Engineering and Governing the Climate - Key Issues in Climate Change and Sustainability: Ethics, Politics and Policy by Xavier Landes Paperback

About the Book

This thorough and accessible text introduces readers to the topic of climate engineering. Landes defines key concepts, presents the major methods and techniques, proposes an evaluative framework for judging whether to embark upon a specific interventions, and reviews the main ...

Book Synopsis

This thorough and accessible text introduces readers to the topic of climate engineering. Landes defines key concepts, presents the major methods and techniques, proposes an evaluative framework for judging whether to embark upon a specific interventions, and reviews the main reasons for initiating action toward climate alteration or resisting it.

Review Quotes

Humanity's failure to take the steps necessary to arrest catastrophic anthropogenic climate change has forced geoengineering on our attention. The technologies involved raise daunting moral and political issues which we must nonetheless address immediately. Xavier Landes's book does us an enormous service by walking us through these issues in a manner that is both scientifically informed and philosophically sensitive. This is precisely the book that needed to be written given our present predicament, and we are all in Xavier Landes's debt for having written it.

I learned a great deal from reading this groundbreaking book. Geoengineering has been something of a taboo subject among environmentalists for many years, based on the desire to avoid distracting attention away from carbon abatement, which remains the first-best response to the problem of climate change. Considering the current warming trajectory, however, it seems inevitable that we will at some point need to take second-best options more seriously. Landes provides an invaluable guide to this emerging set of issues, describing the technological options and the normative concerns they raise with exemplary clarity.

About the Author

Xavier Landes is an associate professor at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. In addition, he has held positions at Université de Montréal, University of Toronto, and Copenhagen University. Landes's areas of expertise are political and moral philosophy. He has published on various topics such as multiculturalism, the welfare state, public insurance, and happiness. Climate change and climate alteration constitute his current focuses of research and teaching.