Dead Heat ─ Global Justice and Global Warming

Today's record-breaking heat waves, droughts, and floods foreshadow an increasingly unstable future. The Bush Administration, meanwhile, has chosen to reject the Kyoto Protocol, deny the consequences of oil dependency, and define the politics of oil as the politics of military domination and war. Still, the science is clear: if we don't drastically reduce our greenhouse pollution, we'll soon suffer catastrophic climatic change, and the poor among us will suffer the most. Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer argue that only a social justice approach can shape the necessary compromise between the North and the South, and cut a path to sustainability on a planet riven with explosive national, ideological, and class divides.

TOM ATHANASIOU is a longtime green activist and technology critic, and the author of dozens of essays on environmental and techno-scientific politics. In 1996, his first book was published—in the United States as Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor, and in England as Slow Reckoning: The Ecology of a Divided Planet. His interests focus on class division and distributive justice within finite environmental spaces.
PAUL BAER is a Ph.D. candidate in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of Calfornia, Berkeley. His research in the area of ecological economics focuses on both ecological and economic modeling and on the equity implications of various climate policy alternatives.