Naomi Klein's Speech 'addicted to Risk'

For my brief presentation I've chosen Naomi Klein's speech 'Addicted to risk' about the issues that come with the process of finding new energy. I did it mainly because of the speaker because I find Naomi Klein a great person to call a role model as well as the problem she presented is serious and still on-the-map.

Naomi Klein is a Canadian social activist and journalist, author of best-selling titles as “No Logo” and “The Shock Doctrine”. In the second one, she criticize corporate globalization and corporate capitalism, regarding environmental disasters. The speech given at Ted is an enlargement of it. Since 2009 she focused on environmentalism, especially on climate change. That is also the subject of her latest book “This Changes Everything”. Her articles has appeared in a great deal of respectable newspapers and magazines, such as The New York Times, Newsweek or The Los Angeles Times and she writes regularly for the Guardian, being a contributing editor at Harper’s at the same time. She won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for her reporting from Iraq for Harper’s. She is also a member of the board of directors for global movement to solve the climate crisis named 350.org. She’s really dedicated to what she’s doing, persistent, stubborn and hard-working. That all gave her a deserved fame, which she uses to spread along her views. The Ted’s speech is only a part of it.

Naomi Klein in her speech tells about the risk connected to processes of finding new energy. She spent a week at sea on a research vessel accompanying a scientific team from the University of South Florida who tracked the travel of BP’s oil in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2010 on the oil drilling rig named Deepwater Horizon occurred an explosion which caused the explosion and sinking of the platform and, as it is considered, the largest marine oil spill in the history. The environmentalists who Naomi Klein accompanied were studying the effect of the oil (and dispersants) on very small creatures in the sea. Naomi Klein recalled in her speech the information given by the people in charge of the BP’s oil drill that although about 75 percent of the oil has disappeared, there was, according to what they said, nothing to be worried about because the missing oil did no serious damage for the environment and the spill wasn’t harmful to the animals. But it isn’t true. What have drown in the sea consisted toxic insecticides like DDT. They unfolded in the sea and were absorbed by the small sea creatures starting with phytoplankton. Phytoplankton is part of many birds nourishment, so the birds were simply poisoned with their food. This fact has been forgotten and it clearly showed the lack of responsibility for the disaster. That is what irritated Naomi Klein the most and provoked to start asking why and start asking what was missing in this project of oil drill. It was characterized by the carelessness in every part from the amiss drill to only shallow clean-up. The very possible answer could be a missing back-up plan. The government and the investors haven’t protected the project well enough and the leakage was the effect. What bothers the most is that recently all the processes of finding a new energy are rather uncertain but they still proceed. Naomi Klein recalled a common false belief that our “Mother Nature is so nurturing and so resilient that we can never make a dent in her abundance” and that sentence is one of the best to confirm Naomi’s statement that one of the main causes of that problem is people’s recklessness. With recklessness come along hubris and greed. Half joking she gave an example. The former CEO of BP Tony Hayward had a plaque on his desk with inspiring and significant in the context of the speech slogan “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”. Naomi’s advice was to replace it with a picture of Ikarus. Another example given was Motorola advertisement with the text “Slap Mother Nature in the face”. You can say it’s a fun fact knowing that she saw it just few days before the speech.