Americans were jailed in internment camps. If an attack on U.S. soil were perpetrated by people who were not white and Christian, we can be pretty damn sure that racists would have a field day.
The Heartland Institute, which people mostly only know in terms of the fact that it hosts these annual conferences of climate change skeptics or deniers, it's important to know that the Heartland Institute is first and foremost a free market think tank. It's not a scientific organization.
My father was born in Newark, New Jersey, and my mother was born in Philadelphia. They both went to Stanford for grad school and met there.
When I went to Australia, I had this feeling, like, 'Wow, this is really a different country.' I think that feeling of genuine foreignness, that this is a very different culture, which is increasingly rare in our globalised world.
The divestment movement is a start at challenging the excesses of capitalism. It's working to delegitimize fossil fuels and showing that they're just as unethical as profits from the tobacco industry.
A new bubble will replace the old one. A new technology will come along to fix the messes we made with the last one. In a way, that is the story of the settling of the Americas, the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped.
There are things that government can do to incentivize the free market to do a better job, yes. But is that a replacement for getting in the way, actively, of the fossil fuel industry and preventing them from destroying our chances of a future on a livable planet? It's not a replacement.
2007, according to a Harris poll, 71 percent of Americans believed that climate change was real, that it was human caused.
This phrase, 'culture jamming,' was very much in vogue in the 1990s when these superbrands sort of emerged and started kind of projecting their names onto ever more surfaces.
It takes me a long time writing books. It takes me about five years to write a book, and when I'm done, the last thing I want to do is to do it again.
I was the rebel in our family and a child of the eighties. That meant going to the mall.
That's the trick of free market economic theory: it doesn't just ask you to only be selfish and not care about others. It tells you that by being selfish, you are helping others. And, in fact, by trying to directly help others, you will hurt them.
The more hardcore conservative you are, the more tightly identified you are with defending the interest of capital as an interest of the system based on hyper-competition, the more likely it is that you vehemently deny climate change. Because if climate change is real, your worldview will come crashing down around you.
Here in Canada, the people who oppose the tar sands most forcefully are Indigenous people living downstream from the tar sands. They are not opposing it because of climate change - they are opposing it because it poisons their bodies.
Change or be changed, right? And what we mean by that is that climate change, if we don't change course, if we don't change our political and economic system, is going to change everything about our physical world.
My worry about this exclusive focus on Trump - the personality and how all of this is so unprecedented - is that then the solution seems to be, 'Well, we'll just get rid of Trump.'
While everyone is focused on security and civil liberties, Trump's Cabinet of billionaires will try to quietly push through even more extreme measures to enrich themselves and their class, like dismantling Social Security or auctioning off major pieces of government for profit.
Throughout U.S. history, national crises have been used to suspend constitutional protections and attack basic rights. After the Civil War, with the nation in crisis, the promise of 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves was promptly betrayed.
Governments started negotiating towards emission reduction in 1990. That's when the official negotiations started.
I think I'm a critic of corporate power, whether locally or globally. And the term 'globalization' I've never found all that helpful.
As soon as you write about climate change, the first attempt to discredit you is, 'Well, you wrote this on a computer,' or, 'You took a plane to this conference.' So your opinion isn't valid.
I think people are just incredibly depressed and hopeless about the prospects for change.
If there is one thing BP's 'watery improv act' made clear, it is that, as a culture, we have become far too willing to gamble with things that are precious and irreplaceable, and to do so without a back-up plan, without an exit strategy.
We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer.
You've got the Trump water and Trump Steaks and Trump's very so-called dodgy university. And so many of the towers, the Trump towers around the world, the Trump resorts around the world, those are not owned by the Trump Organization.
What you want to do is you want to own as little sort of hard infrastructure as possible, and your real value is your name and how you build that up.
One shouldn't gamble with what is irreplaceable and precious.
When I feel my blood sugar getting off, I drink a glass of kale juice. It's so disgusting you don't want to eat anything!
There is some pretty powerful self-interest in wanting a future that is not just running storm-to-storm. The argument that I make is not that we aren't competitive and selfish and greedy. We are. We're all of these things. We're complicated, competitive, greedy and nasty, and kind and generous and compassionate.
What we know is that the environmental movement had a series of dazzling victories in the late '60s and in the '70s where the whole legal framework for responding to pollution and to protecting wildlife came into law. It was just victory after victory after victory. And these were what came to be called 'command-and-control' pieces of legislation.
As I was writing 'The Shock Doctrine', I was covering the Iraq War and profiteering from the war, and I started to see these patterns repeat in the aftermath of natural disasters, like the Asian tsunami and then Hurricane Katrina.
As soon as it was clear, in Copenhagen in 2009, that the Senate was blocking Obama from introducing meaningful climate legislation, the push was for him to use executive authority, use the EPA, use the tool of federal leases, and there was just a refusal to do it.
Trump would have been unelectable were it not for the groundwork laid by Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, two liberal heroes.
In the midst of the pain and panic of the Great Depression, as many as 2 million people of Mexican descent were expelled from the United States.
Fossil fuels are - they're inherently centralized. And you need a lot of infrastructure to get them out, and you need a lot of infrastructure to transport it, as Obama was explaining in front of all that pipe, right? Whereas renewable energy is everywhere.
