Mar 12, 2019

Carbon

Kate Ervine

Hosted by Lance Thurner

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Summary

The crisis of global warming overwhelms the imagination with its urgency, yet more than ever we need patient, clear-sighted. and careful assessments of the possibilities for transforming the global political economy. Carbon (Polity, 2018) is an excellent addition to our evolving efforts to understand clearly where we are and where we need to go. Here, Kate Ervine provides an accessible and trenchant introduction to the severity of our situation and the international climate politics of the past 30 years. With critical insight and deep experience in the field, she describes how and why politics as usual has so far failed to prevent disaster as oil, gas, and coal interests continue to win the better ears of political leaders. Ervine delves deep into the technological fixes that will and must be part of the human response to climate change, but argues that ultimately preventing full-scale disaster will require more fundamental changes to global politics and economy. In this way, we can aspire not only to meet this challenge, also to achieve greater environmental justice and stronger democratic practices. Kate Ervine is Associate Professor of International Development Studies and Faculty Associate of the School of the Environment at Saint Mary’s University

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Lance Thurner

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He can be reached at lancet@rutgers.edu.

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