This Misrepresents Everything
Apart from the stock shots of effluent pipes and belching smokestacks, Naomi Klein’s idea of objectivity about the Alberta oilsands is to find a worker prepared to blow his nose on a banknote in a Fort McMurray bar.
Scenes like this make Klein’s documentary This Changes Everything, which will air on CBC on Thursday night, not just intellectually vacuous but downright objectionable.
The guy using the currency as nasal tissue might well now be out of a job, not just because of the oil price collapse, but because of the prominent role played by Klein in killing the Keystone XL pipeline and thus draining billions from the Alberta economy.
Much of the movie, which is based on Klein’s endless book of the same name, takes the form of a series of confrontations between local people and some form of development: the oilsands in Alberta; pipelines, coal and shale in Montana and Wyoming; a coal- fired electricity plant in India; a goldmine in Greece; killer smog in Beijing.
The propaganda sequence runs roughly: riot, teargas (not required in Beijing), shots of people running and screaming, rinse and repeat.
This is not to suggest that consultation with local communities is not necessary, but things are in fact not quite as simple as presented. In Kleinworld, agitation is often organized by multinational environmental NGOs with an anti-development agenda and little or no concern for local people’s welfare. Meanwhile it takes considerable chutzpah to suggest that Greece’s problems might be based on any version of capitalism.
The wobbly intellectual substructure to Klein’s catalogue of capitalist crimes is the system’s alleged belief that Mother Nature is there to be raped and pillaged, and that resources are infinite. The film never presents anyone who actually holds this view because, like most of Klein’s claims, it is demonic nonsense.
Klein’s evil capitalist clincher is, of course, climate change, which is epitomized by Superstorm Sandy. But that storm can in no way shape or form be laid at the door of man-made global warming.
It is ironic indeed that early on in the film Klein attends a meeting of the British Royal Society — home of Newton and Darwin — as the supposed epicentre of the scientific assault on spirituality. The meeting is to discuss geoengineering as a solution to climate change (“pollution to fight pollution”). But while there are indeed many questions about such schemes, the implication that the Royal Society is a bastion of objectivity, particularly when it comes to climate, is almost satirical. Indeed several recent presidents of the society have gone off the reservation when it comes to the climate issue and have had to be reined in my their own members.
The movie, which was directed by Klein’s husband Avi Lewis, scion of one of Canada’s most prominently canting socialist families, is outstanding only for its perspective-free hypocrisy.
Take the posturing of Crystal Lameman of the Beaver Lake Cree, who live in the vicinity of the oilsands. Lameman, who will later appear delivering a speech to a mob in Washington, spouts fortune- cookie mysticism about the land owning the people rather than the other way round. But the arresting point is that she is doing so while dressed and made up in very non- traditional fashion, against the backdrop of her modern kitchen, with its Ikea cabinetry, brushed- steel faucets and modern appliances. Then Crystal is seen driving her Kia to a Michael- Moore- style nonconfrontation at a spill site, which she knows she will not be allowed to enter. Crystal, like Naomi, presumably did not reach Washington by magic carpet. She also uses a phone, which definitely wasn’t developed by “traditional knowledge.”
At a Beaver Cree band barbecue, no thought is obviously given to the system that produced the bottles of San Pellegrino or the watermelon that the child being conspicuously coddled by Klein is eating. The height of hypocrisy is reached when it is revealed that the Beaver Cree are suing the government of Canada because oilsands development has “made traditional life impossible.” Apparently undesirable too. The film gets really intriguing when the credits begin to roll, and those who supported this pile of agitprop are identified. Chief among them is something called the Sustainable Markets Foundation, SMF. Since it’s all the rage these days to bemoan “Dark Money,” the title of Jane Mayer’s hatchet job on the Koch Brothers ( Mayer was interviewed on the CBC’s The Current this week), it’s worth noting that the SMF was highlighted in a report by a U. S. Senate committee as an up- and- coming node of a progressive “Billionaires Club” filled with capitalist foundations that despise markets.
"Can I be honest with you?” Klein asks at the beginning of this very dishonest film. “I’ve always kind of hated films about climate change … Is it really possible to be bored by the end of the world?”
No, Naomi, but it is possible to be bored by people who prattle incessantly that the end of the world is imminent when it isn’t, and who want to end the best world we’ve ever had.
NO THOUGHT IS OBVIOUSLY GIVEN TO THE SYSTEM THAT PRODUCED THE BOTTLES OF SAN PELLEGRINO OR THE WATERMELON.
Financial Post