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Climate Change Solutions represents an application of critical theory to examine proposed solutions to climate change. Drawing from Marx’s negative conception of ideology, the authors illustrate how ideology continues to conceal the capital-climate contradiction or the fundamental incompatibility between growth-dependent capitalism and effectively and justly mitigating climate change. Dominant solutions to climate change that offer minor changes to the current system fail to address this contradiction. However, alternatives like degrowth involve a shift in priorities and power relations and can offer new systemic arrangements that confront and move beyond the capital-climate contradiction. While there are clear barriers to a systemic transition that prioritizes social and ecological well-being, such a transition is possible and desirable.

Can humanity work together to mitigate the effects of climate change? Climate Games argues we can. This book brings together a decade and a half of experimentation, conducted by researchers around the world, which shows that people can and will work together to prevent disasters like climate change. These experiments, called economic games, put money on the line to create laboratory disasters. Participants must work together by spending a bit of money now to prevent themselves from losing even more money in the future. Will people sacrifice their own money to prevent disaster? Can people make wise decisions? And can people decide wisely on behalf of others? The answer is a resounding yes. 

Yet real climate change is a complex social dilemma involving the world’s nearly eight billion inhabitants. In the real world, the worst effects of climate change are likely to be felt by developing countries, while most of the decisions will be made by rich, industrialized countries. And while the world as a whole would be better off if all nations reduced their greenhouse gas emissions, any given nation could decide it would be even better off if it continued emitting and let other nations take care of the problem. These disaster experiments test how real people respond to climate change’s unique constellation of challenges and deliver a positive message: People will prevent disaster.

In Engineering Vulnerability Sarah E. Vaughn examines climate adaptation against the backdrop of ongoing processes of settler colonialism and the global climate change initiatives that seek to intervene in the lives of the world’s most vulnerable. Her case study is Guyana in the aftermath of the 2005 catastrophic flooding that ravaged the country’s Atlantic coastal plain. The country’s ensuing engineering projects reveal the contingencies of climate adaptation and the capacity of flooding to shape Guyanese expectations about racial (in)equality. Analyzing the coproduction of race and vulnerability, Vaughn details why climate adaptation has implications for how we understand the past and the continued human settlement of a place. Such understandings become particularly apparent not only through experts’ and ordinary citizens’ disputes over resources but in their attention to the ethical practice of technoscience over time. Approaching climate adaptation this way, Vaughn exposes the generative openings as well as gaps in racial thinking for theorizing climate action, environmental justice, and, more broadly, future life on a warming planet.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Industrial and agricultural greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly warming Earth’s climate, unleashing rising seas, ocean acidification, melting permafrost, powerful storms, wildfires, floods, deadly heat waves, droughts, tsunamis, food shortages, and armed conflict over shrinking water supplies while reducing nutritional levels in crops. Billions of people will become climate refugees. Hotter temperatures will allow tropical diseases to spread into temperate regions. Higher levels of CO2, allergens, dust, and other particulate matter will impair our physical and mental health and even reduce our cognitive abilities. Climate change disproportionately affects the world’s poor. It also harms Nature, and could ultimately trigger a sixth mass extinction. In Escaping Nature, Orrin H. Pilkey and his coauthors offer concrete suggestions for how to respond to the threats posed by global climate change. They argue that while we wait for the world’s governments to get serious about mitigating climate change we can adapt to a hotter world through technological innovations, behavioral changes, nature-based solutions, political changes, and education.

Geoengineering is the deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth's climate system in an attempt to mitigate the adverse effects of global warming. Now that climate emergency is upon us, claims that geoengineering is inevitable are rapidly proliferating. How did we get into this situation where the most extreme path now seems a plausible development? Is it an accurate representation of where we are at? Who is this “we” who is talking? What options make it onto the table? Which are left out? Whom does geoengineering serve? Why is the ensemble of projects that goes by that name so salient, even though the community of researchers and advocates is remarkably small? These are some of the questions that the thinkers contributing to this volume are exploring from perspectives ranging from sociology and geography to ethics and Indigenous studies. The editors set out this diverse collection of voices not as a monolithic, unified take on geoengineering, but as a place where creative thinkers, students, and interested environmental and social justice advocates can explore nuanced ideas in more than 240 characters. 

Power Shift traces recent social and cultural shifts in how we understand and imagine energy, the environment, and the challenges of global warming. Across the globe, the need to transition to renewables has become the guiding reality of our energy present and future, despite continuing resistance to change. But what does this moment of energy transition look like for those struggling to make it happen in a way that benefits every individual and all communities?

