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 quality and character of those necessary changes are a source of seemingly intractable dispute. Does the answer lie in trusting the dynamism of capitalist market forces, or in the development of new, climate-engineering technologies? Or does it lie in ideas for the radical reorganization of society - from a wartime-like mobilization to rapidly build a post-carbon world, to reconceptualizing what the "good life" might look like in a society seeking something richer than perpetual economic growth? How we think about the way the world works affects how we think about climate change and what we think can and should be done about it. In this 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 think about and address our collective responsibility to create a livable global future.