The failure of democratic regimes to identify and confront the climate crisis is the outcome of the protracted yet incomplete defeat of critical reflexivity by instrumental reasoning. Historically, this is evident in the institutional and practical consequences of colonialism, militarism, and commodification. Political elites’ objectification of nature, of uncertainty, and of oppressed groups delimits normative scope of the climate crisis. By ignoring salient differences between the epistemic and ontological limits of these acts of objectification, elites place misguided faith in their capacity to control nature, exploit others, and convert uncertainty into risk. Lawrence first historicizes the inadequacies of collective responses to the climate crisis, then encapsulates salient differences between mainstream and critical approaches to this question. He subsequently details how a dependence upon militarism and GDP correlates with quantifying uncertainty and objectifying risk, while underplaying the ecological risks of both. He concludes by reflecting upon how strategies for seeing and knowing both democratic and ecological fragility and robustness can mutually inform each other.

Chapter 1 introduces the book's key concepts: utopianism, speculative fiction and the Anthropocene. I start by defining utopianism in terms of the "education of a desire for alternative ways of being." The chapter then shows that the current climate crisis necessitates a fundamental reorientation of our cognitive and affective frameworks. This can only be achieved, I maintain, with the help of various kinds of social dreaming, spurred by theory building and storytelling. In a second step, I discuss the background against which my analysis proceeds – the Anthropocene. In a concise fashion, different interpretations of, and objections to, the basic premise of a "human planet" are reviewed. Third, the chapter outlines the disciplinary perspectives informing this approach: political theory, utopian studies and the environmental humanities. Another section covers the book’s methodology and explains two central ideas behind my case selection: constellation and plot line. The chapter concludes with a synopsis of the ensuing argument.

The Introduction to Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet outlines large themes in the 6,000-year story of how cities gave humans the power to dominate Earth. Our Urban Planet is at once a plural and a singular phenomenon. Its diversity reflects the many birthplaces and birthdates of cities on six continents over six millennia, yet it has become a connected city-enabled habitat of a single species on a single planet. Cities – compact built spaces that rely on many other, dispersed ones – allowed us to harvest enough energy from the Sun and Earth to create the political communities, institutions, wealth, and ideas we needed to act on a global scale, to build an Earth-encrusting habitat, to impact all other parts of our planet’s biosphere, and to face the consequences. The life of Earthopolis exists in space and time. As our urban harvests of natural energy transformed throughout global urban history, from river valleys to the world ocean, and then to hydrocarbon, the geographic extent of our Urban Planet’s four defining realms – of human action, habitat, impact, and consequence – expanded and retreated across Earth. Now our Urban Planet puts us in perilous command of our host planet’s entire halo of life.

A new wave of global social movements is being led by young Africans. In the same way that a wave of European Baby Boomers took to the streets demanding social change as teenagers and young adults in the student protests of 1968, this cohort of young Africans are at the forefront of similar protests. And young sub-Saharan Africans are using social media to push back against tradition and fight for change, as exemplified by Nigeria’s #endSARS protests against police brutality. Driven by Twitter – at the movement’s peak in October 2020, 48 million #endSARS tweets were posted in just 10 days – #endSARS constituted the country’s most significant protest movement since pro-democracy rallies in the 1990s. Threatened by the power of platforms such as Twitter, the frequency and duration of internet shutdowns by governments across Africa is steadily increasing – in June 2021, the Nigerian government suspended Twitter in the country. For many young Nigerians #endSARS was a real political awakening. The protests created the recognition that young people could be a powerful political force, combined with the more brutal understanding that the establishment will respond violently to perceived challenges.

Communicating the strengths and limitations of climate modeling to those outside the field of climate science is a formidable challenge. The nuances of scientific language can be lost in the translation to natural language when climate predictions are presented to a general audience. This loss in translation can lead to misinformation and disinformation that hampers a rational response to the climate crisis. Even simple terms like “model,” “data,” and “prediction” have many different meanings depending on the context. Anytime we talk about the future, we are using a model. In climate science, we might think we are dealing with data from the past, but often this is processed data that is produced by analysis models applied to raw data. The word “prediction” can mean a range of things, from unconditional prophecies to conditional projections.

The Aymara people use the metaphor that the future is behind us and the past is in front of us. Imagine that we are driving a car in reverse into our climate future. The past is in front of us; climate models act as the rearview mirror, showing what lies behind us in the future. The view is blurry because there is uncertainty, and the car is moving fast as we continue to emit greenhouse gases. We need to brake quickly – reduce emissions – because we know that the braking distance is very long. The Paris Agreement to reduce worldwide emissions is like a potluck dinner: Each guest decides how much food to bring. If the guests don’t bring enough food for everyone, then some will leave hungry. Similarly, emission reductions pledged in the Paris Agreement are voluntary and may be not be sufficient to strongly mitigate the warming.

