Naomi Klein

Canadian author, journalist and activist.

The green movement has been obsessed with win-wins for a long time. That usually means wins for the coal company and, supposedly, wins for the climate. So offsetting is a win-win. Those are actually lose-loses. Usually, the people who lose are the most vulnerable: the kids who get asthma living next to the refinery that doesn't get shut down, or the indigenous people who get pushed off their land because their forest got turned into a tree museum by a big green group. The win is for the coal company because they don't have to change. This is often called the strategy of the low-hanging fruit - which means that we're going to do the easy stuff first, and save the hard stuff for later. The big green groups have bee really enamoured with that argument. It's proven disastrous.