Outsourcing Climate Breakdown: How Rich Nations Get Away with It

Around the world, leading economies are announcing significant progress on climate change. World leaders are queuing up to proclaim their commitment to tackling the climate crisis, pointing to data that shows the progress they have made. Yet the atmosphere is still warming at a record rate, with devastating effects on poverty and precarity in the world’s most vulnerable communities. Are we being deceived?

Climate change is devastating the planet, and globalisation is hiding it. This book opens our eyes.

Carbon colonialism explores the murky practices of outsourcing a country’s environmental impact, where emissions and waste are exported from rich countries to poorer ones; a world in which corporations and countries are allowed to maintain a clean, green image while landfills in the world’s poorest countries continue to expand, and droughts and floods intensify under the auspices of globalisation, deregulation and economic growth.

Taking a wide-ranging, culturally engaged approach to the topic, the book shows how this is not only a technical problem, but a problem of cultural and political systems and structures - from nationalism to economic logic - deeply embedded in our society.

Laurie Parsons is Lecturer in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and Principal Investigator of the projects The Disaster Trade: The Hidden Footprint of UK Imports and Investment Overseas and Hot Trends: How the Global Garment Industry Shapes Climate Vulnerability in Cambodia. His other books include Going Nowhere Fast: Inequality in the Age of Translocality (2020) and Climate Change in the Global Workplace (2021).