Reading list

Theorizing the Climate Crisis

How different theories of the climate crisis shape our understanding of what must be done.

Verso Books16 July 2023

Every year, debates around strategy and climate activism are sharpened as the effects of global warming become ever more apparent. But the strategic debates around climate politics are underpinned by less obvious differences in theory. The readings below grapple with how we ought to theorize the climate crisis, which concepts are most useful in understanding the current predicament, and how different ways of thinking inevitably lead to different political options for transformative change.

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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 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...

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 ...

A Planet to Win

by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Thea Riofrancos

All politics are climate politics in the twenty-first century - and this bold book argues for a Green New Deal that confronts both climate change and inequalityThe age of climate gradualism is over...

The Case for the Green New Deal

by Ann Pettifor

In 2008, the first Green New Deal was devised by Pettifor and a group of English economist and thinkers, but was ignored within the tumults of the financial crash. A decade later, the ideas was rev...

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...

The Great Adaptation

by Romain Felli

The Great Adaptation tells the story of how scientists, governments and corporations have tried to deal with the challenge that climate change poses to capitalism by promoting adaptation to the con...

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...

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 ...

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...

Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency

by Andreas Malm

The economic and social impact of the coronavirus pandemic has been unprecedented. Governments have spoken of being at war and find themselves forced to seek new powers in order to maintain social ...

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...

Carbon Democracy

by Timothy Mitchell

With the rise of coal power, the producers who oversaw its development acquired the ability to shut down energy systems, a threat they used to build the first mass democracies. Oil offered the Wes...

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...

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...

Capitalism in the Web of Life

by Jason W. Moore

Finance. Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today’s global turbulence have a ...

The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

Translated by David Fernbach

The Earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. What we are facing is not only an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. In two centuries, our planet has tipped int...