Carbon is the political challenge of our time. While critical to
supporting life on Earth, too much carbon threatens to destroy life as
we know it, with rising sea levels, crippling droughts, and catastrophic
floods sounding the alarm on a future now upon us. How did we get here
and what must be done?
In this incisive book, Kate Ervine unravels carbon's distinct political
economy, arguing that, to understand global warming and why it remains
so difficult to address, we must go back to the origins of industrial
capitalism and its swelling dependence on carbon-intensive fossil
fuels - coal, oil, and natural gas - to grease the wheels of growth and
profitability. Taking the reader from carbon dioxide as chemical
compound abundant in nature to carbon dioxide as greenhouse gas, from
the role of carbon in the rise of global capitalism to its role in
reinforcing and expanding existing patterns of global inequality, and
from carbon as object of environmental governance to carbon as tradable
commodity, Ervine exposes emerging struggles to decarbonize our
societies for what they are: battles over the very meaning of democracy
and social and ecological justice.