Paper #1 Assignment
(Adapted from a prompt by Jordanco Jovanoski)
Reading:
Naomi Klein, “Hot Money: How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat the Planet”
Prompt:
Klein asserts that, as a species, humanity cannot adequately address the climate crisis without
challenging the logic of “free market” capitalism. It can seem, according to Klein, that “changing the
earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of
changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism” (224). With this in mind,
respond to the following:
To what extent is it possible to reconcile the “growth-based profit-seeking logic of
capitalism” with measures that are necessary for addressing climate change?
Follow-Up Questions:
• How does global capitalism contribute to climate change?
• Can climate change be fully addressed within the limits of a capitalist system?
• Might it be that Klein underestimates capitalism’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances?
• Klein criticizes the “free” market and “free trade” agreements. How might Klein challenge our
view of what freedom is? What does her argument imply for how we should understand freedom?
Goals for this assignment:
• Make connections between different parts of the text. For example, you might interpret a quote
that is not explicitly about freedom (or some other term) through the lens of freedom.
• Work on selecting meaningful quotations and properly integrating them into your own sentences.
• Move beyond summary toward analysis. (Hint: using Klein’s name frequently when you introduce
and analyze her quotations will encourage you to develop critical distance from her text.)