Featuring brief essays on 101 key terms by scholars, artists, and activists from around the world and across disciplines, Power Shift offers an expansive, kaleidoscopic guide to the history of petromodernity, recent technological and social developments, and pathways to new energy futures. The book offers new insights into the emergent politics of energy, contrasting today’s environmental and climate movements with the geopolitical contests of the Cold War era. It explores the still unfolding story of energy transition by focusing on the ongoing struggles of communities and individuals against decisions made by corporations, governments, and international organizations.
 

As scientists call for widespread climate action, there has been an alarming rise in climate doomism, the belief that it is too late to do anything about climate change. Many people who struggle to imagine the solutions and social order that would be needed to support more sustainable outcomes instead look away and do nothing, immobilized by defeatist thinking. Yet every fraction of a degree of warming avoided means saving lives and livelihoods in the future.

Drawing from climate science, sociology, psychology, and philosophy, Rejecting Climate Doomism outlines the reasons to instead choose action grounded in active hope. It examines how global warming could be effectively limited through specific policy proposals. Despite the many obstacles to achieving some of the policies discussed in this book, they are still possible and worth pursuing. By outlining a positive vision of the far-reaching changes that can be used to minimize warming, the book encourages readers to advocate for the social and economic changes necessary to forge the best path for people and the planet.

Sustainability and Water Management in the Maya World and Beyond investigates climate change and sustainability through time, exploring how political control of water sources, maintenance of sustainable systems, ideological relationships with water, and fluctuations in water availability have affected and been affected by social change. Contributors focus on and build upon earlier investigations of the global diversity of water management systems and the successes and failures of their employment, while applying a multitude of perspectives on sustainability.
 
The volume focuses primarily on the Precolumbian Maya but offers several analogous case studies outside the ancient Maya world that illustrate the pervasiveness of water’s role in sustainability, including an ethnographic study of the sustainability of small-scale, farmer-managed irrigation systems in contemporary New Mexico and the environmental consequences of Angkor’s growth into the world’s most extensive preindustrial settlement. The archaeological record offers rich data on past politics of climate change, while epigraphic and ethnographic data show how integrated the ideological, political, and environmental worlds of the Maya were.
 
While Sustainability and Water Management in the Maya World and Beyond stresses how lessons from the past offer invaluable insight into current approaches of adaptation, it also advances our understanding of those adaptations by making the inevitable discrepancies between past and present climate change less daunting and emphasizing the sustainable negotiations between humans and their surroundings that have been mediated by the changing climate for millennia. It will appeal to students and scholars interested in climate change, sustainability, and water management in the archaeological record.
 
Contributors: Mary Jane Acuña, Wendy Ashmore, Timothy Beach, Jeffrey Brewer, Christopher Carr, Adrian S. Z. Chase, Arlen F. Chase, Diane Z. Chase, Carlos R. Chiriboga, Jennifer Chmilar, Nicholas Dunning, Maurits W. Ertsen, Roland Fletcher, David Friedel, Robert Griffin, Joel D. Gunn, Armando Anaya Hernández, Christian Isendahl, David Lentz, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, Dan Penny, Kathryn Reese-Taylor, Michelle Rich, Cynthia Robin, Sylvia Rodríguez, William Saturno, Vernon Scarborough, Payson Sheets, Liwy Grazioso Sierra, Michael Smyth, Sander van der Leeuw, Andrew Wyatt
 

Saúl Luciano Lliuya guides tours in the mountains and his family grow corn, wheat, barley, and potatoes on their farm in Huaraz, Peru, a community of more than 100,000 people in the Andes near Palcacocha, a glacial lake. Palcacocha, however, is growing, as is the major flood risk to Huaraz. Climate change through the emission of greenhouse gases continues to melt the Peruvian glaciers—greenhouse gases that come from corporate polluters not just in Peru, but across the industrialized world. So, Luciano Lliuya decided to sue. Although the German energy company RWE has never operated in Peru, Luciano Lliuya sought to hold the company, which uses coal power generation, liable for damages in a groundbreaking case that, despite being dismissed, established that major emitters can be held liable for climate harms. In The Climate Trial, anthropologist Noah Walker-Crawford draws on years of personal involvement with the lawsuit and extensive fieldwork in Peru and Germany to follow the people, legal strategies, scientific arguments, and political tensions that have shaped the trial. More than a courtroom drama, The Climate Trial is a deeply human story about moral responsibility in a changing world and what it means to be a “good neighbor” while living thousands of miles away.