In this powerful statement against doomsday thinking and catastrophism, Giddens’s captivating study of climate change attempts to bring the debate squarely back to politics, not least with both concrete policy proposals and an energising utopian vision. As Giddens advocates:

Season policy with a dash of utopian thinking. Why? Because, however it happens, we are working our way towards a form of society that eventually will be quite different from the one in which we live today. We have to chance our arm.

Giddens organises his book around political topics, not the science of climate change itself. There are chapters on the globalisation of risk, the Green movement (from which he distances his own approach), energy security, governance, taxation, carbon markets, and much else. The form of the book is sociological through and through: each chapter explores aspects of the global impact of climate change in terms of our daily lives, routines, and habits; and lifestyle is in turn treated as essential to coping with the challenges faced by collective humanity.

With commendable simplicity, Giddens addresses climate change with an eye firmly on everyday life. He tackles head-on, for example, the thorny topic of SUVs and asks bluntly: ‘why does anyone, anyone at all, for even a single day longer, continue to drive an SUV?’ If you happen to drive such a gas guzzler, you needn’t feel victimised; Giddens describes SUVs as a metaphor for life in the fast, polished cities of the West. ‘We are all,’ he writes, ‘SUV drivers.’

The problem with trying to clarify, as well as classify, the dangers we face as a result of the warming of the earth’s climate is that it is almost impossible not to lapse into abstract claims about the future. In The Politics of Climate Change, the author calls this ‘Giddens’s paradox’. The theorem of Giddens’s paradox is stated thus:

since the dangers posed by global warming aren’t tangible, immediate or visible in the course of day-to-day life, however awesome they appear, many will sit on their hands and do nothing of a concrete nature about them. Yet waiting until they become visible and acute before being stirred to serious action will, by definition, be too late.

And this, says Giddens, accounts for why people continue to drive SUVs: climate change is relegated to the back of the mind, as the future is discounted.

The great strength of the book is that Giddens covers a remarkably wide spectrum of political issues stemming from climate change, which he treats with lucidity and learning, while all the time reflecting on the possibilities for a low-carbon future. From analysis of the world’s fossil fuel resources and the peaking of oil to careful appraisal of the vast literature on climate change technologies, and from critical dissection of the pros and cons of carbon taxes and rationing to the geopolitics of global warming: Giddens brings a sociological sharpness and radical political edge to the climate change debate that has all too often been lacking from many recent critiques.

Giddens’s progressive political sensibilities are especially evident when discussing the complex relations between climate change, global inequalities, and energy security. He underscores that developing countries, and the poorest people who inhabit them, are especially vulnerable to climate change and that the world community should recognise a ‘development imperative’ for those living in extreme poverty. As he writes:

The poorer nations have contributed only marginally to global warming; they must have the chance to develop, even if such a process raises emissions, for a period quite steeply. Development is imperative not simply for moral reasons. The consequences of climate change will worsen the enormous tensions that already derive from global inequalities, with implications for the world as a whole. Through technology transfer and other means, it should be possible for the developing countries to avoid a wholesale recapitulation of the path followed earlier by the industrial ones, but essentially a bargain between the more and less developed parts of the world has to be struck.

Such is the academic and political interest in Giddens’s ideas that The Politics of Climate Change has quickly become a major publishing event in its own right. The book has been endorsed by Bill Clinton, who describes it as a ‘landmark study’. Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, also rates the book highly. When the book was launched in London, various political heavyweights – from Tony Blair to the Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store – praised Giddens’s efforts to think about climate change anew.

Giddens’s political vision, judging by the current volume, has been progressively maturing. Once the purveyor of Third Way political doctrines and a key adviser to Tony Blair, he has, in recent years, become increasingly concerned with creating a more cosmopolitan, cooperative world. Since trading the post of director of the London School of Economics for a seat in the House of Lords, Giddens has channelled his Third Way politics into a full-blooded critique of how collective humanity might best avoid a new Dark Ages. He has passed from Blairite zest to what he calls ‘utopian realism’.

From one angle, Giddens’s The Politics of Climate Change is the mirror opposite of, say, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It (2006). Whereas Gore talks of impending disasters, Giddens speaks of political and business revolutions. Whereas Gore seeks to scare people into action, Giddens wants to motivate them through emphasising opportunities. For Giddens, the switch to low-carbon technologies opens the way to new business opportunities, ambitious public-private partnerships, Copenhagen style transnational agreements and large-scale government planning.

The book deserves to be widely read and intensely debated; it will make a major impact in the struggle to contain climate change. Giddens certainly offers a masterful, persuasive summation of the intricate connections between climate change, energy security and the global economy. After nearly forty years of contributions to political debate, he remains one of the more interesting minds in contemporary politics and public sociology.