Last year, the Canadian journalist and activist Naomi Klein trained her focus on climate change with her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. In the past year, she’s also been busy launching the Leap Manifesto, a document signed by scores of prominent Canadians that lays out a plan to wean the country off fossil fuels.

So with world leaders assembled in Paris to hash out a climate accord, what are Klein’s thoughts regarding how things stand in the battle against global warming?

Frank Barat, a human rights activist based in London, recently sat down with Klein at COP21. In the following interview, originally conducted for the French publication Ballast, Klein discusses the crackdown on protesters in Paris, the bleak prospects for a good deal, and why “climate change is the best argument against austerity that you are ever going to have.”