This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate is a book of such ambition and consequence that it is almost unreviewable ... Klein’s fans will recognize her method from her prior books ... Her strategy is to take a scourge ... trace its origins, then chart a course of liberation. In each book she arrives at some semihopeful place, where activists are reaffirming embattled civic values ... To call This Changes Everything environmental is to limit Klein’s considerable agenda ... The voices Klein gathers from across the world achieve a choral force ... To change economic norms and ethical perceptions in tandem is even more formidable than the technological battle to adapt to the heavy weather coming down the tubes. Yet This Changes Everything is, improbably, Klein’s most optimistic book. She braids together the science, psychology, geopolitics, economics, ethics and activism that shape the climate question. The result is the most momentous and contentious environmental book since Silent Spring.

The proposition that the world's political and economic institutions are preventing us from meeting the lethal challenge of global warming is hardly novel. But Naomi Klein in her new book articulates the case as forcefully and comprehensively as anyone has yet managed ... Klein is a first-class sloganiser. Our dependence on deposits of coal and oil made from prehistoric vegetation and animal matter make us 'a society of grave robbers'. We're treating nature like 'a bottomless vending machine'. Yet despite lobbing in these occasional firecrackers Klein's a pretty pedestrian writer. She seems to fill pages with tedious acronyms and the names of obscure academics. The descriptive passages of the natural world are soporific. Nevertheless, Klein doesn't pretend that she is producing a dainty work of literature. This is a piece of political advocacy. And that's the light in which it really ought to be judged ... One might quibble with the language but the alacrity with which climate change has slid down the agenda of Western politicians over the past decade, even as the science has grown more alarming, makes it difficult to push back against that basic conclusion

This Changes Everything is as much about the psychology of denial as it is about climate change ... Much of this book is concerned with showing that powerful and well-financed rightwing thinktanks and lobby groups lie behind the denial of climate change in recent years ... As a result of human activities, large-scale climate change is under way, and if it goes on unchecked it will fundamentally alter the world in which humans will in future have to live. Yet the political response has been at best ambiguous and indecisive ... For Klein none of this is accidental ... Klein is a brave and passionate writer who always deserves to be heard, and this is a powerful and urgent book that anyone who cares about climate change will want to read. Yet it is hard to resist the conclusion that she shrinks from facing the true scale of the problem ... This is a dangerous world, but not because an all-powerful elite is in charge. None of the states contending for power in the Middle East, Ukraine or the South China Sea can control or predict the consequences of their actions. No one is in charge in the world’s conflicts. Another problem with pinning all the blame for climate crisis on corporate elites is that humanly caused environmental destruction long predates the rise of capitalism ... Throughout This Changes Everything, Klein describes the climate crisis as a confrontation between capitalism and the planet. It would be more accurate to describe the crisis as a clash between the expanding demands of humankind and a finite world, but however the conflict is framed there can be no doubt who the winner will be. The Earth is vastly older and stronger than the human animal ...The change that is under way is no more than the Earth returning to equilibrium – a process that will go on for centuries or millennia whatever anyone does. Rather than denying this irreversible shift, we’d be better off trying to find ways of living with it.

Klein hopes this book will be read by people who don't read climate-change books (such as me). So it's probably my duty to warn you that it is quite wordy, and sees things from a North American angle, and is a bit more vague about renewable energy than I'd like. But so what – it's an unavoidably difficult and complex subject. The argument is signposted throughout with striking buzzwords: Extractivism, Big Green, No Messiahs, Blockadia. Not to mention the brilliant title – an executive summary in itself.

This Changes Everythingmakes the case that the problem of climate change reduces to the same problem that aroused [Klein] before, and the solution entails the exact same things she has always favored ... If her logic does not make sense to you, that is because you fail to grasp Klein’s moral code, which considered corporations an irredeemably evil force tainting anything with which they come into contact ... Klein comes face-to-face with evidence that falsifies her thesis and ignores it ... The most fascinating thing about This Changes Everything is how much factual refutation of Klein’s thesis is contained within the book itself ... Klein’s fervently ideological, anti-empiricist style, and her deep skepticism of the mainstream liberals who believe emissions can be controlled without destroying capitalism, places her in odd agreement with the far right ... U.N. efforts to fight climate change have only been under way since 1988. Compare this with the notion of replacing capitalism with a radical egalitarian alternative, which has been around for a century and a half. The project does not seem to be moving forward. Waiting to limit the damage of greenhouse-gas emissions until the people can overthrow the yoke of unfettered capitalism may represent the most dangerous advice the left has come up with in a very long time.

