Johnston unpacks and critiques the legal, economic, and scientific basis for precautionary climate policies pursued in the United States. In doing so, he reveals an alternative approach to climate change policy that would enable the US to efficiently adapt to a changing climate and radically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

The first volume on critical social and political studies of climate change for advanced students, researchers and policy makers.

Written in a clear and non-technical manner, Retaking Rationality gives progressive groups and the public the tools they need both to understand and to engage in the debate over the economic analysis of environmental, public health, and safety regulation. Since the Reagan presidency, the most important regulations affecting every American have been required to pass a "cost-benefit" test, but most Americans-including many professionals working for progressive institutions or elected officials-do not understand how economic analysis works. The result is that industry and conservative ideologues have twisted economic analysis so that good regulations seem to fail the cost-benefit test. This book argues that the public, and progressive institutions, must take up the fight over how economic analysis is conducted, and gives them the knowledge they need to engage industry and conservatives about when and how economic analysis of regulation should be carried out.

"Climate change is an issue that transcends and exceeds formal political and geographical boundaries. Social scientists are increasingly studying how effective policies on climate change can be enacted at the global level, 'beyond the state'. Such perspectives take into account governance mechanisms with public, hybrid and private sources of authority. Studies are raising questions about the ways in which state authority is constituted and practiced in the climate arena, and the implications for how we understand the potential and limits for addressing the climate problem. This book focuses on the rationalities and practices by which a carbon-constrained world is represented, categorized and ordered. The book will enable investigations into a range of sites (e.g., the body, home, shopping centre, firm, city, forests, streets, international bureaucracies, financial flows, migrants and refugees) where subjectivities around climate change and carbon are formed and contested. Despite a growing interest in this area of work, the field remains fragmented and diffuse. This edited collection brings together the leading scholarship in the field to cast new light on the question of how, why, and with what implications climate governance is taking place. It is the first volume to collect this body of scholarship, and provides a key reference point in the growing debate about climate change across the social sciences"--

Climate change is without question the single most important issue the world faces over the next hundred years. The most recent scientific data have led to the conclusion that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming and that continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates would cause this process to continue to the severe detriment of our environment. This unequivocal link between climate change and human activity requires an urgent, world-wide shift towards a low carbon economy and coordinated policies and measures to manage this transition. The starting point and core idea of this book is the long-held observation that the threat of climate change calls for a change of climate in economics. Inherent characteristics of the climate problem including complexity, irreversibility and deep uncertainty challenge core economic assumptions and mainstream economic theory appears inappropriately equipped to deal with this crucial issue. Kevin Maréchal shows how themes and approaches from evolutionary and ecological economics can be united to provide a theoretical framework that is better suited to tackle the problem.

Politics and regulation -- A threatening synthesis -- Staying in bounds -- A retreat from reason -- The illusion of costs without benefits -- Erasing public health science -- Resurrecting discredited models -- Ignoring indirect benefits -- Trivializing climate change -- Manipulating transfers -- Future directions -- Improving the guardrails.

Climate change is the greatest challenge of the age, and yet fierce disagreement still exists over the best way to tackle the problem or, indeed, whether it should be tackled at all. In this original book, Amanda Machin draws on radical democratic theory to show that such disagreement does not have to hinder collective action; rather, democratic differences are necessary if we are to have any hope of acting against climate change. This is an important read for researchers, students, policy makers and anyone concerned about the current (lack of) politics in climate change.