Selling our future
Jens Beckert is director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, and his book How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change was published in German in 2024, followed by an English translation (Beckert, 2025). A review on Earth.Org described the book as “a sober, rational assessment of what influences have impacted the world’s failure to address climate change, and what this means for our shared future”. Beckert asks “what are the social, political, and economic drivers and structures that brought us to this point?” and “examines each of the social and political structures responsible for and affected by the situation” (Lee, 2025). Beckert’s book is of modest length, with nine chapters: Knowledge without change, Capitalist modernity, Big Oil, The hesitant state, Global prosperity, Consumption without limits, Green growth, Planetary boundaries, and What next? The book provides extensive notes and references. The chapter titles give an...