ABSTRACT
The stage for this chapter is set in late modernity, a time when the grim reality of global climate change is dawning on humanity. In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that total global greenhouse gas emissions must peak and begin to drop by 2015 if humanity wishes to avoid the most dangerous warming scenarios. In the US, “environmentalists” are working to raise their voices above the hubbub of
exuberant consumption. Determined activists and scientists, like NASA’s atmospheric physicist James Hansen, persist in a constant drumming of the message, a message becoming faintly audible above the din of the marketplace. Global warming is real. We must gear up immediately and respond all-out, as if for a war.
