Climate Change as Social Change - by Thomas Scheffer (Hardcover)

About the Book

Thomas Scheffer offers a new framework for sociological understanding of the climate crisis, arguing that responses to this existential crisis arrive in successive stages of realization.

Book Synopsis

The consequences of a changing climate are all around us. Everything from small talk about the weather to transportation, energy infrastructure, and agriculture is being reshaped. Yet countless people and institutions continue to behave as though this collective crisis were not taking place or actively deny its existence. How do social actors come to perceive climate change as real and act on its reality? How can we advance toward greater levels of action commensurate with the scale of this existential problem?

Thomas Scheffer offers a new framework for sociological understanding of the climate crisis, arguing that responses to this existential crisis arrive in successive stages of realization. Awareness of climate change permeates everyday life, with new forms of common sense emerging from the destabilization of routines in a warming world. Industries are driven to innovate in light of climate change's effects on their products, resources, and infrastructures. Governments formulate policy responses on local, national, and transnational levels. Scheffer cautions that common sense, productive capacity, and governance must support one another if we are to advance to the next stage of realization. If a society relies on just one of these dimensions, its response to climate change will remain deficient, vulnerable, and even reversible.

Climate Change as Social Change offers a bold argument that the changing climate should be central to social scientific inquiry today--and that its reality is already central to society at every level.

About the Author

Thomas Scheffer is professor of sociology with a focus on interpretative social research at Goethe University Frankfurt.