Climate Crisis Archives - Public Seminar

The Islandization of Miami

Stephanie Wakefield’s new book explores what “urban resilience” programs get wrong about our future

April 22, 2025 • by Lily Chishan Wong

Do cities have a place in our future? Geographers such as Stephanie Wakefield have identified urbanization as both driver and product of the Anthropocene, the “geological time impacted by human activities.” The uneven capitalist productions of urban spaces, along with operational landscapes required to sustain urban life—such as global supply ...

Climate & Ecology

Petro-Capitalist Status Quo

In Overshoot, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton show how governments have failed to stop the fossil fuel industry bulldozing through international emissions thresholds

November 12, 2024 • by Martin Weiner

Andres Malm and Wim Carton’s new book, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Verso, 2024), is a thorough and unsparing account of the recent history and politics of the attempt to mitigate fossil fuels, and the reasons for its significant failure. Both authors teach at Lund University in Sweden. ...

Habitats

Market Failures

How do we protect consumers from their own mistakes?

November 27, 2023 • by Cass R. Sunstein

Most motor vehicles emit pollution, including greenhouse gases, and use gasoline that increases national dependence on foreign oil. On standard economic grounds, the result is a market failure in the form of excessive pollution, for which some kind of cap-and-trade system or corrective tax is the best response, designed to ...

Migration

The Climate-Migration-Industrial Complex

January 10, 2020 • by Thomas Nail

This complex is composed of private companies who profit by securitizing nation-states from the effects of climate-related events, including migration. This includes private detention centers, border construction companies, surveillance technology consultants and developers, deportation and transportation contractors, and a growing army of other subcontractors profiting from insecurity more broadly. Every ...