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8 N A T I O N A L N U R S E W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 4 NEWS BRIEFS This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate By Naomi Klein Simon and Schuster, 2014 BOOK REVIEW O n a recent installment of the HBO series, "The Newsroom," a fictional top Environmental Pro - tection Agency scientist horrifies even the grim-faced news anchor Will McAvoy with the pronouncement that the fight against climate change is already lost. "If we face this problem head on, if we listen to our best scientists, and act decisively, and passionately, I still don't see any way we can survive," intones the EPA official, predicting "mass migration, food and water shortages, spread of deadly disease, endless wildfires, storms that have the power to level cities, black- en the sky and create permanent darkness." "Newsroom" creator Aaron Sorkin was no doubt trying to shock viewers who have become numb to frequent real news reports about the climate crisis that, if not at the level of the overly dramatized civilization collapse, are certainly cause for alarm. On the eve of the latest United Nations Climate Summit in Lima, Peru, even the more staid New York Times noted Nov. 30 that scientists and climate policy experts "warn that it now may be impossible to prevent the temperature of the planet's atmosphere from rising by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. According to a large body of scientific research, that is the tipping point at which the world will be locked into a near-term future of drought, food and water shortages, melting ice sheets, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels, and widespread flooding—events that could harm the world's population and economy." With so much at much at stake, why have world leaders done so little to embrace comprehensive, mandatory solutions, rely- ing instead on modest, market-based proposals for voluntary reductions in green- house gas emissions? Environmental activist Naomi Klein, in her important new tome This Changes Every- thing, has an answer. To Klein, the two-ton elephant in the room is not just global warm- ing, it's the global economy, which she labels the ultimate source of the climate crisis and which must be confronted head on to save the planet and all the life forms who live here. "What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house?" Klein asks. "We have not done the things that are neces- sary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reining ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis." To Klein, the policy pillars of this era should be "familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corpo- rate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending." Or to put it another way, "the core of the problem comes back to the same inescapable fact that has both blocked climate action and accelerated emissions: all of us are living in the world that neoliberalism built." But the origins of the climate crisis go farther back, she asserts, to an "ideology of extractivism"—a term describing the removal of raw materials from the earth, usually by colonial powers for profit, that are intrinsic to the origins of our present economic system. Extractivism, says Klein, means subvert- ing nature into a commodity to be exploited by humans, but also "the reduction of human beings into labor to be brutally extracted" or pushed into what she calls "sacrifice zones" of massive decimation. Coal production is what might be called the origi- nal sin, and coal's "earliest casualties—the miners who died from black lung—an early warning that we were unleashing a poison- ous substance onto the world." Moving forward to today, Klein notes the iron grip of corporations, especially those in the energy extraction sector, that dominate global economies and political structures. "In virtually every country, the political class accepts the premise that it is not the place of government to tell large corporations what they can and cannot do, even when public health and welfare—indeed the habitability of our shared home—are clearly at stake." Thus comprehensive climate action is buried under obeisance to corporate inter- ests and massive corporate lobbying. In Washington, for example, says Klein, climate action has failed for the "same reasons why Obama's health reform failed to take on the perverting influence of the medical insurance and pharmaceutical companies…because large corporations wield far too much political power." In probably the book's biggest weakness, Klein offers only brief references to health consequences of both climate change and the corporate grip blocking substantive solutions. One glaring example she cites is a Canadian doctor who was vilified by both Canadian health regulators and a major physicians association for exposing "alarming numbers of cancers, including extremely rare and aggressive bile-duct malignancies" in the tar sands-producing region of Alberta, Canada. NNU has long held that illustrating the massive health harm would help break through the stranglehold of the extractive industry and its grip on public policy that stifles climate action. A recent report on "The Climate Crisis and the Global Threat to Human Health" by the Cornell Global Labor Institute, in collab- oration with NNU, documents the wide- spread ways in which climate change adversely affects human health. These include vector-borne diseases, from malaria to Ebola, extreme weather events that lead to death, injuries, toxic contamination, and the spread of infectious diseases and mental health disorders, food shortages and nutrition insecurity linked to droughts and flooding, respiratory and pulmonary diseases linked to wildfires, and heat-related strokes. Game Changer