Climate change is always on my mind. After a year full of wildfires in California and heat waves in Europe, I thought it would also be on the American people’s minds. However, our attention span is shorter than I could have imagined. We are distracted by domestic and international conflict, turning our attention to the latest news story – instead of focusing on the greatest ever threat to human existence: climate change.

There will always be new issues emerging, and those problems must also be addressed; however, climate change is one of the most intersectional issues that society has ever faced. Increased natural disasters and unpredictable weather patterns heighten poverty rates by displacing millions of people, and exacerbate income inequality through environmental racism. Solving the climate crisis will alleviate the suffering of tens of millions of people who unknowingly suffer the consequences of other issues stemming from the climate crisis.

To ensure that our planet can continue to thrive, the American people must maintain their focus on the climate crisis. They must hound politicians and demand systemic change, not just from companies, but also from local, state, and federal governments.

However, the most important change must be to the world’s economic system. Greed created the climate crisis, and believing that we can solve the crisis without changing or getting rid of capitalism is naive. As Cardinal Pietro Parolin, State Secretary of the Holy See, said “Capitalism is unsustainable. Its irrational and unsustainable production and consumption patterns and the growing and unjust concentration of wealth are the main threats against the ecological balance of the planet.”

The Lie

Canadian climate writer Naomi Klein has written extensively on how ending the climate crisis can only be done by upending our economic system.

The atmosphere’s inability to deal with society’s emissions “is a symptom of a much larger crisis,” Klein says, “one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless.”

In the same article, Klein emphasizes that to combat the climate crisis, the U.S. will have to abandon the enduring laissez-faire economic style created during the ‘80s and “[shred] the free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades.”

In the opening of Klein’s book On Fire (a read that I would highly recommend), she writes that the deadly impacts of capitalism and its effects on the environment “were impossible to deny,” but it was argued that the “benefits [of capitalism] would eventually trickle down to improve the lives of nearly everyone on the planet.”

However, Klein says, “indifference to life … has instead trickled up to swallow our entire planet, turning fertile lands into salt flats, beautiful islands into rubble, and draining once vibrant reefs of their life and color.”

Instead of bringing untold wealth and status to millions of people, capitalism has destroyed our world and put unimaginable amounts of wealth into the pockets of a handful of cruel and merciless rulers, companies, and billionaires. The world’s wealthiest 10% have caused two-thirds of global warming since 1990, and fossil fuel executives rake in record profits at the expense of a destroyed planet.

Klein understands that we have been lied to about the benefits of capitalism. It is time to see through that and take control of our own futures.

However, doing so will require more change than ever before.

A Call to Action

All of Klein’s writings make the same case: climate change is intertwined with every global issue you can think of, and capitalism is the major fuel of the crisis. Our culture of consumption, which fuels capitalism, needs to be changed. This might mean defining ourselves by what we say and do instead of what we wear and eat.

Klein is no doomsday writer, however. She conveys the facts clearly. She writes about the magnificent world we could live in once we have confronted the climate crisis and, most importantly, changed our economic system and consumption habits.

Personally, Klein’s writing has inspired me to decrease my consumption habits and join the climate fight by becoming a writer for the Jewish Youth Climate Movement (JYCM), a Gen Z-led movement dedicated to combating climate change and environmental injustice from a Jewish lens. Kein’s writing has also relieved some of my climate anxiety as I’ve realized that while individual action is important, systemic change is what is truly going to build a livable future.

At the end of On Fire, Klein writes that the biggest obstacle to ending the climate crisis is “hopelessness, a feeling that it’s all too late, we’ve left it too long and we’ll never get the job done on such a short timeline.” However, Klein argues that that is the wrong mindset. She says that this crisis is an opportunity to rewrite our future as a society and create a world our children will thank us for.

Klein ends her book writing that “When the future of life is at stake there is nothing we cannot achieve.” The crisis is great, but the future we can build is even greater. The forests we could replant, the communities we could rebuild – the past offenses we could repay. Humanity has the option to reimagine our future like never before.

An Indifference to Life  © 2025 by Youth Environmental Press Team is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/