Carbon

A landmark work on the geopolitics of the climate crisis from the go-to guide to the radical new world we’ve entered (Guardian)

Over the past fifty years the climate crisis has become the defining story of our time. Here acclaimed historian Adam Tooze offers a sweeping, revelatory account of how it has reordered the world economy and exposed the limits of Western power.

For decades, climate change was framed as a Western drama. Today, China is not only the world’s largest carbon emitter; it also dominates the new energy economy and shapes the energy transition. Tooze examines the forces behind this profound shift, beginning in the waning days of the Cold War and moving through Rio, Kyoto, the financial crisis, and the turbulence of the 2020s. Climate politics, he shows, was never simply a fight between scientists and oil companies but a struggle over trade, development, state power, and who gets to build the industries that will define our future.

This is the story of globalization itself: of how the fossil-fuel age accelerated into planetary crisis even as we discovered the technological means to escape it. It is the story of the great wager of the late twentieth century, that liberal capitalism, triumphant after 1989, could lead to sustainable prosperity, and of how that wager unravelled. The result is an unsettling reality in which the future of the planet may depend on an authoritarian superpower that the West neither fully understands nor controls.

A paradigm-shifting work, Carbon offers a new lens to understand not just the past but also the future.