Worlds at Stake

The intensifying climate crisis has put the world on high alert. For those living in the high-consuming, high-polluting swaths of the world, it is clear that something about our society, our politics, our economy — our very way of life — must change. But the nature of those necessary changes is a source of seemingly intractable dispute. Does the answer lie in stimulating the dynamism of capitalist market forces with a carbon price, or in the deployment of new, climate-engineering technologies? Or does it lie in still more radical changes — something akin to a wartime-like mobilization to rapidly build a more just post-carbon world, or a shift to an ecologically bounded society that has transcended perpetual capitalist growth? Our ideologies — the competing ways we believe the world should be — powerfully affect how we see the problem of climate change and what we think ought to be done about it. In this highly original and accessible book, Saad presents an erudite survey of political perspectives and ethical arguments about how we should respond to the climate crisis. By arranging these approaches into two broad categories of “system preserving” and “system changing” frameworks, Saad takes the reader on a journey through competing ideas about how we can address our collective responsibility to create a livable global future.