Cambiamenti climatici. Antropocene e politica by Daniele Conversi, Milano, Mondadori Università, 2022, 184 pages, price: 13 € (paperback).

Abstract

Daniele Conversi published a short and instructive volume on the relations between climate change and politics. Conversi puts on the table the interconnections between climate change, the apex of many other environmental disasters, and the world of nationalist politics, with the latter being anchored to predominant nation-state logics, even in the face of planetary challenges. In four chapters, the author addresses the ‘climate change science’ and sociopolitical responsibilities pertinent to the nation-state. He asserts that a state of ‘collective stupidity’ (p. 6) and the clouding of intellectual faculties, pushed aside by mediatic mainstream, have engendered a sort of alarmism and, at the same time, a refusal to rethink economic growth or liberal capitalistic development. The phenomenon of skeptical deniers’ tautological distortion of scientific evidence has hindered the effective governance of planetary problems. This lack of political response has led to the expansion of regional tipping points tending to become global ones. As the regional transforms into global, with no sufficient measures taken by policy-makers, this process poses high risk to the planet, given the unpredictable cascading effects it originates. Conversi uncovers the triadic reality of interconnected scientific, social, and state-nation political dimensions, while advocating for the need to adopt a transdisciplinary science to address climate change. His position implies that science may not necessarily be democratic in the production of knowledge. However, it requires democratic transparency in order to disseminate that knowledge and, consequently, provide means of pressure on politics. In the first chapter, Conversi historicizes the first development of scientific environmental studies and the first signs of ecological consciousness, initiated in the 1970s (Earth Day, Green Peace, the 1972 Limits to Growth Report, etc.), that showed the fallacies of the dominant Western economic model. As neither interest, nor concrete action had been taken by states during the Reaganian years of so-called ‘devolution’, the role of nation-states in the developed world regarding greenhouse gas emissions was only conceptualized in 1992 (with no public funding). Yet, the two conflicting paradigms, that is, no limits to development and economic growth vs. anthropogenic responsibility, remained unbridgeable. The second chapter introduces the biopolitical dimension, inspired by Bruno Latour, of contemporary emergencies. As asserted by Conversi, climate change is the corollary of conflicts, pandemics, wars, poverty droughts (e.g., Syria, Somalia, Sudan, etc.) which are consequential to soil depletion, desertification, and deforestation, acidification of the oceans, extinction of species, and so on; up to the demographic pressure of ‘climigration’ of masses from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe (p. 26). Here, the author posits the challenge of the denationalization of both politics and policies worldwide. This is the core reflection of Conversi’s book. Global phenomena, such as mass consumerism, the overpopulation of the planet, pollution of chemical and\or radioactive isotopes from nuclear scoriae, all impact climate change and the emergencies deriving from