Klein is a gifted writer and there is little doubt about the problem she identifies ... Uncertainties remain over the role of climate change in specific extreme weather events and the precise impact of future warming. Klein acknowledges these but argues the risk is so great that emissions must be cut. This is not radical thinking. The International Energy Agency, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund all say emissions have to come down ... her arguments about why leaders have failed to respond adequately are not always persuasive ... And some of her prescriptions for how a shift to a fairer, renewable energy-based economy might be achieved...are precisely what groups from the IMF to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have long proposed ... Klein would say we no longer have time to see if such centrist prescriptions will work. A centrist might say we don’t have time to wait for capitalism to be dismantled to find out. But the longer the world waits for any meaningful response to a changing climate, the more appealing her arguments may become.

This is the new environmentalism – one that focuses on systemic change rather than go-green lifestyle choices – and it has a powerful proponent in Naomi Klein. Her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, has the potential to be the definitive account of our current moment ... This Changes Everything is a work of startling force, exhaustive reporting, and telling anecdote ... Klein's great gifts have always been synthesizing huge amounts of information and drawing connections between seemingly disparate issues; on those points, This Changes Everything is no different. Still, the book is not without its faults. Klein is not an especially elegant writer, and she frequently gets mired in repetitive platitudes, awkward syntax, left-wing cliché, and bumpy rhetorical landings. A larger problem is that it is never quite clear what she means when she refers to 'capitalism' – as she does frequently, including in the subtitle of the book ... The broad strokes she advocates – community-managed power utilities, massive government investment in renewable energy, cheap and accessible public transit – may be radical by today's standards, and are probably a long way off. But they're hardly anti-capitalist as such – in fact, they sound a lot like a hypercharged European social democracy, albeit with ecology at its core.

Naomi Klein has written a brave book that not only confronts the calamity of climate destabilization, but also examines the crisis’ deep roots in the perverse logic of capitalism and the dehumanizing values underpinning 'extractivist' energy and technology ... Klein’s courage shows not in her reporting—there we get the research and rigor that are her trademarks—but in her plea that we not only think about the crisis and commit to act, but that we feel it as well. Facing climate change is not just a matter of data and analysis, but of anguish. Klein is candid about her own struggle with the grief that accompanies truth ... The struggle for ecological sanity is intellectual, political, moral and deeply emotional ... At both the personal and the planetary level, [Klein] suggests, we renew and regenerate, or we die.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, which argues, in the starkest terms imaginable, that we as a culture have reached a tipping point ... Klein is not naïve about the issues ... At the same time, there is, in places, a disconnect between her idealism and her realism, what she thinks ought to happen and what she recognizes likely will ... More effective are her portrayals of grass-roots resistance ... As heartening as this is, however, it’s just a drop in the bucket, in a world where preservation has always taken a back seat to greed ... In [a] sense,[Klein] is arguing for a new way of thinking, of interacting with the planet, one that has a lot to do with those in power but also trickles down to all of us.

...[an] ambitious new polemic ... 'What is wrong with us?' Klein asks near the start of the book. Her answer turns upside-down the narrative that the country’s largest environmental groups have been telling ... Klein’s analysis—of the direness of the situation, of the structural nature of the problem, of the generalized direct and indirect complicity—makes it sound as if This Changes Everything is a downbeat book. But it isn’t, or at least it isn’t intended to be. It’s deeply optimistic, indeed some may say maddeningly so. Klein contends not just that emission trends can be turned around in time, but that pretty much everything else that’s wrong with society today—inequality, unemployment, the lack of access in large parts of the world to electricity or clean water or health care—can be righted in the process ... This, of course, is a rather tall order ... To draw on Klein paraphrasing Al Gore, here’s my inconvenient truth: when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away ... All the major environmental groups know this, which is why they maintain, contrary to the requirements of a 2,000-watt society, that climate change can be tackled with minimal disruption to 'the American way of life.' And Klein, you have to assume, knows it too. The irony of her book is that she ends up exactly where the 'warmists' do, telling a fable she hopes will do some good.

