Everyone is green now, at least in theory. A warming planet has panicked the world into looking for alternatives to fossil fuels even as billions of people begin to achieve the sort of luxurious Western lifestyle that will, without reform, cook the Earth. If the science of climate change is fast-moving, the politics are even faster, with a huge array of treaties, promises, pledges and targets giving the appearance of lots of action—but with little actually being achieved. Three books take very different approaches to sizing up the problem.

Alamy

Anthony Giddens, a professor at the London School of Economics, is a sociologist most famous for developing the “Third Way”, the centre-leftish political philosophy espoused by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. His book argues that the scale of the climate-change problem and the difficulty of reconciling greenery with development demands a new political approach.

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