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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.
For someone with a background of economic justice, what scared me about climate change is not just that the sea level will rise and we'll have more storms - it's how this intersects with that cocktail of inequality and racism.
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.
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.
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.
Catching Trump out not paying his taxes, treating his employees like garbage - none of this sticks to him because that actually reinforces his power, power over other people, which is this specific kind of power that he's selling.
I think I would say that there is absolutely no way to reconcile an austerity agenda with climate action. Our political class needs to understand that the fight against austerity and the fight for climate action are the same fight.
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.
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.
Regardless of the overall state of the economy, there is now a large enough elite made up of new multi-millionaires and billionaires for Wall Street to see the group as "superconsumers," able to carry consumer demand all on their own.
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.
That is the meaning of the Trump brand - being the boss who is so rich and so powerful he can do whatever he wants. So the way in which he ran for president was to embody that idea as fully as he possibly could with his outrageousness.
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.
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.
One of the main ways in which I get attacked is by being called a conspiracy theorist by the right and the other main attack is actually from the conspiracy theorists who are really pissed at me for not admitting that 9/11 was an inside job.
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.
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.
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.
I think there has been this really bad habit of environmentalists being insufferably smug, where they are sort of saying, 'This is the issue that beats all other issues,' or, 'Your issue doesn't matter because nothing matters if the earth is fried.'
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.
I do believe that our ability to jam the Trump brand is somewhat limited. I think we can chip away at it, but ultimately, the way to undermine the Trump brand is a better product in the political marketplace, if you'll forgive the capitalist metaphor.
This same economic system, based on short-term growth and endless profits is also the reason for pretty much everything else that is lousy in our society, from private prisons to Fox News. What I'm arguing is that, in fact, what we've been told is a lie.
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.
This is what he has been selling on the 'The Apprentice', through his self-help books, how to - you know, 'Trump 101' or the 'Art of the Deal' or, really, back to 'Art of the Deal'. So almost the more he gets away with, the more he is reinforcing his brand.
Terrorism doesn't just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism - real and exaggerated - has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses.
Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi's and Nikes, grab their caps and backpacks, and Sony personal CD players and head for school.
In a marketplace where it's so easy to produce products, where your competitors can essentially match you on the product itself, you need to have something else. You need to have an added value, and that added value is the identity, the idea behind your brand.
I don't think you can understand Trump's relationship to his voters and how he gets away with what he gets away with, without understanding the pact between a lifestyle brand and its consumer base and how that really transformed the global economy in the 1990s.
Like Russia's gangsterism and Bush's cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of the fifty-year crusade to privatize the world. Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the ideology that gave it birth.
We live in a society that is powered by fossil fuels, but for the meantime, we're in it. Maybe there's, like, five people living in the woods off-grid, but they're spending all their time maintaining that, and they don't have much time left over for anything else.
Look at the structure of the Gates Foundation and this idea that, rather than trying to solve these huge global problems through institutions with some kind of democracy and transparency baked into them, we're just going to outsource it to benevolent billionaires.
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.
There is a triple layer of jargon when writing about climate change. You have the scientists, who are very cautious now because of the amount of climate denial. Then you have the U.N. jargon - I had to carry around a glossary of terms. It was like an alphabet soup.
I really did have this powerful sense, when I was in New Orleans after the storm, of watching all these profiteers descend on Baton Rouge to lobby to get rid of the housing projects and privatise the school system - I thought I was in some science-fiction experiment.
The way in which people talk about climate is just so wonky and so abstract and such a boys' club that it makes a lot of women just roll their eyes or feel that they are somehow not qualified. I certainly had to fight that feeling in myself in order to write about it.
It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.
As I explored Trump's inextricable relationship with his commercial brand, and its implications for the future of politics, I began to see why so many of the attacks on him have failed to stick - and how we can identify ways of resisting him that will be more effective.
Since the 1980s, we've been living in this era, really, of corporate rule, based on this idea that the role of government is to liberate the power of capital so that they can have as much economic growth as quickly as possible, and then all good things will flow from that.
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.
The world now has a new kind of hero, one who listens more than speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader who doesn't show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror. And in the Zapatistas, we have not one dream of a revolution, but a dreaming revolution.
Real climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.
We need to invest in healthcare, in education, in the sciences. And in so doing, we will tackle one of the most intractable problems we face, which is gross wealth inequality. We can't fight climate change without dealing with inequality in our countries and between our countries.
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.
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.
Brands like Starbucks came along and talked about their brand as itself being a community, the idea that Starbucks is what they like to call a 'third place,' which is not their idea; it's the idea of basic citizenry needing a place that is not work, that is not home, where citizens gather.
If you're biking more and walking more, you're going to be happier and healthier. And you'll probably feel better if you take out less garbage, as most of us feel pretty crappy about that. But I don't think we can mistake those acts for doing what it takes to address a crisis at a global level.
The Trump family's business model is part of a broader shift in corporate structure that has taken place within many brand-based multinationals, one with transformative impacts on culture and the job market, trends that I wrote about in my first book, 'No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies'.
So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.
And if there is one thing we can be sure of, it’s that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods—disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many thousands—are going to keep coming.
The net is more than an organizing tool - it has become an organizing model, a blueprint for decentralized but cooperative decision-making. It facilitates the process of information sharing to such an extent that many groups can work in concert with one another without the need to achieve monolithic consensus.