Naomi Klein is angry. The author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, and a self-confessed former climate change skeptic, comes out swinging in a book that takes direct aim at corporations, governments, and – surprisingly – climate activists ... Klein has forged a career out of criticizing the mechanisms of corporate dominance and government malfeasance; what is impressive here is her level gaze, which makes the righteous anger seething through almost every word that much more potent ... Klein’s optimism is more muted than her fury, lending the second half of this book a vague feeling of anticlimax. (There is also a frankly unnecessary and distracting digression into the author’s own attempts to get pregnant in her thirties.) However, when she harnesses her rage at humanity’s inability to see what is right in front of us, she is no mere polemicist or propagandist. She is a force of nature.

This Changes Everything builds on Klein’s anti-capitalist critique. In her sly way, Klein is honest enough about the disguised Marxism of her project ... But This Changes Everything is also a polemic ... Klein understands this tradition: she is a robust explainer. If her constructions are often unwieldy, they are always accessible. Her narrative voice is reasonable, approachable and, for her many fans, deeply likeable ... Global emissions exceeded 500 billion tonnes in 2011. We somehow have to industrialise China, India and Africa with less than half the pollution budget of the three centuries since Newcomen. What would this entail? Rapid, indeed unprecedented, upheavals in our energy system ... Can it be done? No, it can’t. The numbers don’t add up. That is the cruel irony of Klein’s title. Climate change is not changing everything. It is not changing things nearly enough. Industrial development continues apace – indeed, at a faster rate than ever before ... you could argue that much of what is interesting about This Changes Everythingis the way Klein uses climate change as the antithesis of the neoliberal thesis. She does it with sincerity and no little rigour. But we never get a synthesis, and Klein’s aphorisms are poor fare compared to Engels and Marx. In truth, Klein seems strangely unable to take the final step of her analysis: to call for a revolution to overthrow the ‘everything’ she claims must change.

...an enormous, complex, compelling, and, by turns, distressing and rallying analysis of the dysfunctional symbiotic relationships between free-market capitalism, the fossil fuels industry, and global warming ... Within this mammoth mosaic of assiduously collected facts and bold analysis, Klein addresses every aspect of the causes and threats of climate change and the paradox of why we behave as though we value the mythical free-market more than real life itself ... This comprehensive, sure-to-be controversial inquiry, one of the most thorough, eloquent, and enlightening books yet on this urgent and overwhelming subject—alongside works by Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Diane Ackerman—provides the evidence and the reasoning we need to help us shift to a 'worldview based on regeneration and renewal rather than domination and depletion.'

In part, Klein’s narrative is a personal story about her own awakening to and increasing engagement with the climate issue. But this always-interesting polemic is built mostly on her interviews with experts, environmentalists and activists and her colorful on-site reporting from various international meetings and conferences and particularly from worldwide pockets of resistance to corporate bullying ... A sharp analysis that is bound to be widely discussed, with all the usual suspects, depending on their politics, lining up to cheer or excoriate Klein.

The struggle for a sustainable world is really a fight against capitalism, according to this sprawling manifesto from Nation columnist Klein ... She gives a rousing, if familiar, rundown of the perils of global warming and singles out energy corporations in particular ... Klein's gifts for catchy, aphoristic prose and vivid journalistic montage are well-displayed and her critiques sometimes trenchant ... Unfortunately, her grasp of energy policy is questionable: she uncritically repeats renewables boosterism while ignoring their limitations and her dismissal of nuclear power as a low-carbon energy source is ill-informed. By drawing 'everything' into her thesis Klein dilutes her over-stuffed book's consistency and coherence; worse, her tendency to demonize more than analyze leaves unaddressed the real-world conflicts and contradictions that make climate policy so intractable.