From Earth’s history to global heating, water crises and socialist strategy — Climate and Capitalism editor Ian Angus presents eight new books for radical readers.
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Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life
By Ferris Jabr
Penguin Random House
Life and the Earth have coevolved for billions of years, transforming a lump of orbiting rock into a unique cosmic oasis. Life doesn’t just adapt to its environment, it changes and remakes the world and reshapes itself in the process. Even if you are not convinced by Jabr’s version of Gaia theory (is Earth alive?) this is a valuable account of the complex interactions that have created our planet and its inhabitants.
Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World
By Jisung Park
Princeton University Press
Much writing focuses on the future results of global heating. Park focuses less on the possibility of mass climate extinction, and more on the everyday implications of climate change here and now. Climate change silently accumulates a thousand tiny conflagrations, increasing health risks for billions of people, reducing productivity and amplifying inequality in a host of ways.
Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring our Atmosphere
By Rob Jackson
Simon & Schuster
Jackson, chair of the Global Carbon Project, argues that we must not only slash emissions, but also repair the damage by removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Restoring the atmosphere means reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the air to pre-industrial levels to heal the harm we have done. The question is how, and how long will it take?
Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil Through Social Media
By Jordan B Kinder
University of Minnesota Press
Since the early 2010s, an increasingly influential network of pro-oil groups, organisations and campaigns has harnessed social media to undermine resistance to the fossil fuel industry. Kinder exposes the deep divide between Canada’s environmentally progressive reputation and the actions of its governments and corporate polluters.
Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change
By M V Ramana
Verso
The climate crisis has propelled nuclear energy back into fashion. Its proponents argue that the technology only needs perfection and deployment. Ramana replies that such thinking is naïve and dangerous. In addition to exposing nuclear power’s high costs and technical limitations, he unmasks the powerful groups that are greenwashing a spectacularly dirty industry.
Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World
By Corey Ross
Princeton University Press
Ross tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism and how the imperial past still haunts us today. An important historical perspective on the crises engulfing the world’s waters, particularly in the Global South, where billions of people face water shortages, floods and the depletion of sea life.
The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can’t Hack the Future of Food
By Julie Guthman
University of California Press
A concise and feisty takedown of the all-style, no-substance tech ventures that fail to solve our food crises. Guthman digs into the impoverished and ill-informed solutions for food and agriculture currently being promoted by Silicon Valley technocrats. She urges us to stop trying to fix our broken food system through finite capitalistic solutions and technological moonshots that do next to nothing to actualise a more just and sustainable system.
The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge
By Douglas Greene
Routledge
Socialists have long ignored Karl Kautsky’s ideas, accepting Vladimir Lenin’s description of him as a renegade opponent of working-class revolution. Recently, scholars including Lars Lih, Eric Blanc and Mike McNair have sought to rehabilitate him, arguing that the 21st Century-left has much to learn from him. Greene argues that, far from being a model for revolutionaries, Kautsky played a key role in the rightward degeneration of the Second International and that “there is good reason for rejecting neo-Kautskyianism in toto”.
[Reprinted from Climate and Capitalism. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement.]