This month COP 27 is about to kick start in Eygpt. Executive director of the UN Environment Programme said: “Climate change is no longer a future problem. It is a new problem.” Increasingly, warnings such as Andersen’s are making their way into the books – fiction and non-fiction; countless award-winning, bestselling titles released this year have the climate crisis at their heart, from those on the Booker Prize shortlist to Pulitzer Prize winners. A selection of books that are not intended to scare or depress, but to energise and entertain; a selection of books that find hope in the intelligence of humanity and the resilience of our natural world.
The planet on Fire by Mathew Lawrence and Lurie Laybourn-Langton ****
The environment is collapsing at a rapid rate and in increasingly unpredictable ways. Everyone knows that this is happening, and yet the only politics that is emerging to tackle it are coming from the increasingly nativist far-right. How should the left respond? In Beyond Barbarism, two rising stars of the British left lay down a set of proposals for a fundamental reshaping of the global economy and offer a roadmap for tackling climate breakdown. Building on the debates surrounding the Green New Deal debates that both authors have been central to, Lawrence and Laybourn argue that it is not enough merely to spend our way out of the crisis.
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 order and prevent the spread of the virus. This is often exercised with the notion that we will return to normal as soon as we can. What if that is not possible? Secondly, if the state can mobilize itself in the face of an invisible foe like this pandemic, it should also be able to confront visible dangers such as climate destruction with equal force. In Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, leading environmental thinker, Andreas Malm demands that this war-footing state should be applied on a permanent basis to the ongoing climate front line. He offers proposals on how the climate movement should use this present emergency to make that case.
The Tragedy of the Worker by The Salvage Collective****
Salvage is the most exciting journal to appear on the anglophone left over the past decade: avant-garde Marxism with no illusions, perfectly pitched to our dismal times. Here the formidable Salvage Collective tackles the defining question of those times: the ecological crisis. The result is the most beautiful and urgent essay yet written on what climate catastrophe means for the struggle for communism, in the past, present and future. This is the one for the ages.
White Skin, Black Fuel by Andreas Malm and The Zetkin Collective ****
The first study of the far right in the climate crisis, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism presents an eye-opening sweep of a novel political constellation and reveals its deep historical roots. Fossil-fuelled technologies were born steeped in racism. None loved them more passionately than the classical fascists. As such forces rise to the surface, some profess to have the solution – closing borders to save the climate. Epic and riveting, White Skin, Black Fuel traces a future of political fronts that can only heat up.
Read more about COP books at –https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/books/2021/10/30/a-cop26-inspired-reading-list-on-climate-change/
