John Urry, Climate Change and Society, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 2011, 200 pages, $22.95 paper, ISBN 9780745650371.

Sociologist John Urry’s recent Climate Change and Society is worthwhile because of his insistence that social science perspectives on climate change are dangerously absent from climate change analyses and solutions. As a remedy, his book is a vision for a disciplinary reconsideration of high-carbon human lives, why social scientists should reconsider the centrality of carbon to modernity, and a suggested political and economic solution that addresses both human and non-human climate concerns. This is a hefty task for a book whose body is fewer than 200 pages. As a result, Urry's work feels at times sprawling and unfocused on the existing academic literature already addressing these issues. Nevertheless, there is some important insight throughout the work, even if it is not as well executed as it could have been.

To open, Urry critiques economics as a disciplinary hegemon in climate policy discussions, relying mostly on evidence from global climate governance institutions. He argues that these institutions, like the UN and others, rely on economistic assumptions about humans and institutions, thereby elevating particular rationalities for explaining human behavior. Urry writes that these assumptions: 1) attempt to reduce the complexity of human behavior to economically calculable actions; 2) rely uncritically on economic institutions as non-social, non-political actors; and 3) miscalculate the centrality of material resources to the perpetuation of human life. Urry’s response, as well as the response of geographers and others who have long offered similar critique, is that humans often do not behave according to principles of economic rationality, that economic institutions have tremendous social and political consequences typically unnoticed by markets, and that markets often do not account for the externalities of resource use. Economics as a discipline, Urry argues, eschews these types of connections and should therefore be removed and replaced by a perspective able to better consider the social practices embroiled in high-carbon human lives.

To this end, much of the remainder of Climate Change and Society prods sociologists to consider climate change through a proposal for a “post-carbon sociology” that would “emphasize how modernity has consisted of an essentially carbonized modern world, but that this carbon underpinning has been obscured and ignored by most social thought” (page 16). This observation is important, both in terms of its implications for social thought and for critiquing the primacy of economics in climate discussions. As for what a post-carbon sociology might look like, Urry ventures broadly into a sea of suggested topics, critiquing social practices of personal consumption, scientific knowledge production, discursive constructions of catastrophe, neoliberal capitalism, petroleum and natural resource extraction, and other widely ranging social practices. Urry’s disciplinary alternative to the over-reliance on economic logics is establishing broad connections between aspects of social life often considered as disparate. For instance, his argument that the 2008 financial crisis was enmeshed within a connected web of peak oil, suburban growth, and climate change is timely and noteworthy.

Geographers would do and have already done well to pick up on Urry’s post-carbon cues by continuing research that emphasizes the socio-spatiality of climate issues. Because Urry’s main audience is his home discipline, geographers unfamiliar with the current state of climate change research in sociology may miss some of Urry’s key points. Nevertheless, his contention that climate change is a social problem linked to the processes, practices, decisions, and structures of everyday life will find resonance with many geographers. This resonance, however, would likely be countered by some dissonance. Though Urry’s vision for a post-carbon sociology is admirable and necessary, his execution of it falters in two significant ways.

What first hampers Urry’s efforts toward a post-carbon sociology is his book’s reliance on future speculation and unelaborated technical fixes. His primary technical fix is 'resource capitalism,' a form of emerging post-neoliberal capitalism in which “nature would not be regarded as separate from the economy and hence would not be available for transformation through short-term profit maximization” (page 120). Despite its claimed centrality to a low carbon future, Urry devotes only a few pages to explaining resource capitalism. Instead of detailing perhaps how resource capitalism might address other common capitalist contradictions like over-accumulation or how a resource capitalism might be practically enacted, Urry offers detailed, grim, and ultimately speculative visions of a future without resource capitalism. Indeed, when writing for academic audiences likely familiar with the critical theory-inspired literature about the structured relationships between capital and nature, it seems an oversight not to recognize the ready counters to his uncritical and too brief appeal to resource capitalism as a climate solution.

Secondly, geographers will note absences and inconsistencies regarding some important geographical concepts, which further limit Urry’s post-carbon sociology and analysis as a whole. These gaps are made all the more curious by his long familiarity with geography as a discipline. For instance, while discussing the economics-driven and widely read Stern Review, Urry writes, “the consequences [of temperature rise] are global and hence the only kind of viable policy response must also be global. Solutions cannot be developed within a single society, although what happens in each society affects everywhere” (page 9). It is unclear in the text whether this sentiment originates from Urry or Stern. Either way, Urry recites approvingly or claims for himself a scalar paradigm for climate solutions that geographers and many other climate researchers would reject out of hand. Yet, Urry suggests policy improvements at a variety of scales throughout his book and shifts scales of analysis from national resource extraction policies to the subtle carbon-based practices of everyday life. This leads to confusion about how he conceptualizes the politics of scale as related to problems and “solutions” of climate change.

The lack of clarity about scale is perhaps symptomatic of Urry’s general neglect of geographical and geography-related scholarship throughout his book. One example of this is when he, addressing his fellow sociologists, writes of the ideological separation between nature and society—a separation that he rightly notes has plagued sociology and other social sciences for decades. Urry, though, gives no introduction to, or even citations of, the myriad articles and books, especially those present in geography, environmental history, and critical social theory, that deconstruct the separation of these categories. Another similar instance of this omission is when he writes, “I argue for a ‘new’ epochalism for the twenty-first century that inter-connects [sic] sociology with the various physical and environmental sciences” (page 37) while not mentioning that anthropologists, geographers, political scientists, sociologists, and others have been theorizing and practicing a similar approach in the vast political ecology literature for roughly thirty years. The exception that proves the rule of these omissions is Urry’s partially compelling critique of Erik Swyngedouw’s argument that climate discourse and governance has become ‘post-political’. One has to wonder about the reasons for these omissions and whether with a more thorough incorporation of relevant scholarship, Urry’s argument could have started and ended at a more theoretically sophisticated position.

Overall, there are some interesting moments throughout Climate Change and Society, even though the book falls short in some moments. It may sound self-serving for a geographer to critique a book by a sociologist for not having enough geography in it, but in this case, the critique is warranted. Academic geographers will lament some sizable omissions of relevant geographic and other literatures that could have advanced not only Urry’s argument, but also his hope for a post-carbon sociology. This well-intentioned vision is further limited by excessive speculation and unexplained technical fixes—neither of which bolster enough his welcome and reasonable claims about the state of social considerations in climate change discussions.