On 20th January we held a screening of the film of Naomi Klein’s book ‘This Changes Everything’. 56 people from as far afield as Kettering, Bedford and Amersham were in the audience.
The film has a strong focus on communities affected by the extraction of fossil fuels, looking mostly at the Athabasca region of Alberta in Klein’s native Canada. The large-scale extraction of tar sands has been a relatively recent phenomenon. A number of the Cree first nation people have been staging legal challenges on the grounds that the industry is making normal life for them impossible. There are also episodes set in Greece and India where we were told of the frighteningly high number of coal-fired power stations planned. China is shown as having terrible problems of air pollution but also a country that has the capacity to make quick changes which have already started with the rapid expansion of solar power and reductions in the use of coal. The last coal-fired power station supplying Beijing will close in 2016.
One of Klein’s strengths is the focus she gives to deniers and corporate backers of the status quo including the Heartland Institute and James Delingpole. She does this by letting them speak for themselves to expose their own unscientific views. The audience gasped in amazement at statements such as the one that concerns about climate change are just a Marxist Trojan horse to undermine capitalism.
The film contains a number of ‘what if…’ questions, the last of which is ‘what if climate change is not the problem but the answer?’ By this she means, are the renewable energy solutions to climate change opportunities to change our economic system away from one that is dominated by big corporations supplying and depending on fossil fuel?
