Climate Politics

Citizens’ assemblies bring the shared wisdom of ordinary people into political decision making on the climate and ecological crisis. They are increasingly being used at local, national and even global levels. But with what impact? Can they take us beyond the shortcomings of electoral and partisan politics? Can they make a real difference? This book explains why climate assemblies have captured the imagination of governments and activists alike, exploring the ways they can have a meaningful impact on climate politics.

Today just about everything we've known and relied on (our natural environment, economy, societies, cultures and institutions) is changing dramatically—too often for the worse. Without radical new approaches, our planet will become unrecognizable as well as poorer, more violent, more authoritarian. Thomas Homer-Dixon calls on his extraordinary knowledge of complexity science, of how societies work and can evolve, and of our capacity to handle threats, to show that we can shift human civilization onto a new path if we mobilize our minds, spirits, imaginations and collective values.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty for the benefit of European powers.

Climate Change and the Road to Net-Zero is a story of how humanity has broken free from the shackles of poverty, suffering, and war and for the first time in human history, grown both population and prosperity. It’s also a story of how a single species has reconfigured the natural world, repurposed the Earth’s resources, and begun to reengineer the climate. The book uses these conflicting narratives to explore the science, economics, technology, and politics of climate change.

Over his long career as witness to an extreme 20th century, National Book Award-winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual Robert Jay Lifton has grappled with the profound effects of nuclear war, terrorism, and genocide. Now he shifts to climate change, which, Lifton writes, "presents us with what may be the most demanding and unique psychological task ever required of humankind" - what he describes as the task of mobilizing our imaginative resources toward climate sanity.

Five Times Faster is an inside story from Simon Sharpe, who has spent ten years at the forefront of climate change policy and diplomacy. In our fight to avoid dangerous climate change, science is pulling its punches, diplomacy is picking the wrong battles, and economics has been fighting for the other side. This provocative and engaging book sets out how we should rethink our strategies and reorganize our efforts in the fields of science, economics, and diplomacy, so that we can act fast enough to stay safe.

In the last few years, it has become abundantly clear that the effects of accelerating climate change will be catastrophic, from rising seas to more violent storms to desertification. Yet why do nation-states find it so difficult to implement transnational policies that can reduce carbon output and slow global warming? In Oceans Rise, Empires Fall, Gerard Toal identifies geopolitics as the culprit.

Renowned investor and climate champion Tom Steyer has been on the forefront of the climate war for well over a decade, leveraging his investment expertise, business knowledge, and community-organizing skills to support sustainable climate solutions. In this accessible book, he explains how capitalism is an effective tool for scaling climate progress, offers his candid take on fossil fuel enablers, and explains why immediate action on the climate front will be an investment in our economy and our key to a healthy and viable future.

The burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide (CO2), and these CO2 emissions are a major driver of climate change. Carbon capture offers a path to climate change mitigation that has received relatively little attention. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Howard Herzog offers a concise guide to carbon capture, covering basic information as well as the larger context of climate technology and policy.

With temperatures rising and the risk of disasters growing, our world is increasingly vulnerable. Most people see disasters as freak, natural events that are unpredictable and unpreventable. But that simply isn’t the case - disasters are avoidable, but when they do strike, there are strategic ways to manage the fallout.

Un sincero y revelador análisis de las posibilidades energéticas de nuestro futuro. Así pues, este libro aborda temas tan importantes como la improbable y difícil tarea de descarbonizar el planeta, en parte por la estrecha relación entre la producción de alimentos y los combustibles fósiles, pero también destapa realidades incómodas, como la dependencia de las economías modernas respecto de la alta producción de amoníaco, metal, cemento y plástico.

Smokescreen cuts through years of misunderstanding and misdirection to make an impassioned, evidence-based argument for a new era of forest management for the sake of the planet and the human race. Scientist and activist Chad T. Hanson explains how natural alarm over wildfire has been marshaled to advance corporate and political agendas, notably those of the logging industry. He also shows that, in contrast to the fear-driven narrative, contemporary research has demonstrated that forests in the US, North America, and around the world have a significant deficit of fire.

As a chef in high-end restaurants, and later, in the home of then Senator Barack and Michelle Obama, Sam Kass read a lot about how eating organic and buying local was the key to remaking a food system otherwise built on climate-change-causing petroleum. But when he followed the Obamas into the White House, he realized something: While it’s easy to identify the problems in our spoiled food system, fixing it is not as simple as getting your eggs from the farmers’ market. Now investing in startups trying to solve the environmental and human challenges of climate change in food and agriculture.

Hoy, la subida del nivel del mar es una causa de alarma generalizada entre aquellos que ya han abandonado el sueño pernicioso de que el calentamiento global es un mito. Sin embargo, no es ni siquiera la punta del gigantesco iceberg de horrores inimaginables que amenazan la vida en la Tierra: incendios, huracanes, sequías, inundaciones...

In its 2001 report on global climate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations prominently featured the "Hockey Stick", a chart showing global temperature data over the past 1,000 years. The Hockey Stick demonstrated that temperature had risen with the increase in industrialization and use of fossil fuels. The inescapable conclusion was that worldwide human activity since the industrial age had raised CO2 levels, trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and warming the planet.

"The climate crisis may at times appear to be happening slowly, but in fact it is happening very quickly - and has become a true planetary emergency....[I]nconvenient truths do not go away just because they are not seen. Indeed, when they are not responded to, their significance doesn't diminish; it grows." -Al Gore

Even as climate change dominates the headlines, many of us still think about it in the future tense—we imagine that as global warming worsens over the coming decades, millions of people will scatter around the world, fleeing famine and rising seas. What we often don’t realize is that the consequences of climate change are already visible, right here in the United States. In communities across the country, climate disasters are pushing thousands of people away from their homes.

Most books about the environmental crisis are densely academic, depressingly doom-laden, and crammed with impersonal statistics. We Are the Weather is different--accessible, immediate, and with a single clear solution that individual readers can put into practice straight away. A significant proportion of global carbon emissions come from farming meat. Giving up meat is incredibly hard and nobody is perfect--but just cutting back is much easier and still has a huge positive effect on the environment.

The Fall of Boris Johnson is the explosive inside account of how a prime minister lost his hold on power. Written and read by Sebastian Payne, Director of Onward and former Whitehall Editor for the Financial Times. Winner at the 2022 Parlimentary Book Awards A New Statesman, The Times, Daily...

After decades of debate about global warming, the fact of the climate crisis is finally widely accepted. People at all scales—from the household to the global market—are attempting to govern climate to deal with its causes and impacts. Although the stakes are different now, governing climate is centuries old. In this book, Zeke Baker develops a genealogy of climate science that traces the relationship between those who have created knowledge of the climate and those who have attempted to gain power and govern society, right up to the present, historic moment.