An author I discovered only in the past decade, though he's been active since the 1970s, is William Ophuls.

He was amongst the first to write of the political dimension of addressing global catastrophic risks. Initially, that was largely focused on the concept of resource limits. Global warming isn't unrelated, though it's a sink limit: boundaries on the ability of the environment to absorb the consequences of human activity without making that human activity itself untenable.

What Ophuls realised, and what I'm increasingly convinced of, is that it's not the technical element, but rather the political, social, cultural, and economic (commerce, finance, trade, power) aspects which will prove the most challenging. And he seems to have been correct.

I strongly recommend all his work, though Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (first published in 1977, revised ~1994) and Plato's Revenge (2011) are probably the best starting points.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-scarcity-prologue-to-a-political-theory-of-the-steady-state/oclc/1222878433

https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-scarcity-revisited-the-unraveling-of-the-american-dream/oclc/1033584104

https://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-the-age-of-ecology/oclc/8162554740

Also available via Archive Org:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=william%20ophuls

Ophuls has a website with more recent writings:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190311104851/https://ophuls.org/essays

As he's on in years, I've looked for others who are carrying on his tradition. Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon is referenced by Ophuls several times and seems closest:

https://homerdixon.com/

#ClimateChange #WilliamOphuls #ThomasHomerDixon

@Hamishcampbell This is true.

It's also ... common.

Very nearly all wars are at heart resource wars, and the resources now in contention are both environmental sinks (for ever-increasing industrial pollutants, including but not limited to CO2).

I recommend as strongly as possible the authors William Ophuls (Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity and Plato's Revenge most especially) and Thomas Homer-Dixon (The Ingenuity Gap, among others), who've explored both the ecology and politics of the era of scarcity and limits.

https://ophuls.org/
https://homerdixon.com/
https://homerdixon.com/writing/books/the-ingenuity-gap/

#WilliamOphuls #ThomasHomerDixon #ecology #scarcity #limits #HardProblems