Climate Politics

More and more frequent extreme weather events occur each year, and wildlife everywhere is increasingly endangered. Science fiction or science fact, most climate experts see this as our world on climate change—and, according to polls, a majority of people around the globe agree. Climate Change for Dummies allows you to investigate this hottest of hotly debated issues for yourself—examining its causes, the way it affects our lives, and what we can all do to make a difference.

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.

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.

James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis and the greatest environmental thinker of our time, has produced an astounding new theory about future of life on Earth. He argues that the anthropocene - the age in which humans acquired planetary-scale technologies - is, after 300 years, coming to an end. A new age - the novacene - has already begun.

On November 8, 2018, the people of Paradise, California, awoke to a mottled gray sky and gusty winds. Soon the Camp Fire was upon them, gobbling an acre a second. Less than two hours after the fire ignited, the town was engulfed in flames, the residents trapped in their homes and cars. By the next morning, eighty-five people were dead. As a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Lizzie Johnson was there as the town of Paradise burned.

Politicians, pseudo-experts, and other partisans have led us to believe that there are only two approaches to climate change: doomerism or denial. Benji Backer, Founder and Executive Chairman of the American Conservation Coalition, argues that both are dead ends. In The Conservative Environmentalist, he delivers an entirely new strategy to take care of the planet while putting the economic interest of the American people first.

Spanning millennia and continents, here is a stunningly revealing history of how the distribution of water has shaped human civilization. Giulio Boc­caletti - honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Univer­sity of Oxford - shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civ­ilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers.

An innovative work of research and reportage, We Are the Middle of Forever places Indigenous voices at the center of conversations about today’s environmental crisis. The book draws on interviews with people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic regions who share their knowledge and experience, their questions, their observations, and their dreams of maintaining the best relationship possible to all of life.

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.

For decades, our world has understood that we are on the brink of an apocalypse—yet the only implemented solutions have been small and convenient, feel-good initiatives that avoid unpleasant truths about the root causes of our impending disaster. Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen argue that we must reconsider the origins of the consumption crisis and the challenges we face in creating a survivable future. Longstanding assumptions about economic growth and technological progress—the dream of a future of endless bounty—are no longer tenable.

Generation Nero: Burning the Future gives you the tools to recognise these traps and see through the corporate smokescreens and political half-truths that keep you from understanding the urgency of our situation. You will sense the tension between darkness and light, between those who profit from the status quo and those willing to fight for a fairer future.

Bestselling author and renowned economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin delivers the political narrative, technical framework, and economic plan for the debate now taking center stage across America. The concurrence of a stranded fossil fuel assets bubble and a green political vision opens up the possibility of a massive global paradigm shift into a post-carbon ecological era, hopefully in time to prevent a temperature rise that will tip us over the edge into runaway climate change.

In the 60,000 years since people began colonizing the continents, a recurring feature of human civilization has been mobility - the ever-constant search for resources and stability. Seismic global events - wars and genocides, revolutions and pandemics - have only accelerated the process. The map of humanity isn’t settled - not now, not ever.

An eye-opening examination of how treating land as a source of profit has a massive impact on racial inequality and the housing, gentrification, and environmental crises.

Taking listeners from the melting Alaskan permafrost to storm-torn New Orleans, acclaimed journalist Elizabeth Kolbert approaches this monumental problem from every angle. She interviews researchers and environmentalists, explains the science, draws frightening parallels to lost civilizations, and presents the moving tales of people who are watching their worlds disappear.

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.

Coming home from the war in Iraq, US Army private Roy Scranton thought he'd left the world of strife behind. Then he watched as new calamities struck America, heralding a threat far more dangerous than ISIS or al-Qaeda: Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, megadrought - the shock and awe of global warming. Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Conflict, famine, plagues, and riots menace from every quarter.

In a collection of original essays, the venerated television journalist, Dan Rather, celebrates our shared values and what matters most in our great country, and shows us what patriotism looks like. Writing about the institutions that sustain us, such as public libraries, public schools, and national parks; the values that have transformed us, such as the struggle for civil rights; and the drive toward science and innovation that has made the US great, Rather brings his experience on the frontlines of the world's biggest stories, and offers listeners a way forward.

Prominent Latin American historian John Charles Chasteen provides a concise history of the world, in which he explores the origins and persistence of the timeless phenomena of humanity's inhumanity to itself. Where did it come from? Why has it been so prevalent throughout our history? And, most importantly, can we overcome it? Chasteen argues that to do so, we must understand our shared past.

In The Nature of Nature, world-renowned environmental thinker and activist Vandana Shiva argues that food is the currency of life, a thread woven throughout the web of all life, indivisible from Earth and its natural systems. When this interdependence is ruptured—as it is now—the conditions for the “metabolic disorder” of climate change and countless other ecological imbalances come into being.