The recognition that climate change is now a climate emergency has been
endorsed by a wide range of scientists and the United Nations. Natural
scientists focus on the aggregate impacts of human activity resulting
from burning fossil fuels and producing food, and hence speak of
anthropogenic climate change. Climate Emergency analyses the
socio-economic and political forces driving the climate emergency,
developing the complementary concept of 'sociogenic climate change' to
show how societies both create the crisis and are challenged by it in
different ways. Harvey demonstrates how societies inhabit different
resource environments, whether for fossil fuel reserves, or for land,
sun, and water, differences which condition their histories and
cultures.
In introducing the sociogenic approach to climate change, Harvey
re-examines history through the lens of climate change, re-writing the
climate impact of the British industrial revolution; US settler
colonialism; slavery and Native American genocides; the electrification
of societies and infrastructures for fossil-fuelled transportation; and
changes in our eating habits. In the big historical picture, different
societies and political economies have both created an unequal world and
so continue to make an unequal contribution to climate change. This can
only be understood by showing how societies have come to distinctively
exploit planetary resources in different ways. Societies create the
crisis and have to be politically involved in addressing the crisis.
