The United Nations as Leviathan: Global Governance in the Post-American World

Klimat is not a highly-detailed or technical description of the processes of climate change as they affect Russia. It clearly analyses the current and likely future economic effects of global mean temperature increase on Russia’s economic growth model. The book is a useful, well-done summary of a set of political-economic issues from an elite perspective. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 can be seen as a consequence of the dynamics and dilemmas outlined in the book. If Russia were ever to recover the industrial and agricultural resources of Ukraine, which it arguably needs to emerge from the growth trap Gustafson has delineated, it needed to act before global events, including climate change, made it absolutely impossible for it to do so. But the failure of the gamble that the conquest could be accomplished rapidly and at low cost will hasten and intensify the economic consequences of the exhaustion of the hydrocarbon export model on which the Putin era has depended.