Climate Change and the Nation State

"This book has its origins in a growing sense of alarm, of frustration, and of futility. As international efforts to reduce emissions have failed repeatedly to meet their targets, even as warnings by experts about the existential dangers of climate change and the need for haste have grown, I developed a stronger and stronger sense of the comparative irrelevance of most of the issues on which I have been working in the areas of international relations and security studies. A revelatory moment came when I was researching the growing tension between the USA and China over the Chinese military occupation of reefs and sandbanks in the South China Sea. I suddenly realised that as a long-term issue these places will be meaningless for both sides: because if nations, and China and the USA above all, fail to take action to limit climate change, then by the end of this century rising sea levels and intensified typhoons will have put the sources of these tensions under water again. The rush of Western security establishments towards a "new cold war" with China and Russia (and new US threats of war with Iran) provided an additional impetus to write this book; for in all the innumerable articles and essays on this subject, hardly one has mentioned the destructive effects of hostility between China and the West on international co-operation against climate change"--