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How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change [1]

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Date: 2025-02

For decades we have known about the dangers of global warming. Nevertheless, greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase. How can we explain our failure to take the necessary measures to stop climate change? Why are societies, despite the mounting threat to us and our children, so reluctant to take action?

Jens Beckert, Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and author of How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change, joins us to discuss the answers to these questions.

Drawing on social science research, he argues that climate change is an inevitable product of the structures of capitalist modernity which have been developing for the past 500 years. Our institutional and cultural arrangements are operating at the cost of destroying the natural environment and attempts to address global warming are almost inevitably bound to fail. Temperatures will continue to rise, and social and political conflicts will intensify. The tragic truth is we are selling our future for the next quarterly figures, the upcoming election results, and today's pleasure.

Any realistic climate policy needs to focus on preparing societies for the consequences of escalating climate change and aim at strengthening social resilience to cope with the increasingly unstable natural world. Civil society is the only source of pressure that could build the necessary strength and support for climate protection.

About the speaker

Jens Beckert has been Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and Professor of Sociology in Cologne since 2005. He has previously taught in Göttingen, New York, Princeton, Paris, and at Harvard University. In 2005 he was awarded the Prize of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and in 2018 the German Research Foundation’s Leibniz Prize. He received the Karl Polanyi Prize from the German Sociological Association for his book Imagined Future. His most recent book is How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change.

This event is hosted by the University of Bath Institute for Policy Research (IPR).

If you have a question about access, please contact us via Eventbrite or email us at [email protected]

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[1] Url: https://theconversation.com/uk/events/jens-beckert-how-we-sold-our-future-the-failure-to-fight-climate-change-14218

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