Postmodern Climate Change

International responses to the crisis of climate change have been controversial, contentious, and to date, largely unsuccessful. Despite concern and action for over two decades, the global rise in greenhouse gas emissions has yet to be arrested. Leigh Glover argues that efforts by the international community to control climate change using modernity's usual scientific, economic, and governmental tools are inherently flawed, so that the problem of climate change defines modernity's end in ecological terms. This book offers a new way to understand the climate change problem and is concerned with problems of modernity and postmodernity in the context of contemporary environmental thought. Focussing on the international politics surrounding the UN agreement on climate change, the Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol, the author examines this important issue using the key aspects of climate change science, global environmental politics, and global environmental management. This book will be of interest to students and research in fields of environmental politics, environmental theory, political science, and international relations, with an interest in climate change. It will also appeal to those in environmental studies, geography, cultural studies, and other relevant aspects of the social sciences dealing with global environmental governance, global environmental problems, ecological justice, and environmentalism.

Leigh Glover is Policy Fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy, University of Delaware, USA