Climate change has been a nonstarter in U.S. national policy. But it has become a military matter. Security reports used to describe it as a “threat multiplier.” Today, climate change is seen as a “catalyst for conflict,” which, military officials agree, indicates that it now represents a “direct cause of instability.” Responding to a recent report on national security and the “accelerating risks of climate change,” Secretary of State John Kerry indicated his intention to address geostrategic implications and options for action (Coral Davenportmay, “Climate Change Deemed Growing Security Threat by Military Researchers,” New York Times, 14 May 14 2014, A18). The U.S. military is no climate skeptic, and the business world is increasingly paying attention. Even fossil fuel corporations that generously funded, and continue to fund, climate change denial are now, ironically, exploring—massive and massively lucrative—efforts to temper the effects of global warming by geoengineering projects, such as projects to inject millions of tons of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to shield the planet from solar radiation. Clearly, things are heating up in the climate-change business. In light of such developments, it is high time that political scientists took notice, as a recent essay suggests (Debra Javeline, “The Most Important Topic Political Scientists Are Not Studying: Adapting to Climate Change,” Perspectives on Politics 12 [March 2014]: 1–15). The two books reviewed here well represent primers in the moral and political economy of climate change.

Climate-Challenged Society is a survey text addressing the social, political, and economic impacts of and potential responses to a destabilized climate. Its synthesis of existing literature and critical commentary is not intended to develop solutions or even thoroughly evaluate particular approaches or proposals. The goal is simply to provide “plenty of resources for intelligent thinking” (p. 146). John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, and David Schlosberg do not commit to any path or policy beyond affirming that the only adequate response to climate change will entail a decarbonized economy and the development of numerous forms of adaptation.

At some level, the rejection of an overarching plan or policy follows from the authors’ discussion of climate change as a “wicked problem” (p. 12). Wicked problems are multidimensional conundrums that resist technical fixes or win-win solutions. The wickedness of climate change largely accounts for the reason that “the increasing urgency of calls for action is accompanied by diminishing likelihood of substantial response, especially at the crucial global level” (p. 12). The authors explore whether this diminishing likelihood may be ascribed to evolutionary psychology, as “human brains did not evolve in an environment where they had to deal with problems of this scale, scope, and complexity” (p. 14). Ultimately, however, they reject this proposal, asserting (though not demonstrating) that “the faults do not lie in our cognitive selves but rather in our social systems” (p. 14). This assumption leads to a recommendation for “reconceptualized social-ecological relationships” (p. 129).

Greater “contestation” and a “new materialism” are also endorsed. New materialism involves “more sustainable flows of food, energy, and material [that] express and embody empowerment” (p. 139). And contestation promises to deliver “more productive deliberative systems” that get us beyond narrow self-interest to a place of “mutually beneficial outcomes, persuasion rather than coercion, the pursuit of collective interests (such as global sustainability), reflection on what is desirable and defensible, and efforts to reach and understand those with different starting points” (p. 144). Fine ideals, indeed. But how to realize them?

No doubt climate change is, owing to its scope, complexity, and rapidity, about as wicked a problem as they get. Perhaps, then, it is understandable that scholars grappling with it conclude with the suggestion—both too ambiguous and too ambitious—that we reconceive ourselves. Unfortunately, climate change requires more than new concepts. It demands decisive, concerted action. Asserting its complexity, underlining the limitations of any single response, calling for further reflection, and celebrating contestation does not much advance the ball down the field.

Notwithstanding the authors’ reluctance to take a position on strategies or specific goals, the text does offer a bracing message and some hope. The harsh truth to be accepted is that climate change is not simply the most recent of a long line of tough (but passing) challenges. It has become “a permanent feature of the human condition” (p. 16). We now stand fully within the Anthropocene, a period in geological history when a single species, Homo sapiens, has become a (if not the) major force shaping the planet. And there is no going back. Today, “responsible action must mean taking on collective responsibility for what happens to the processes of the Earth system (which can no longer be described as natural) in such a way as to promote their sustainable and sustaining character” (p. 120). This is a formidable responsibility.

Fear, the authors note, is not a recipe for assuming this responsibility (p. 16). Repeated pronouncements of doom and gloom do not active, accountable citizens make. What is the alternative? There is the hope that climate change will enable our species to do things that it has not yet managed to do. That is to say, the unprecedented scope and complexity of the challenge presents an opportunity to address the “persistent riddles of human environmental history” and develop just, rational economies that meet human needs and preserve ecosystems (pp. 17, 18). We may well be able to achieve this world historical feat because … well, because there is no viable alternative.

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. So maybe, just maybe, the climate crisis will become the midwife of unprecedented social, political, and economic systems that are resilient, rational, just, and better equipped to grapple with a complex, changing world.

Jörg Friedrichs is not betting on it. The Future Is Not What It Used to Be assesses the “moral economy of inaction” that determines the transitory nature of our civilization. Friedrichs presents a synopsis of the science of climate change and energy scarcity, as well as an account of the psychology driving us toward the cliff. In turn, he places our current predicament in a historical context, detailing how and why earlier societies succumbed to existential threats.

