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Naomi Klein's interview in Grist this week is smart, insightful, and half right. Her assessment of the obstacles to solving climate change — from ideology to misplaced faith in green consumerism — are exactly right. And she's right that fixing this problem means changing how the world does business.But Klein is wrong in her more serious assertion, first articulated in her "Capitalism vs. the Climate" article in The Nation, that we can save the planet only if we abandon capitalism. Published on Grist on March 14th, 2012.

Naomi Klein, the award-winning Guardian columnist and best-selling author of the seminal 'No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies' (2000) has just completed her most ambitious project to date. With the publication of 'Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism', Klein may have achieved what many political leaders, economists and journalists the world over have failed to do during the tumultuous tenure of the current Bush Administration – namely to forensically prove that a 'rolling coup' has taken place within the United States that has subordinated its domestic and foreign policy imperatives to corporate interests and naked greed by way of the implementation of ruinous and violent strategies from the Bayou in Louisiana to the banks of the Tigris in Iraq. In the opening chapters of her work Klein introduces the reader to the deeply anti-democratic and laissez faire capitalist ideology of George W Bush's neo-conservative clique as articulated by its intellectual architect Milton Friedman. Friedman's philosophy of unfettered right-wing capitalism – characterised by wholesale asset stripping within states to include the totality of their natural resources and manufacturing capacity along with the privatisation of their respective education, health and security sectors – is explored by Klein in the first half of her book by way of a detailed account of the mayhem and misery caused by the neo-cons trademark 'economic shock therapy' as implemented in countries around the globe including Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, South Africa, Poland, Russia and Iraq. Klein demonstrates quite clearly the manner in which Friedman's 'disciples' – his powerful admirers and student graduates of the Chicago School of Economics – known as the 'Chicago School' or the 'Berkeley Mafia' were intimately involved in the dismantling of democratic structures across many continents from the 'Southern Cone' of Latin America to Central Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Asia. Among Friedman's disciples Klein clearly identifies former US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld – of whom President Richard Nixon said in 1971, 'He's a ruthless little bastard. You can be sure of that' – former US Chief Envoy to Iraq, Paul Bremer along with a host of other conservative Washington Republican luminaries including US Vice President, Dick Cheney.

We've been making fun of Naomi Klein's ignorance of trade for well over a decade now. For she claimed, in one of her books, that banning cheap solar panels from a country aids the fight against climate change by making solar panels more expensive. Yes, aids.But how we've an entire country going down that path to madness:The Biden administration touts solar energy as one of its big success stories, a booming new industry that is curbing the effects of the climate crisis and creating high-paying jobs across the country. But the more complicated truth is that the United States is mired in a long-running trade war with China, which is flooding the market with artificially cheap solar panels that carry an uncomfortably large carbon footprint and threaten to obliterate the domestic industry.At which point they're adding tariffs to stop those dastardly Chinese sending cheap solar kit which will aid in the fight against climate change. Abject nonsense, obviously. Either we want cheap solar so as to beat climate change or we don't. If we don't then no subsidies, no push, no regulations are required. If we do then getting them from anyone sellin' 'em cheap is a great idea. And that's all there is.As to why there's this problem it's because people simply don't understand trade. Yes, it's true, comparative advantage is indeed the only theory in the social sciences that is not trivial or obvious. But even then we'd hope for a better understanding of it than this: "Chinese companies don't have any comparative advantage, only artificial advantages. They rely on government subsidies, and on lack of enforcement of labor and environmental laws."That's not comparative advantage in the slightest. That's absolute advantage. Comparative means what is, given those advantages, China least bad at doing? Absolute is that those advantages mean that China is better than US companies at solar panels. Sigh.Either climate change is some vast problem that we need to subsidise our way out of - in which cheap solar from anyone at all is just what we want - or it isn't and therefore no subsidy from anyone is desirable. Insisting it's a very big problem that needs hundreds of billions in subsidy but that we must reject the cheap kit someone's knocking on the door with is to be, well, it's to be Naomi Klein. That way madness lies.Tim Worstall