Political ecology analysis of the “out of control juggernaut” of globalization as a changeable political position is almost unintelligible outside academia (for example, Peter Newell, Globalization and the Environment, 2012). The international economic organizations (such as the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank) that govern trade, production, and finance are critical to the possibilities of effective environmental governance, but they are not typically thought of as environmental regimes—and yet, these organizations have substantive environmental profiles in terms of the authority they exercise over resource access, use, and environmental impact. Reified categories that separate the global from the national or the political from the economic interfere with effective environmental analysis. Until reified categories are challenged and what counts as “environmental” is broadened, political solutions can be framed only within a business-as-usual approach that is headed in an unsustainable direction (Newell). Once claims to political impotency are demystified, the discourse that absolves governments from blame for the consequences of reckless investment and irresponsible speculation can be challenged, and the globalization dynamics can no longer be used as an excuse for the lack of a project for political reform (Newell). Political ecology scholars seek to identify indicators of real political activity that do not overstate their potential for political reform, and indicators of real ecological disruption that do not understate the potential for ecological collapse. Once the indicators are identified, one can easily appreciate the desire for inspiring political reform by making causal inferences, but the co-evolution of globalization in our biosphere represents a singular case study that constitutes an inadequate basis for generalizing about the process.

Agendas for reform are just as subject to the distorting influences of deterministic assumptions as are the reified categories associated with major institutions or nations. The scholarly challenge is to deconstruct reified categorizations that block political reform without socially constructing a political agenda that generates “big conclusions from small samples” lest our methodological needs generate the theory, rather than vice versa (Stanley Lieberson, Small N’s and Big Conclusions, 1991). Unfortunately, the very process that makes a study more academically sound (for instance, contextualization, qualification, measurement error, interaction effects, and multicausality) often renders it unintelligible to a broader audience. This itself becomes problematic if the proposed political solution involves popular democratic reform.

Overcoming these identification challenges with an accessible writing style that investigates complicated interconnections in a meaningful way contributes to our understanding of a political ecology approach to macroeconomics. In This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, Naomi Klein uses a story-based inquiry method of investigative journalism to delve deeply into the relationship between capitalism and climate change. She believes that the global community is entering a new historic moment, dubbed “decade zero,” of widespread public recognition that we are in a crisis of our own making that threatens our existence, the outcome of which will change everything (p. 452). She deconstructs the underlying politics of business-as-usual decision-making behavior, demystifies belief in technological fixes and messianic saviors, challenges reckless behavior and political irresponsibility, and calls for a just transition to a responsible future.

Klein begins with a political analysis of factors that support unregulated capitalism, documenting political decisions in which “trade has repeatedly been allowed to trump climate, but under no circumstances would climate be permitted to trump trade” (p. 78). The first section unmasks hyper-extractivism as a political strategy sabotaging a collective response to climate change just when it is most needed (p. 130). Inadequate oversight and regulation of natural gas fracking is linked to fossil fuel industry lobbying efforts and changeable political regulatory decisions (p. 145). Political delay only radicalizes the economic changes that must be made if adaptation to environmental changes are to have any hope of success, so starving the public sphere at the very moment when it is needed most is argued to be a politically untenable position (p. 106).

The second section is dedicated to demystifying three types of magical thinking that Klein believes contribute to popular support of business as usual: (1) that environmental nongovernmental organizations will influence capitalism to adapt to climate change; (2) that influential “green” capitalists will redirect the economy toward sustainability; and (3) that geoengineering solutions will insulate us from the effects of climate change. She offers evidence of how fossil fuel funding has shaped parts of the environmental movement to offer solutions (for example, natural gas or tar sands) that are sufficiently compromised to result in “catastrophic levels of warming” (p. 199). Similarly, the green leadership of ‘converted’ billionaires are too financially compromised to offer the needed leadership for adaptive change (p. 231). Even when green leaders make uncompromised efforts, their serious attempts can be counterproductive if the degree of hope they inspire contributes to further denial about the regulatory changes called for by science. According to Klein,

Finally, Klein demystifies belief in geoengineering management of climate change as justification for continuing with unregulated capitalism (p. 258). Solar radiation management, for example, might help slow glacial melting, but it would likely induce widespread drought and reduced freshwater supplies (p. 275), and it does nothing about the ocean acidification that threatens the aquatic food chain (p. 259). Klein writes,

Political decision making that risks ecocide is foolish when viable alternatives exist, but responsible solutions will require engaging in the hard work of making radical changes to the way we currently live (p. 289).

The remainder of the book identifies a pattern of local, regional, national, and international grassroots political mobilizations that simultaneously block new carbon frontiers (such as fracking and coal mines) and reorganize toward sustainability (for instance, renewable energy plans and community-owned businesses) (p. 364). Financially, this takes the form of the “Divest-Invest” movement, in which foundations, colleges and universities take the funds that they divest from fossil fuel companies and reinvest them in green initiatives, such as the clean tech sector and affordable green housing (p. 401). Klein describes a “constructive movement” that must fuse resistance with the development of alternatives to build an alternative economy within the existing one that is so “treacherous that nowhere is safe” (p. 405). Klein suggests that financing for a “Marshall Plan for the Earth” be conducted within a “Greenhouse Development Rights” framework to ensure a just transition that incorporates a country’s responsibility for historical emissions and the country’s capacity to contribute based on their level of development (p. 417). Funds for the transition could come from a combination of strategies such as erasing foreign debt, imposing a financial transaction tax, or elimination of fossil fuel company subsidies (p. 418).

Klein’s most interesting contribution to popular political ecology is also the portion most easily dismissed because of her shift to personal storytelling about private matters. As Betty Friedan noted, however, the personal is political. Klein writes of her own problems with infertility, then links unregulated capitalism to changes to the regenerative health of ecosystems. She notes how industrial risk assessment reports are conducted under the assumption that “we live in a world where all creatures are already fully grown” (p. 431). Reports note that marine mammals might experience some stress, but “conspicuously absent from the report are the words ‘eggs,’ ‘larvae,’ ‘fetus,’ and ‘juvenile’”(p. 432). To the extent that environmental impact assessments do not take into account reproductive impairment when identifying acceptable levels of environmental pollution, they may be seriously underestimating the interactive effects between climate change and species extinction—what Klein refers to as “disappearing babies in a warming world” (p. 434).

Although Klein’s deepest insights derive from her experience of “becoming a mother in an age of extinction” (p. 419), her successful achievement of motherhood while conducting investigative journalism may also contribute to an overstatement of the possibilities for political reform and an understatement of the potential for unfettered capitalism to induce ecological collapse. The time has come, she believes, for climate activists to take a clear moral stance, yet she acknowledges that the “raw terror of ecocide” continues to “suppress the full reality of the climate crisis” through the muting influence of denial (p. 462). Klein has written about capitalism and climate, but the pressing decision she ultimately describes concerns politics and ecology.