Media Review: The Politics of Climate Change
评论Nyberg、Wright和Boden的著作，分析为何尽管气候危机日益严重，仍缺乏有效政策，指出经济增长至上的政治经济秩序是阻碍行动的主因。
One of today’s defining questions is why, despite decades of awareness about the looming climate crisis and the increasing occurrence of catastrophes, we still lack impactful policies to avert the direst consequences. This question is even more puzzling as climate disasters like floods or wildfires are now also regularly affecting industrialized nations that once believed themselves immune, despite their overarching responsibility for emitting the greenhouse gases that have caused global warming. Climate activists, Indigenous communities, and young generations that have long warned about the consequences of failing to limit greenhouse gas emissions during the international climate negotiations have taken to the streets and engage in increasingly visible forms of protest in the light of policy inaction. Policy-makers in many countries, in turn, focus on suppressing these protests or on raiding and arresting protesters. In their recent book, Nyberg, Wright, and Boden assess the causes and consequences of this grim situation. They argue that a “ruling order of economic and political activity” is maintained by “global corporations, state-owned enterprises, allied governments and political parties, along with the supporting institutional apparatus of think tanks, consultancies and media whose power and finances depend on a perpetuation of economic growth at all costs” (p. 4). In short: defending a particular lifestyle revolving around economic growth and fossil-fuel intensive consumption is given higher priority than preventing planetary collapse.