The Carbon-Civilization Combustion Complex

The result of blending scholarship and fiction is a fascinating if grim story of how and why global temperatures started rising in the nineteenth century with the industrial revolution, and, unbelievably, accelerated in the twenty and twenty-first centuries.

The heart of the matter, however, is the politics of corruption that converted countless pundits (at universities, think tanks, media, and politicians) into dogmatic defenders of fossil fuel combustion. These rising millionaires ignored the warnings of scientists, thoughtlessly repeating the mantras of polluters.

"A shadow of ignorance and denial had fallen over people who considered themselves children of the Enlightenment," the author from the future reports. He explains how the culture of oil, electricity, car and giant agriculture brought down Western civilization. The beneficiaries of fossil fuels embraced lies and self-deception. Such delusion, the author says, was rooted on an "ideological fixation of free markets."

True, market fundamentalism has been a roadblock to government regulation and, in the end, abolition of fossil fuels. Solar power has always been an alternative to petroleum, coal, and methane.

The beauty of this great little book is that, in the form of a science fiction story, tells a non-fiction truth. How people of power (especially, those who own and benefit from the burning of fossil fuels) are corrupted by power, becoming dangerous to the rest of us -- and the Earth.

Read this well-written, insightful, and important book. It includes a useful lexicon of "archaic" terms like capitalism, environment, environmental protection and market failure. It also includes a marvelous and revealing interview with the real authors of the book.

All in all, The Collapse of Western Civilization is a concise summary of the deleterious forces and politics that fuel climate change: forces and politics that, left unchecked, are certain to destroy our society and the planet.

Global warming threatens the collapse of much more than the collapse of Western civilization.

Global warming is real. It's going on right now. According to Erik Conway: "We have overwhelming evidence that we've already triggered a rapid rate of oceanic and atmospheric warning." And Naomi Oreskes confirms the reality of global warming. "We are sure," she says, "that climate change is happening – we already see damage – and we know beyond a reasonable doubt that business as usual will lead to more damage, possibly devastating damage."