Carbon

Over the past fifty years the climate crisis has become the defining story of our time. In Carbon, acclaimed historian Adam Tooze offers a sweeping, revelatory account of how climate change reordered the world economy and exposed the limits of Western power.

This is the story of globalization itself: of how the fossil-fuel age accelerated into planetary crisis even as we discovered the technological means to escape it. It is the story of the great wager of the late twentieth century—that liberal capitalism, triumphant after 1989, could lead to sustainable prosperity—and of how that wager unravelled.

While the United States and Europe grappled with how to respond to the climate crisis, China emerged as the engine of the green revolution: both the world’s greatest carbon emitter and unexpected architect of decarbonization. The result is an unsettling reality in which the future of the planet may depend on an authoritarian superpower that the West neither fully understands nor controls.

Thought-provoking and urgent, Carbon is a paradigm-shifting work and a new way of understanding both the past and the future.

© Adam Tooze 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027