Includes bibliographical references (pages 215-223) and index.

Climate change is acknowledged to be the major problem currently facing the human race, and the need to reduce our carbon footprint becomes ever more urgent as the scientific predictions of the effects of climate change become increasingly dire. Whether we are fully aware of the social and political consequences of striving for a significant reduction is more questionable. This book identifies the many dangers inherent in the projected solutions, such as retreating from the spread of globalization, the current socio-economic paradigm for world trade. The war of words that is being waged over the appropriate way to deal with our collective carbon footprint has critical implications for us all. The author examines the issues in detail, raising questions about the assumptions being made on both sides of the climate change divide. He argues that we must urgently address the problem of how to engineer the best possible trade-off between economic survival and ecological disaster, and he puts forward some radical suggestions about how we should set about doing so. Key features include: Challenges current policies about how to deal with global warming, outlining their potentially disastrous side-effects on society and the environment; Brings out the political complexities of the links between globalization and global warming; Provides a wide variety of case studies; Calls for a radical re-think of West-Third World relations.

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