Against Doom

Book excerpt: Late in 2015, nearly two hundred countries signed the Paris Agreement acknowledging their individual and collective duty to protect the earth’s climate--and willfully refused to perform that duty. They unanimously agreed to the goal of keeping global warming "well below 2 degrees Celsius” and to pursue efforts "to limit the increase in temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” But they did not agree to a single legally binding requirement about how, or how much, they would cut emissions. In response to this institutional failure and to growing climate destruction, we are witnessing the birth of a global nonviolent constitutional insurgency. Global because the world order of climate destruction it seeks to change is global. Nonviolent because it relies on the power of the world’s people to withdraw their acquiescence and cooperation from those who are destroying our planet. Constitutional because it is based on the fundamental constitutional principle that the earth’s shared resources belong to the people and that governments have no authority to destroy them. Insurgency because it denies that established government authority is legitimate and asserts that its own actions are. Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual tells how to put strategy into action--and how it can succeed. It is a handbook for halting global warming and restoring our climate--a how-to for climate insurgents.