Best-Selling Author Klein: US Should Pay ‘Trillions’ For Causing Climate Change

Facts, people. They’re not that hard.

Naomi Klein, the best-selling author and columnist taken too seriously by American media, decried conservative groups for opposing “wealth redistribution.” Klein argued that North America and Europe need to pay reparations to poorer nations for causing climate change. Her new book, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate,” [1] used flawed facts, exaggerations and misrepresentations to promote her brand of climate-change alarmism.

Klein wasted no time completely misinterpreting facts to make her point. The very first page of the book started out with the story of US Airways Flight 3935. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of Flight 3935 [2], even normally pro-climate change alarmism media outlets didn’t see anything to report.

The plane was temporarily detained on the tarmac when the landing gear got stuck in the asphalt in the summer of 2013. According to the BBC [3], this can happen even in temperatures around 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit). The temperature that day was reportedly 100 degrees, which wasn’t a record [4], or even the hottest day for that summer. But, as far as Klein was concerned, the evidence from that one incident was enough that the passengers should have given up exacerbating the problem with air travel right then and there.

“[I]t’s no mystery why this has been happening: the profligate burning of fossil fuels, the very thing that US Airways was bound and determined to do despite the inconvenience presented by a melting tarmac,” Klein wrote confidently. “This irony – the fact that the burning of fossil fuels is so radically changing our climate that it is getting in the way of our capacity to burn fossil fuels – did not stop the passengers of 3935 from reembarking and continuing their journeys.”

Klein’s criticism of the passengers of flight 3935 was particularly hypocritical. The Guardian reported [5] on Sept. 14, that Klein actually flies “a lot more than most people, and is set to rack up air miles that would make her, by her own admission, a ‘climate criminal’”

After citing the oft-repeated but still very misleading claim that 97 percent of scientists agree that “humans are a major cause of climate change,” Klein demanded that the United States and other first-world nations should take part in a “Marshall Plan for the Earth.” (That was a reference to the original Marshall Plan [6] after World War II, where the United States gave $12 billion to rebuild shattered European economies to prevent them from being overrun by the growing threat of communism).

According to Klein, this new Marshall Plan “would be very costly – hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars.” Klein further displayed her lack of basic economic knowledge when she suggested a source for this staggering price tag: “Need more money? Print some!”

As was evidenced by the title, much of Klein’s angst is directed at capitalism. (She’s got a whole chapter dedicated to “Slapping the Invisible Hand.”) Predictably, the former Occupy Wall Street Protester Klein called for raising taxes on the wealthy to raise money to “prepare for the coming storms.”

But talk like this is nothing new for Klein. Besides taking part in the Occupy Wall Street Protests, Klein has been consistent in her criticism of capitalism. In 2012, after the release of her book “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” Klein told public television host and liberal big dollar donor Bill Moyers that the free market approach to economics would bring about “Armageddon [7]” if it’s not stopped.

“This Changes Everything” gives Klein a platform to rant about the Heartland Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and basically anyone who doesn’t buy into the man-made climate change alarmism agenda. According to Klein, anyone who doesn’t support sending reparations to impoverished nations for “causing” climate change is buying into the “theories of racial superiority, barely under the surface in parts of the denial movement.”