In This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein paints a stark portrait of the climate crisis. Since the book’s publication in 2014, the situation has continued to deteriorate; record-high temperatures are recorded each year, greater volumes of glacier ice are melting, and natural disasters are becoming more common and more severe. As noted in the book, suffering during these disasters is compounded by economic and political inequality—the official death toll of Hurricane Maria (2017) in Puerto Rico was 2,975, but US-imposed austerity policies on the island led to slow disaster relief, with large swaths of the island remaining without electricity for months afterward. Likewise, devastating floods in 2020 killed over 6,000 people in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, and heat waves disproportionately affect people in the Global South.

While the planet continues to warm, world governments have adopted new policies to curb climate change. In 2016, UN countries signed the Paris Agreement, which pledges to cut emissions by about 50% by 2030 to keep global warming below 1.5 °C. In 2020, after many national governments officially declared a climate emergency, the European Commission introduced the European Green Deal, aiming to make the EU carbon-neutral by 2050. Vietnam is phasing out coal power, and China is aiming for carbon neutrality by 2060.