The (Unlearned) Lesson of Flight 3935
Klein relates an anecdote about Flight 3935 to illustrate the fundamental ironic connection between capitalism and climate change. Passengers were force to disembark the plane before takeoff in hopes that this lightening of the load would facilitate the solution to a major problem: the wheels of the jet had literally sunk into the tarmac so softened by the hot weather than it had begun melting.
“This irony—the fact that the burning of fossil fuels is so radically changing our climate that it is getting in the way of our capacity to burn fossil fuels—did not stop the passengers of Flight 3935 from reembarking and continuing their journeys.”
Capitalism and Climate Change
The central purpose of the book is to reveal the inextricable connection between capitalist economics and the climate change debate. Economics is the underpinning of most rejection of climate change science and forms the essential character of arguments against taking action by climate change deniers. Klein points out that this argument cuts both ways, but that pro-regulatory capitalists who are the object of scorn by the right-wing conspiracy to spread disinformation about climate change are ironically overlooking a golden opportunity:
“It is a painful irony that while the right is forever casting climate change as a left-wing plot, most leftists and liberals are still averting their eyes, having yet to grasp that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism since William Blake’s `dark Satanic Mills’ blackened England’s skies”
The Pinatubo Paradox
After the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo produced a haze which cooled the worldwide temperature of the earth roughly the exact same amount in one year as it has been warmed by the release of greenhouse gas emissions, serious efforts ramped up to study man-made means of achieving the same block of the sun in order to permanently offset the those emissions. The paradoxical result of successful implementation that essentially stops global warming, however, would be a sky so hazy that the capacity of solar-powered generation of energy would ironically collapse to unknown levels.
Nigerian Natural Gas
The process of extracting oil from the Niger Delta is one that also results in the collateral effect of producing natural gas. Such is the volume of this production of natural gas that were an appropriate system built and put in place, the consequence of capturing all that natural gas would be a grid capable of providing electricity throughout the entire country. Instead, the gas is not collected, but set on fire leaving behind nothing but more pollution fired into the atmosphere and the irony that the Delta region of the country is persistently plagued by fuel shortages and electrical blackouts.
The Big Blue Marble of Irony
During the last manned mission to the moon, Apollo 17, a photograph of the earth was taken by the crew which showed one half of the planet fully illuminated by the sun, with swirls of white clouds obscuring much of the Indian Ocean, but the top half of Africa and the Sinai Peninsula spectacularly clear. The photograph became known as the Blue Marble is arguably the single most viewed earth-from-outer-space image ever taken. The image would shortly afterward be adopted as the unofficial symbol of the environmental movement taking hold in the 1970’s. At the time of release, the image was simply credited to the crew of Apollo 17, but information disclosed later specifically identified astronaut Harrison Schmitt as the photographer who snapped the camera. This revelation would later become deeply ironic as Schmitt would go on to become one of the leading figures of the anti-environmentalist climate-change-denial movement.
