In the face of climate disaster and mass extinction, the only ‘solutions’ on offer – from our world leaders and corporations – are catastrophic geoengineering schemes, privatized conservation, and ‘net-zero targets’ that will do little to reverse the damage. These mainstream approaches assume that hyper-consumerism in the Global North can continue unabated.

These books propose radical climate solutions rooted in radical political change.

We have updated this list to include a section of writing from Mike Davis on LA as locus of ecological destruction.

Essential Reading from Mike Davis

Ecology of Fear

by Mike Davis

Counterpointing Los Angeles’s central role in America’s fantasy life – the city has been destroyed no less than 138 times in novels and films since 1909 – with its wanton denial of its own real his...

Ecology of Fear

by Mike Davis

Counterpointing Los Angeles’s central role in America’s fantasy life – the city has been destroyed no less than 138 times in novels and films since 1909 – with its wanton denial of its own real his...

City of Quartz

by Mike Davis

No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mi...

Set the Night on Fire

by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener

Histories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade’s political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power—where Malcolm ...

Climate Activism and Environmental Justice

Overshoot

by Wim Carton and Andreas Malm

The world is on the cusp of one and a half degrees of warming – just the rise it has committed itself to avoiding. Heat at such levels would be intolerable. Even before one and a half, seasons of c...

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a...

The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth

by Andreas Malm

Israel’s pulverization of Gaza since October 7, 2023 is not only a humanitarian crisis, but an environmental catastrophe. Far from the first event of its kind, the devastation Israel has inflicted ...

Fighting in a World on Fire

by Andreas Malm

Young people are inheriting a world of climate catastrophe. Young people are also one of the strongest forces leading movements for climate justice, and to halt the fossil fuel emissions that are m...

Planet on Fire

by Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton

As we rebuild our lives in the wake of Covid-19 and face the challenges of ecological disaster, how can the left win a world fit for life? Planet on Fire is an urgent manifesto for a fundamental ...

Economic Solutions: from De-growth to Renewables

The Price is Wrong

by Brett Christophers

RECENT TECHNICAL ADVANCES mean it is typically cheaper to produce electricity from renewable sources than from fossil fuels. Yet, around the world, the transition to green energy is happening too s...

The Future is Degrowth

by Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan and Andrea Vetter

Economic growth isn’t working, and it cannot be made to work. Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialization, and capitalis...

The Imperial Mode of Living

by Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen

With the concept of the Imperial Mode of Living, Brand and Wissen highlight the fact that capitalism implies uneven development as well as a constant and accelerating universalisation of a Western ...

Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal

by Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin

Edited by C.J. Polychroniou

The environmental crisis under way is unique in human history. It is a true existential crisis. Those alive today will decide the fate of humanity. Meanwhile, the leaders of the most powerful stat...

Ending Fossil Fuels

by Holly Jean Buck

Around the world, countries and companies are setting net-zero carbon emissions targets. But “net-zero” is a term that conveniently obscures multiple futures. There could be a version of net-zero w...

Who Owns the Wind?

by David McDermott Hughes

The energy transition has begun. To succeed – to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar power – that process must be fair. Otherwise, mounting popular protest against wind farms will prolong ca...

Post-Growth Living

by Kate Soper

The reality of runaway climate change is inextricably linked with the mass consumerist, capitalist society in which we live. And the cult of endless growth, and endless consumption of cheap disposa...

Socialist Climate Strategy

Half-Earth Socialism

by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese

‘Building a society that operates within ecological constraints requires an unleashing of our political imaginations, and this book helps us do just that’—Astra Taylor, author of The Age of Insecur...

Climate Change as Class War

by Matthew T. Huber

The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As ...

The Conservation Revolution

by Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher

Conservation needs a revolution. This is the only way it can contribute to the drastic transformations needed to come to a truly sustainable model of development. The good news is that conservation...

Who Will Build the Ark?

Edited by Benjamin Kunkel and Lola Seaton

In Who Will Build the Ark?, leading radical thinkers debate left alternatives to runaway global heating, capitalist crisis and wider environmental breakdown, clarifying the stakes in today's key di...

The Tragedy of the Worker

by Jamie Allinson, China Miéville, Richard Seymour and Rosie Warren

To understand the scale of what faces us and how it ramifies through every corner of our lives is to marvel at our inaction. Why aren’t we holding emergency meetings in every city, town and village...

How did we get here? Histories of the Climate Crisis

Crude Capitalism

by Adam Hanieh

This expansive history traces the hidden connections between oil and capitalism from the late 1800s to the current climate crisis. Beyond simplistic narratives that frame oil as 'prize' or 'curse',...

Future of Denial

by Tad DeLay

The age of denial is over, we are told. Yet emissions continue to rise while gimmicks, graft, and green- washing distract the public from the climate violence suffered by the vulnerable. This timel...

The States of the Earth

by Mohamed Amer Meziane

Translated by Jonathan Adjemian

While industrial states competed to colonize Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century, conversion to Christianity was replaced by a civilizing mission. This new secular impetus strode hand in hand...

Fossil Capital

by Andreas Malm

The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess?In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began...

Capitalism and the Sea

by Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás

Winner of the IPEG 2022 Book PrizeThe global ocean has through the centuries served as a trade route, strategic space, fish bank and supply chain for the modern capitalist economy. While sea beds a...

Chaos in the Heavens

by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher

Translated by Gregory Elliott

Nothing could seem more contemporary than climate change. Yet, in Chaos in the Heavens, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher show that we have been thinking about and debating the consequences o...

Happy Apocalypse

by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

Translated by David Broder

Being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact h...

Theoretical Analyses of the Climate Crisis

The Anthropocene Unconscious

by Mark Bould

The art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness. The Anthropocene – the term given to this geological epoch in which humans, anthropo...

Capitalism in the Web of Life

by Jason W. Moore

Finance. Climate. Food. Class. How are the crises—and politics—of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today’s global turb...

Feminism or Death

by Francoise d'Eaubonne

Translated by Ruth Hottell

Originally published in French in 1974, radical feminist Francoise d’Eaubonne surveyed women’s status around the globe and argued that the stakes of feminist struggle was not about equality but abo...

Planetary Mine

by Martín Arboleda

Planetary Mine rethinks the politics and territoriality of resource extraction, especially as the mining industry becomes reorganized in the form of logistical networks, and East Asian economies em...

Climate Leviathan

by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright

**Winner of the 2019 Sussex International Theory Prize**Despite the science and the summits, leading capitalist states have not achieved anything close to an adequate level of carbon mitigation. Th...

Climate Change and the Far-Right

White Skin, Black Fuel

by The Zetkin Collective and Andreas Malm

In recent years, the far right has done everything in its power to accelerate the heating: an American president who believes it is a hoax has removed limits on fossil fuel production. The Brazilia...

Further reading on Earth Day:

Property does not stand above the Earth: Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse.

How To Blow Up A Pipeline, A Verso Roundtable: These articles expand the debate and introduce Malm's key ideas to new readers.

Five Book Plan from the filmmakers behind How To Blow Up A Pipeline: Director/co-writer Daniel Goldhaber, producers/co-writers Jordan Sjol and Ariela Barer, and editor Daniel Garber provide a five book plan for confronting the looming climate apocalypse.

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