Climate and Capitalism editor Ian Angus presents new books on denial, green colonialism, wildfires, energy, the far right, global crises and our ties to nature.
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Future Of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change
By Tad Delay
Verso Books
Exxon knew as early as the 1970s, but the fundamental physics of carbon dioxide warming the Earth was already understood before the American Civil War. Will capitalists ever voluntarily walk away from hundreds of trillions of dollars in fossil fuels unless they are forced to do so? And, if not, who will apply the necessary pressure?
The Geopolitics Of Green Colonialism: Global Justice And Eco-Social Transitions
By Miriam Lang, Mary Ann Manahan and Breno Bringel
Pluto Press
The green growth and clean energy plans of the Global North require large-scale extraction of strategic minerals from the Global South, sacrificing not only territories, but sustainable ways of inhabiting this world. This book provides a platform for the voices that have been conspicuously absent in debates around energy and climate in the Global North.
How To Control Fire On A Burning Continent
By Timothy Neale
Duke University Press
A critical and ethnographic exploration of wildfire management in Australia, one of Earth’s most fire-prone countries, Neale ties contemporary wildfire problems to ongoing colonisation and Indigenous dispossession, exploring Indigenous-led land management and cultural burning as a practical assertion of sovereignty.
Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who Are Selling Off Our Future
By Joshua Frank
Haymarket Books
Taking readers from copper mines in Montana and Bolivia to wind farms in Wyoming to the geopolitical battle over deep-sea mining in the South Pacific, Frank offers a stark assessment of the costs of the rush for renewables and the demand for endless growth. As Frank makes clear, we cannot consume our way out of climate chaos.
The Great Driving Right Show: Cars, Climate Collapse and the Inverted Crisis
By The Zetkin Collective
Verso Books
The political right has invented an “inverted crisis” in which climate action, not climate change, represents the gravest existential threat. They are powered not only by fossil-fuel and automobile interests, but by moral panics about climate and racial justice protesters, trans people, and migrants. With the planet at stake, we must confront the new climate denialism and the violent mobility regime fuelling the rise of fossil fascism.
Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism
By William I Robinson
Cambridge University Press
This bold effort to synthesize the economic, social, political, military and ecological dimensions of the global crisis, concludes that the conditions for global capitalist renewal are becoming exhausted.
Nature Within: How the Natural World Shapes Our Minds, Bodies & Health
By James Bashford
Pelagic Publishing
Our bodies are shaped by our environment, yet we still see ourselves as separate from the natural world. Neuroscientist and doctor James Bashford argues that to protect human health, we need to reawaken our inner connection with nature and prevent the destruction of our environment and the countless species we share it with.
[Reprinted from Climate and Capitalism. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement.]