Governing Climate: How Science and Politics Have Shaped Our Environmental Future - Hardcover

by Zeke Baker (Author)

After decades of debate about global warming, the fact of the climate crisis is finally widely accepted. People at all scales--from the household to the global market--are attempting to govern climate to deal with its causes and impacts. Although the stakes are different now, governing climate is centuries old. In this book, Zeke Baker develops a genealogy of climate science that traces the relationship between those who have created knowledge of the climate and those who have attempted to gain power and govern society, right up to the present, historic moment. Baker draws together over two centuries of science, politics, and environmental change to demonstrate the "co-production" of climate knowledge and power-seeking activity, with a focus on the United States. This book provides a fresh account of contemporary issues transecting science and climate politics, specifically the rise of "climate security," and examines how climate science can either facilitate or reconcile the unequal distribution of power and resources.

Back Jacket

Human societies have often taken extreme positions when confronted with troublesome climates, either seeking control over their climate or obsessively worrying about being overwhelmed by it. Zeke Baker's brilliant new historical account of climate governance shows that neither position is desirable or necessary. Climate is governed well when the knowledge that is made about climate conforms to the values, goals, and ambitions of a society; it is governed badly when a depoliticized climatic knowledge is used to dictate the terms by which we must imagine our social futures.--Mike Hulme, author of Climate Change Isn't Everything: Liberating Climate Politics from Alarmism

"Governing Climate sounds a timely warning about the uses of climate science for the construction and maintenance of U.S. imperialism from independence to the present. Baker's call for a 'critical climatology' merits attention from both social and natural scientists."--Deborah R. Coen, author of Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale

"In this brilliantly researched, deeply humane, and truly insightful book, Baker convincingly argues for the necessity of a 'critical climatology.' This new way of thinking about and acting on climate change is made possible with his trenchant analysis of the long history of both knowledge and power and how intricately intertwined they have been in governing climate for nearly 250 years. Baker's book provides a much needed, hopeful corrective focused on equity and justice in the face of the paralyzing barrage of crisis narratives about the climate crisis that have come to define the present. A tour de force."--Diana K. Davis, Professor of History and Geography, University of California, Davis

"Baker's ambitious, impressively researched, and carefully reasoned book is a first-of-its-kind historical sociology of U.S. climate knowledge. By situating climate debates in a longer history of articulations between climate, science, and the state, Baker highlights the contingency of current attempts to stabilize climate through geoengineering and climate security and offers resources for thinking critically about alternatives. This is an important contribution."--Hillary Angelo, author of How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens

​"Governing Climate develops an innovative framework for analyzing the entanglement of climate sciences and sociopolitical developments. The book not only puts forward important contentions about the current state of the relationship between climate sciences and climate politics, but also makes nuanced claims as to how this might be changed for the better."--Thomas Simpson, author of The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century

Author Biography

Zeke Baker is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and coeditor of Climate, Science and Society.