Fossil Capital

Malm forcefully unmasks the assumption that economic growth has inevitably brought us to the brink of a hothouse Earth. Rather, as he shows in a subtle and surprising reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution, it has been the logic of capital (especially the need to valorize immense sunk investments in fossil fuels), not technology or even industrialism per se, that has driven global warming. Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and Ecology of Fear Fossil Capital is a theoretical masterpiece and a political-economic-ecological manifesto. It looks unblinkingly at the catastrophe that could await human society if we fail to act on the words System Change or Climate Change. It is a book that I will return to again and again-and take notes. John Bellamy Foster, University of Oregon, author of Marx's Ecology The definitive deep history on how our economic system created the climate crisis. Superb, essential reading from one of the most original thinkers on the subject. Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine Will climate change make us evaluate differently the achievements of George Stevenson and James Watt, Industrial Age pioneers? For it was in Britain, which accounted for 80 per cent of fossil fuel combustion in 1825, that the fossil economy began. Malm's history is expansive and detailed, and often quite terrifying in its analysis. Essential reading. Herald Scotland