Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.
Naomi Klein
The truly powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on the most rarified delicacy of all: impunity.
One shouldn't gamble with what is irreplaceable and precious.
We live in an interconnected world, in an interconnected time, and we need holistic solutions. We have a crisis of inequality, and we need climate solutions that solve that crisis.
When Nike says, just do it, that's a message of empowerment. Why aren't the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?
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.'
A large-scale crisis - whether a terrorist attack or a financial crash - would likely provide the pretext to declare some sort of state of exception or emergency, where the usual rules no longer apply.
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.
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.
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 don't think there could've been a pitch as crass as Trump's 'I can fix America because I'm rich' without that groundwork laid by Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative.
It's really, really hard to get in rooms with people you don't usually work with and try to find common ground.
I am about safety for the people and the planet.
The problem with Donald Trump is that he went and designed a brand that is entirely amoral.
When you start talking about sacrifices, pretty soon people start feeling like chumps.
As soon as you write about climate change, the first attempt to discredit you is, 'Well, you wrote this on a computer,' or, 'You took a plane to this conference.' So your opinion isn't valid.
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.
That is the core of Trump. He is undoubtedly an idiot, but do not underestimate how good he is at that.
We have a structural problem because you can simultaneously understand the medium to long-term risks of climate change and also come to the conclusion that it is in your short-term economic interest to invest in oil and gas. Which is why, you know, anybody who tells you that the market is going to fix this on its own is lying to you.
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.
I had maybe watched 'The Apprentice' a couple of times. I didn't know that in later seasons they deported half of their contestants into tents in the backyard. They called it Trump's trailer park.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It takes me a long time writing books. It takes me about five years to write a book, and when I'm done, the last thing I want to do is to do it again.
I think there's a couple of things going on. One is that Trump's relationship with his base is not the traditional relationship of a politician and the people who elected him, and the constituency, which is a relationship of some accountability, right? The idea is that the politicians are working for the people. They're public servants.
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.
My grandfather was actually a union organizer at Walt Disney. He was an animator. He used to draw Donald Duck for Walt Disney.
That's the big mistake the environmental movement made - 'We'll scare the hell out of you, and you'll become an activist'.
There is some pretty powerful self-interest in wanting a future that is not just running storm-to-storm. The argument that I make is not that we aren't competitive and selfish and greedy. We are. We're all of these things. We're complicated, competitive, greedy and nasty, and kind and generous and compassionate.
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.
What you want to do is you want to own as little sort of hard infrastructure as possible, and your real value is your name and how you build that up.
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'.
What I hope is less about what the greens will do but what people who don't consider themselves part of the green movement will do.
The divestment movement is a start at challenging the excesses of capitalism. It's working to delegitimize fossil fuels and showing that they're just as unethical as profits from the tobacco industry.
One of the ideas that I wanted to highlight, which is actually a very bipartisan idea - it's not just about conservatives - is this worship of wealth, the CEO saviour.
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.
Nike was the essence of sports, transcendence through sports.
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.
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.
Change or be changed, right? And what we mean by that is that climate change, if we don't change course, if we don't change our political and economic system, is going to change everything about our physical world.
What we know is that the environmental movement had a series of dazzling victories in the late '60s and in the '70s where the whole legal framework for responding to pollution and to protecting wildlife came into law. It was just victory after victory after victory. And these were what came to be called 'command-and-control' pieces of legislation.
I want to act, if I can, as a bridge for people who read 'Shock Doctrine' or 'No Logo'. People who are sitting out for whatever reasons.
I was the rebel in our family and a child of the eighties. That meant going to the mall.
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.
Trump would have been unelectable were it not for the groundwork laid by Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, two liberal heroes.
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 am not saying Russia is not important, but Trump's base is very well defended against that: 'the liberal media is out to get him', 'it's fake news', and all the rest.
My father was born in Newark, New Jersey, and my mother was born in Philadelphia. They both went to Stanford for grad school and met there.
