Oonagh McDonald, a former Labour Party member of the British Parliament, spares no punches in her Barron’s review of Naomi Klein’s ode to climate alarmism, a book titled This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.

In her latest polemic, best-selling author and social activist Naomi Klein calls on us to abandon fossil fuels to ward off the ravages of global warming. And as her subtitle implies, the same climate concerns require that we also abandon capitalism. “Climate change,” she declares, is “a battle between capitalism and the planet.”

The author’s case for capitalism’s unique complicity in fossil-fuel use sheds heat, rather than light. She traces the cause of global warming to “myths about humanity’s duty to dominate a natural world.” But those “myths” predated the advent of capitalism; recall the biblical injunction to “have dominion” over the Earth. She further casts doubt on her own thesis by noting that the “self-described socialist states devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as their capitalist counterparts, and spewed waste just as recklessly.” We must logically suppose, then, that those states weren’t really socialist, but were only “self-described” as such.

Given the failure of noncapitalist economies to curb fossil-fuel use, Klein’s vision of an alternative to capitalism is short on specifics, although quite sweeping. She wants government ownership of “essential services like energy and water,” the removal of “whole industries” such as oil, gas, and coal, and the development of local economies independent of “corrosive corporate influence.” She would also “block harmful new free trade deals and rewrite old ones.”

The mass impoverishment that would result from such Draconian measures is apparently not her problem. Nor does it seem to interest Klein that, within capitalist democracies, change has occurred; regulations and laws to limit pollution have generally worked.

Klein’s knowledge of capitalism is on par with her ignorance of climate science. She adopts global-warming theory with the unquestioning enthusiasm of a recent convert, echoing those who criticize or reject the theory as “deniers.” Nowhere does she grapple with the fact that there has been no increase in global warming for the past 18 years, despite the increase in carbon dioxide over the same period. She sees a “clear connection between a refusal to accept the science of climate change and social and economic privilege,” given that “overwhelmingly, climate change deniers are not only conservative, but also white and male, a group with higher than average incomes.”

Needless to say, even white males with high incomes have a right to ask: When did the Earth’s climate not change? The climate has always changed and always will.