Climate Change and Society

by John Urry

This book explores the significance of human behaviour to understanding the causes and impacts of changing climates and to assessing varied ways of responding to such changes. So far the discipline that has represented and modelled such human behaviour is economics.

By contrast Climate Change and Society tries to place the ‘social’ at the heart of both the analysis of climates and of the assessment of alternative futures. It demonstrates the importance of social practices organised into systems. In the fateful twentieth century various interlocking high carbon systems were established. This sedimented high carbon social practices, engendering huge population growth, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and the potentially declining availability of oil that made this world go round. Especially important in stabilising this pattern was the ‘carbon military-industrial complex’ around the world.

The book goes on to examine how in this new century it is systems that have to change, to move from growing high carbon systems to those that are low carbon. Many suggestions are made as to how to innovate such low carbon systems. It is shown that such a transition has to happen fast so as to create positive feedbacks of each low carbon system upon each other. Various scenarios are elaborated of differing futures for the middle of this century, futures that all contain significant costs for the scale, extent and richness of social life.

Climate Change and Society thus attempts to replace economics with sociology as the dominant discipline in climate change analysis. Sociology has spent much time examining the nature of modern societies, of modernity, but mostly failed to analyse the carbon resource base of such societies. This book seeks to remedy that failing. It should appeal to teachers and students in sociology, economics, environmental studies, geography, planning, politics and science studies, as well as to the public concerned with the long term future of carbon and society.

Genres: Climate Change, Sociology, Environment

200 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 2011

Reviews

[bencreeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better than the bleak cover image suggests, this was the book I should've read this time last year to prepare for my current course. But better late than never. A good introduction to the systems approach to climate change and climate action, which helpfully removes the onus from the individual consumer and places it onto social and physical systems, mainly the "carbon military industrial complex." Urry is not afraid to be pessmistic and admit the potential for Mad-Max-style warlordism in our future, and I appreciate the candour. However he is also not afraid to be optimistic, assuming that wide-scale social change can be enacted quickly because it's happened before - e.g. with the 2008 Financial Crisis - but this seems to ignore that we had no choice but to adapt to the Financial Crisis. The rub with climate change is that we can so often postpone adaptation, right up until the moment when the wave hits

[Ashley Barratt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Climate Change and Society is an interesting read viewing the subject from a lens of sociology rather than economics or political science. Written in 2010 it is interesting to reflect how much the world has changed - and how little. The author believes that society not the individual is the key actor.

But what of society: the book - rightly - observes that sociology hasn’t found a voice in connecting to the impact of Climate Change. In a world beset by greenwashing it is interesting to reflect whether economics or politics has in fact made better progress. Reading the book one senses that nothing is likely to stop global temperatures increasing unabated.

Towards the end of the book Climate Change and Society makes a valuable summary on what conditions need to be place to bring about a low carbon economy and the actions which might lead us there. It’s rather sobering.

[Jari · Rating 2 out of 5]

Climate Change and Society is quite informative and even interesting but I don't think Urry achieves what he set out to do with this book. Instead of presenting something new in regards to how sociology needs to take part in the discussion about climate change he mostly references and summarized other people's ideas and thoughts. The book works best as an introduction.