Historically, El Niño events have been associated with droughts and famines. Climate change will make extreme El Niño events more frequent and intense. In 2015–2016, one of the warmest El Niños on record helped trigger massive droughts across Ethiopia, Southern Africa, India, the Maritime Continent, Thailand, Latin America, and Brazil. Exceptionally warm ocean waters decimated fisheries and bleached coral reefs. In Ethiopia and southern Africa, 36 million people were pushed into near-famine conditions. Building on the author’s own research, this chapter examines how climate change has contributed to the ~+0.8°C increase in strong El Niños. In a world without climate change, such a +0.8°C increase would be possible but very unlikely. In a world with climate change, such a change would be very likely. Climate change made the 2015–2016 El Niño more extreme, contributing to Ethiopia’s and southern Africa’s extreme hunger and economic loss. Climate change is hurting people now. Climate change models predict that more extreme El Niños are likely over the next twenty years. The chapter contains a firsthand account from Prosper Chirara, a poor young man from Zimbabwe devastated by drought in 2015 and 2016.

In May 2016, the author traveled to Washington, DC to warn the food security community about a potential food crisis in East Africa if a 2016–2017 La Niña followed the 2015–2016 El Niño. This assertion, unfortunately, turned out true, and East Africa suffered a series of brutal back-to-back droughts in late 2016 and early 2017. Supporting this effective early warning was an understanding of how climate change is making La Niña events more extreme, and how climate change has contributed to a drying trend over eastern East Africa, placing millions of people in peril. This chapter uses personal accounts and research by the author to describe how climate change contributed to the March–May 2017 drought. La Niña events cool the equatorial East Pacific. Climate change has resulted in warm “Western V” ocean water that wraps around this cool region, amplifying its drought-inducing efficacy. This makes naturally occurring La Niñas more intense and hazardous. To explore the impact of human-induced warming, a formal attribution study is presented and described. In 2017, March–May Western V sea surface temperatures were the warmest on record, and climate change certainly contributed to the severely dry conditions over East Africa, helping place more than 13 million people in peril.

Chapter 11 examines the rapid increases in wildfire extent and the role played by increased temperature-induced evaporative demand. The story begins in early November 2018, with the author clearing bone-dry brush in the woods behind his house, and discussing these incredibly dry conditions on a local radio show with his local volunteer firefighter friends. In dry regions, warmer air's increased ability to hold water increases its capacity to draw moisture from soils and plants. On November 6, the Community Alert show discussed the exceptionally dry conditions across California, and how these dry-fuel conditions were expected to combine with high winds to set the stage for potential conflagration. At sunrise on November 8, the Camp Fire, California's deadliest and costliest conflagration, broke out. Since the early 1980s, annual US wildfire extents have increased by more than 300 percent. In California, 2017 and 2018 wildfire extent, deaths, and damages were staggering. Increases in western US wildfire extent are tightly coupled with increases in aridity, which are related to both increases in air temperatures and atmospheric water demand. The 2017 and 2018 US wildfires were associated with more than $40 billion in damages and more than a hundred fatalities. Chapter 11 concludes with a firsthand account from Laura Eilerts, a ninety-one-year-old woman who lost her house in the Paradise Fire and drove herself to safety.

To explore our collective future, scientists develop plausible emission, pollution, and land use scenarios. Some of these scenarios describe rapid economic and population growth, and concomitant increases in fossil fuel emissions. Other scenarios describe a rapid transition to clean energy and increased efficiency. Data from the 2019 Global Carbon Project carbon budget indicate that 2019 emissions were very close to scientists’ most dangerous emissions pathway. Like a marble careening across the top of an inverted paper Dixie cup, these rapid emissions could lead to runaway global warming, risking a planetary plummet if temperature increases shrink ice caps, reduce the ocean and land’s ability to sequester carbon dioxide, and/or increase fire emissions. Examining national emission statistics, we see that the United States is by far the greatest per capita emitter. There is some good news, however. Global energy use intensity, the amount of carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product, is increasing rapidly. We can make more goods and services using relatively less emissions. Solar energy is rapidly becoming more affordable. But emissions have already contributed to an exponential increase in disasters costing some $2.2 trillion over the past two decades.

In late 2019, half of Australia’s Kangaroo Island burned, killing more than 17,000 koalas and more than a third of the island’s kangaroos. Across the mainland, two years of very low rainfall and exceptionally warm air temperatures set the stage for a catastrophic “Black Summer.” A staggering and globally unprecedented 21 percent of Australia's forested area burned. Fires stretched over 186,000 square kilometers, destroying over 5,900 buildings and killing at least 34 people. A billion or more animals perished in these conflagrations. This chapter relates the exceptionally warm temperatures to increases in vapor pressure deficits and decrease in dead fuel moisture. High vapor pressure deficits help desiccate living and dead plants, producing conditions conducive to extensive mega-fires. The year 2019 was by far the warmest year on record, and climate change simulations suggest that about half of the observed warming was due to climate change. Temperatures as warm as those observed would have been impossible without climate change. Estimating vapor pressure deficits and dead fuel moisture loads without this human-induced warming suggests that climate change greatly enhanced the background aridity that allowed the Australian fires to spread to unprecedented extents.