Just Earth

In this extraordinary, hopeful book, Britain's leading climate advocate and environmentalist Tony Juniper identifies the real problem at the heart of the issue - equality. Climate change has already begun detrimentally affecting everybody's lives, and problems such as energy prices, fuel poverty, heatwaves, wildfires and migrations are only going to get worse. There is a central question at the heart of our predicament. How can we give people the lives that they deserve, without providing fast and cheap energy that will ultimately hasten global collapse? How can we ask those in developing countries not to partake in the environmentally-damaging technology, such as air conditioning, which will become essential to living in hotter climates? And how can we manage the enormous migration, as so-called 'wet bulb' temperatures in which humans cannot exist become prevalent in equatorial nations? The answer lies in equality. A focus on growth as the answer to humanity's problems has led to an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor across the world. Social disparities are now harnessed to reject the need for environmental action at all. We need to break the trap that capitalism has set for the environment, while finding a way to save the ecosystem we rely upon for our existence. With an extraordinary range of interviews with experts from multiple fields and drawing on 40 years of the author's own participation in government summits and activism, this book explains how to achieve real change.