Power In A Warming World: The New Global Politics of Climate Change and the Remaking of Environmental Inequality
David Ciplet, J. Timmons Roberts, and Mizan R. Khan
Abstract
After nearly a quarter century of international negotiations on climate change, we stand at a crossroads. A new set of agreements is likely to fail to prevent the global climate's destabilization. Islands and coastlines face inundation, and widespread drought, flooding, and famine are expected to worsen in the poorest and most vulnerable countries. How did we arrive at an entirely inequitable and scientifically inadequate international response to climate change? Combining rich empirical description with a political economic view of power relations, the chapters in this book document the strug ... More
After nearly a quarter century of international negotiations on climate change, we stand at a crossroads. A new set of agreements is likely to fail to prevent the global climate's destabilization. Islands and coastlines face inundation, and widespread drought, flooding, and famine are expected to worsen in the poorest and most vulnerable countries. How did we arrive at an entirely inequitable and scientifically inadequate international response to climate change? Combining rich empirical description with a political economic view of power relations, the chapters in this book document the struggles of states and social groups most vulnerable to a changing climate and describe the emergence of new political coalitions that take climate politics beyond a simple North–South divide. They offer six future scenarios in which power relations continue to shift as the world warms. A focus on incremental market-based reform, they argue, has proven insufficient for challenging the enduring power of fossil fuel interests, and will continue to be inadequate without a bolder, more inclusive and aggressive response.
Keywords:
climate change,
destabilization,
power relations,
fossil fuel,
islands,
coastlines,
flooding,
drought,
famine
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780262029612 |
Published to MIT Press Scholarship Online: May 2016 |
DOI:10.7551/mitpress/9780262029612.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
David Ciplet, author
University of East Anglia
J. Timmons Roberts, author
Mizan R. Khan, author
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