It would be easy to suggest that, the title of her book notwithstanding, nothing much has changed in Naomi Klein’s analysis of world affairs. As in her two previous books, Klein identifies neoliberalism and the restructuring of global business and finance initiated in the Thatcher and Reagan era as the forces exacerbating the problems of market-based capitalist societies. In This Changes Everything, as in The Shock Doctrine, Klein explores how climatic crises create opportunities for the wealthy to stretch the parameters of income inequality to new extremes unprecedented for a century or more. To a sceptic, it might seem that Klein’s subtitle reveals more transparently her motivation: to open a new line of attack on an old enemy.

Scepticism, however, can be the last resort of the intellectually lazy. Taken on its own terms, Klein’s book is a powerful and persuasive tract about the complex interweaving of climate change with the global economy. Klein’s ambition is to anatomise the current malaise in international regulation of the carbon emissions