COP26: a radical climate reading list

We need a new, radical politics capable of tackling environmental breakdown. Our world leaders are not going to deliver.

Here is how we fight in a world on fire.

Until January 4 (2022), at 23.59 EST, we have 40% off ALL our print books and 60% off all our ebooks (see full details here)! See all our reading guides here.

A radical manifesto for how to deal with environmental breakdown.

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...

Why resisting climate change means combatting the fossil fuel industry.

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 ...

What does the COVID 19 tell us about the climate breakdown, and what should we do about it?

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...

Ending the Fossil Fuel Industry is the only credible path for climate policy.

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...

What does it mean to be a communist after we have hit a climate tipping point?

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...

What does the rise of the far right mean for the battle against climate change?

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...

A Planet to Win explores the political potential and concrete first steps of a Green New Deal. It calls for dismantling the fossil fuel industry, building beautiful landscapes of renewable energy, and guaranteeing climate-friendly work, no-carbon housing, and free public transit.

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...

A post-capitalist manifesto for conservation.

After Geoengineering

by Holly Jean Buck

Climate engineering is a dystopian project. But as the human species hurtles ever faster towards its own extinction, geoengineering as a temporary fix, to buy time for carbon removal, is a seductiv...

What if the people seized the means of climate production?

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...

Why the wind, and energy it produces, should not be private property.

Further reading:

The Climate Crisis and COVID-19: an activist focused reading list looking at what we need to do to move beyond these interconnected crises. 

Environment and Ecology: Verso student reading (encorporating books looking at the climate crisis and political economy, the global green new deal, and more).

Radical Futures: books to help us re-imagine new futures.

Filed under: climate-change, verso-reading-lists