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Global efforts to slash carbon emissions fast enough have failed. Despite the promises of recent hope-filled books, even under the best scenarios, global citizens will be living in a harsher and less hospitable climate in the coming decades. With worsening heatwaves, floods and fires, and ever-rising seas, cities will be less liveable and supplies of energy, water, food and healthcare will come under increasing stress. We urgently need a plan to protect ourselves.
About the author
Clive Hamilton was recently named a ‘living legend’ among Australian academics and scholars. His influential books include Silent Invasion, Growth Fetish and Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change. A professor at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, he has held visiting academic positions at the University of Oxford, Yale University and Sciences Po. His articles have appeared The New York Times, Times Higher Education Supplement and Scientific American among others. George Wilkenfeld is an independent energy policy consultant who helped develop the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, star-rating labels for energy and water efficiency, and Australia’s corporate greenhouse emissions reporting system. He has over 35 years’ experience conducting energy and greenhouse policy studies for the Commonwealth, State and Pacific region governments. He has written extensively on the history of electrification.
Summary
Living Hot tells the blunt truth about our current climate change predicament: it’s time to get cracking on making the world resilient to intensifying climate extremes. If we prepare well, we can give ourselves a fighting chance to preserve some of the best of what we have, build stronger and fairer communities, find a path through the escalating pressures of a warming world – and even find new ways to flourish.
To get there, we must leave behind both the doomism and the wishful thinking currently holding us back. In Living Hot, highly respected academic Clive Hamilton and policy consultant George Wilkenfeld shift the emphasis away from reducing carbon emissions and on to making the world resilient, outlining a vision for an all-embracing and on-going program of investment and social change to protect ourselves from the ravages of a changing climate.
Living Hot is a sober assessment of the challenges we face, and a farsighted road map for what we must do next if we want to survive and even thrive on our heating planet.
