NAOMI Klein, a Canadian writer, is very outspoken about economics, human society and climate change in her most recent book, This Changes Every Thing. Her thoughts are challenging.

She argues that corporate globalisation, big world-wide business, is the impediment that prevents us reducing CO2 emissions, and it’s built on privatisation of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate private sector, and lower corporate taxation paid for with cuts to public spending. In other words the political system depends on unlimited economic growth irrespective of the damage it’s doing to the planet and most of its population. It’s sadly a response to our own greed and appetite for consumption and, misguidedly, we seem happy with both.

It’s clearly seen in the threat that’s now being negotiated between the USA and the EU – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Once agreed this will give multi-national corporations certain rights over national governments and could imply compensation for lost future profits, so maintaining privatisation, and control over taxation levels. It’s apparent that profits, wealth and growth are the dominant ambitions in the modern world, as the low taxes paid by multi-nationals, such as Apple, Monsanto and Starbucks, and the rash of adverts for another Heathrow runway demonstrate.

Milk is a simple example that we all understand. Following deregulation in 1994 and the abolition of the price setting Milk Marketing Board there’s been outright competition between farmers and retailers and the latter are winning.

You can now buy four pints of milk for one pound in many supermarkets and that’s cheaper than a bottle of water. As the production costs are over 30p a pint it’s clear that at 25p in the shops many farmers can’t continue, resulting in the closure of hundreds of small dairy farms – from 34,000 in 1994 there are now only 13,000.

The answer is said to be the US industrial scale dairying, with herds of between 1,000 and 8,000 cows. It’s the equivalent of battery farming with the cows in sheds all year round – they never see a field. They receive extra feed, often imported soya, and are milked three times a day to double the yield to over 11,000 litres a year per cow.

One such planning application was refused because of fears about the size of the slurry lake, but others have been passed, and none take account of the extra CO2 produced. My milk comes from the farm up the road, delivered to my door in recyclable glass bottles, unlike the supermarket plastic jugs made from oil. It costs more but it’s the right price to pay to keep farmers and grazing cows content, and produce less CO2 per pint.