Anthony Giddens on The Politics of Climate Change

Lord Anthony Giddens presented his recently published book, “The Politics of Climate Change”, which outlines the political complexities of combating climate change.

In “The Politics of Climate Change” Lord Giddens argues that we do not have a systematic politics of climate change. Politics as usual won't allow us to deal with the climate change problems we face, while the recipes of the main challenger to orthodox politics, the green movement, are flawed at source. In this book, Lord Giddens introduces a range of new concepts and proposals to fill in the gap, and examines in depth the connections between climate change and energy security.

About the speaker:
Anthony Giddens is a member of the House of Lords, a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge and Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics.  He was Director of the LSE from 1997 to 2003, and was made a peer in 2004.  He has honorary degrees or comparable awards from 21 universities.  He is an honorary fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Russian Academy of Science and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.  He was the BBC Reith Lecturer in 1999.  According to Google Scholar, he is the most widely cited sociologist in the world.  His many books include The Constitution of Society (1984), Beyond Left and Right (1994), The Third Way (1998) and Europe in the Global Age (2006). His most recent major work is The Politics of Climate Change (2009). His books have been translated into more than forty languages. 

This event is part of the Climate Change Group’s ongoing research on the prospects for a post-Kyoto international climate change agreement.

Anthony Giddens is a very erudite guy with a low-key manner. He's a really good thinker, and I hope you appreciate this. I hope we can live up to his assessment of what needs to happen. I really, really do. (Thank you, Niall Dunne.)