Naomi Klein, prolific author, film maker, and activist, apostle for the climate-control movement, enemy of the fossil-fuel industry, and proponent of extensive governmental regulation as necessary solution to global warming, wowed a Loyola U. crowd on St. Patrick’s Day with an inspiring motivational talk about climate change and worldwide efforts to arrest it.

An overflow crowd filled the Mundelein auditorium on the southeast corner of the beautiful Loyola campus.

The recently retired president, now chancellor, Fr. Michael Garanzini, SJ, introduced her with a 15-minute speech which he read carefully from the podium, mostly with head down, now and then looking up. He called for raising “a cadre for environmental sustainability,” cited Pope Francis in support of climate-control efforts, and took to task the “consumerist society” and “dysfunction of the world economy” that has “proven ineffective.” During Klein’s 70-minute talk, he repeatedly nooded assent to what she said.

Klein, 45 years old but looking ten years younger, set about “unpacking” what happened in the recent Paris conference of world leaders — a scene she described of “massive fight” over modest changes in a non-binding agreement..

She echoed Fr. Garanzini’s admiration of the pope, who had “inserted the language of ethics” into climate discussion, she said. She mentioned “genocide” as price of fossil-fuel use, all the while smiling a good deal, stopping to drink water at one point, explaining she had a cold, but ever the effervescent communicator, on the brink of, but never falling into, breathlessness.

She threw on a big screen behind her the picture of a tanker truck fallen part-way through a crack in the (warmed and thinned) ice, noting that what was inside the truck (fossil fuel) had led to what happened to the truck (thin ice).

“Thousands of lives were lost” in Pakistan, she said, referring to climate-change devastation, throwing up on a screen behind her a picture of bodies wrapped in white in a morgue where the morticians were running out of room.

But she was gladdened by “the mood in the streets,” showing a picture of a huge demonstration in Paris at the time of the conference, forming a long “red line” of flag-like drapery and an air shot of of 250 million protesters in Berlin.

The Paris problem was lots of talk, however, ending with none but verbal commitments by attending countries.

When a picture went up of Donald Trump with his Trump steaks, she muttered, “Maybe he’ll do better than Obama,” then corrected herself, “Oh, that’s not fair.” Later, like Trump, she would finger international trade agreements as warming villain, in that they further enable fossil-fuel companies to sue governments to recoup profits lost by governmental restrictions. Trump’s emphasis is different, of course, namely opposing such agreements as job-killers.

She zeroed in on hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans devastation, throwing up a picture of the indoor arena where people had to stay. “A weak and neglected public sphere” at “every level of government” was the problem, “four decades of it.” But someone on Fox News had called the victims “animals” for looting etc.

Boston Globe quoted a New Orleans policeman to that effect. An online Fox News contributor speaks of gun-toting looters acting like animals. In a ten-minute search, I couldn’t find more than this.

Klein touted her “shock doctrine” — about “how America’s free market policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.”

She herself is a paragon of style, in black tights, or at least close-fitting pants, bright red top (with the black a touch of Stendhal), and black jacket, a sort of toreador of social activism. Musing on her having to stop for water and suffering from a cold, she commended Bernie Sanders “at 77” for campaigning, but couldn’t finish, for the applause.

She applied shock doctrine to post-Katrina New Orleans getting rid of slums and building all-in-a-row new houses in their place. These she showed in another picture.

She moved then to forest fires as warming-caused and the use of prison inmates as firefighters in California, for $2 a day, a dollar an hour when fighting fire.

Thirty percent of Calif. firefighters are prisoners, says Mother Jones. It’s part of the system’s conservation camp program, which dates from 1946. Candidates are chosen from among “low-level offenders,” some of whom prefer it mightily, says the department of corrections:

“I’ve learned a lot – I’ve learned skills here I can use when I get out,” said Mike Jones, a firefighter at Ishi Conservation Camp #18 in Tehama County. “It teaches you accountability. You get with your crew and you learn how to work together, and all different races come together and it doesn’t matter.

NPR found the same thing:

But it’s not just the atmosphere that the inmates say helps them thrive. For inmate firefighter Michael Dignan, the program’s taught him about himself.

“You learn that there is stuff you can put yourself through that you never thought you’d been able to do,” Dignan says. “You think you’re done. You’re just not. Or when you see that last hill you have to climb and you tell yourself you can’t make it, you end up at the top of it.”

Ditto NYC-based Marshall Project for criminal justice reform, quoting an inmate:

I forgot I was incarcerated sometimes. The staff treated you like a human, not a number. The boundaries were more relaxed — just a split-rail fence and some out-of-bounds markers, no locks on the doors. All they did was do a “count” of everyone every two hours.

You were just out there in these beautiful woods, with deer, wolves, bobcats. You had views across the valley at sunrise, out over 100 miles of the Sierra Nevada mountains — which really changes your outlook from when you were in prison.

Klein focused on the state’s “criminally overcrowded prisons,” however, and told of officials arguing against easing requirements for early release noting the need for firefighters.

We all have to get out of our “issue silos,” she said. Issues are “all interconnected.” It’s part of her vision of the world, to connect issues and make one of them the answer to everything else, it appeared from her talk.

Support for the war on warming slipped since 1988, when a Time Magazine cover depicted “endangered earth,” she said and there was widespread readiness take action. “What happened?” she asked. The first international trade agreement happened. And Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher influence ruled the day.

She put Reagan on the screen, quoting him about the most frightening words in the language being “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” — words to live by for appreciators of Reagan but harbinger of bad times for anti-warming people.

“Government got out of the way,” she said. In its place came “privatization, deregulation, lower corporate taxes.” But what’s needed, she said, is “massive investment in the public sphere.” Instead, “we’re not allowed to tax any more.” She said it with a chuckle, adding, “Right?”

The Loyola chancellor nodded agreement.

“In 2000 the globalization process went into hyperdrive,” she said. There was a rise in carbon emissions, for 50% of which “the top 10%” were responsible. “The American way of life,” she said.

“Trade trumps climate,” she said, in that trade agreements make no mention of climate and even facilitate warming.

“I could go on,” she said. “Should I go on?” she asked, laughing, the chancellor nodding.

Fossil-fuel companies have “incredible power” over the U.S. Congress through contributions. Their power to sue is enhanced by trade agreements. Governments end up “paying the polluter reparations” for lost profits. Companies are “actively standing in the way” of reform.

Winding down, she praised movements — “actively doing things together to make the world better, taking care of the planet.”

She explained her Leap Manifesto, “a call for Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another,” that proclaims on its web site, “Small steps will no longer get us to where we need to go. So we need to leap.” The goal is “energy democracy,” she said. Power to the people, others have said before her, decades ago.

There have been “steps in the right direction” which were “not good enough.”

“Now,” she concluded, “is time to leap.”