Hot Money
Updated: Aug 8
Naomi Klein’s Hot Money is the second in Penguin Books’ Green Ideas series, 20 short books designed to “deepen our sense of our place in nature.” It’s the third one I’ve read, after Greta Thunberg and Robin Wall Kimmerer, but the first that was excerpted from a longer work I hadn't read (Thunberg’s volume was a collection of her speeches, and I’d read Kimmerer’s profound Braiding Sweetgrass in 2021). I’d also read Klein’s ambitious and powerful The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism back in 2017, so I had some idea of what I was getting into here—and very much looking forward to it.
Hot Money is about a hundred pocket-sized pages from This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate, published in 2014. It’s urgent, candid, pulls no punches, and, sadly, like everything these days, rounded out a picture for those looking to be informed but certainly changed nobody’s mind who wasn’t open to change going into it. As they say, she was likely preaching to the choir. Nine years later, not much has changed. Sure, we got Biden’s historic climate bill passed into law, but if the scientists Greta Thunberg quotes time and again in her speeches are right, “historic” won’t be enough to matter. If Klein was sounding the alarm nearly a decade ago, Thunberg is right: this house is on fire and we're just sitting here watching it burn.
As for the series thus far, only Kimmerer’s volume has actually delivered on Green Ideas’ mission. When I think about what it means to have my sense of place in nature deepened, I think of Braiding Sweetgrass, I think of Thoreau, Sigurd F. Olson, John Muir, Mary Oliver. I think of timeless writing that draws one into the natural world, brings it to life, makes it sing, and makes one want to sing, too—not urgent, timely books pleading for change before it’s too late. They’re both important, but the latter does not deepen much but my sense of outrage and anxiety. There are 17 in the series to go. I hope, for my sake and the series’, that we get a good deal more of the former.
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