Friedrichs revisits and buttresses Joseph Tainter’s (1988) The Collapse of Complex Societies. In their early stages, Tainter and Friedrichs observe, societies can adapt to existential threats such as climate change. They do so by becoming more complex. So, for example, the ancient Sumerian civilization of the late fourth century BCE was partially the product of drought conditions that stimulated increased urbanization, irrigation and other agricultural techniques, grain storage and distribution, and trade. Owing to the absence of large unexploited opportunities for investment in heightened development, however, already complex societies faced with similar existential threats proved less adaptable, and collapsed. Recovery from the “dark ages” that follow societal collapse is typically long and arduous.

Obviously, we fall into the category of a complex society, and so the prognosis is not good. There may be hope for small, underdeveloped communities that can adapt to climate change and energy scarcity by investing in heightened complexity. But, Friedrichs observes, transitioning to an energy-poor and climate-destabilized world will be much more difficult for large, modern societies characterized by individualism and consumerism, where social capital is low. In turn, the industrialized world is premised on endless economic growth. Financial markets depend on it, as “few investors will borrow their money without the expectation of growth, since only growth enables debtors to pay back their loans with an interest” (p. 3). In a society reliant on abundant, cheap fossil fuels for its economic growth, energy scarcity will quickly undermine the financial sector, with the falling dominoes eventually leading to collapse.

Were we somehow to escape energy scarcity, thus allowing the fossil-fueled growth that industrial societies require to survive, we still face the problem of ecological degradation. To sustain current levels of material consumption (even without economic growth) would require a planet 1.5 times its current size (p. 7). And that does not take into account the extra two billion people that will inhabit the earth by midcentury. It also does not account for the disruptive effects of climate change, which on the whole will decrease agricultural output and strain, if not devastate, coastal cities faced with sea level rise.

With the threat of collapse looming, one might expect that the nations of the world would take decisive action. The Future Is Not What It Used to Be explains why they will not. It extensively investigates the psychology of denial that undermines initiative, collective action, or even meaningful response. And it examines the political economy that further erodes the likelihood of climate change mitigation. Efforts to keep carbon from going beyond 450 parts per billion in the atmosphere—which, if all goes well, will keep the planet’s temperature from rising above the “safe limit” of two degrees centigrade—face the “carbon lock in” problem. Fully functional, expensive infrastructure, such as highly polluting coal-fired power plants, is unlikely to be decommissioned ahead of its time. Unfortunately, over 80% of the carbon budget is already “locked in” by such capital stock, and by 2017 that number will likely rise to 100% (p. 26). In other words, within a few years, existing infrastructure will lock us into a two-degree rise in temperature. Any additional carbon output, which appears inevitable given the predicted growth in populations, affluence, and economies—especially of very large countries such as China and India—will set the planet on course to a catastrophic four to six degree rise in temperature. To make matters worse, there is three times as much carbon in existing fossil fuel reserves, which corporations also count as capital stock, than could be burned if we are to stay within the safe limit. People in general, and particularly those things we now call corporate persons, are not very good at leaving profitable investments unexploited. The upshot of all this, as Friedrichs opines rather too often, is that human beings will most certainly “fry the planet.”

To escape this dire fate would require us to do four things very soon: drastically lower energy consumption, achieve significant gains in energy efficiency, switch from fossil fuels to renewable forms of energy, and make great strides in carbon capture and storage (p. 42). None of these feats is likely. Achieving all four in the near future is a pipe dream. All the elements of the moral economy of inaction vie against it: We temporally discount the future and the distant in space, we are psychologically disposed to deny existential threats, and we have not figured out how to overcome collective-action problems, especially at the global level. The collapse of civilization as we know it is “overdetermined” (p. 166).

If the future is so very bleak, Friedrichs asks, what is the point of trying to do much of anything? The most reasonable and pleasurable course of action—which discounts the future but at least does not deny reality—is the counsel of Isaiah (22:13): “Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die.” So why carry out demanding research and write dispiriting books when there is still good food and drink to be had?

Friedrichs’s answer is not particularly reassuring: “The best thing a moral individual can do is try to live ‘in the truth.’ Life is tragic and sometimes there are no solutions. … My task as a scholar is not to save the planet or pose as an ecological do-gooder. It is plain old-fashioned intellectual honesty” (pp. 170–71). To be intellectually honest today is to acknowledge, at a minimum, that the future is not what it used to be. We are in for some tough times. Such an admission should not be the last word on climate change and energy scarcity. But it ought to be part of the conversation.

How that conversation develops will depend—or, at least, ought to depend—on the contributions of political scientists. A sense of ethical obligation or intellectual honesty may bring political scientists to raise their voices and apply their wits. Either way, as these two books demonstrate, the problem at hand is interesting enough—and the stakes are high enough—to merit the discipline’s sustained attention.