Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero is Not Enough

There are some valuable historical and sociological observations in here, but Buck's political imagination is frustratingly narrow when it comes to a post-fossil fuel future. A significant amount of the book is devoted to outlining (but not doing) the planning work still needing to be done regarding forces of labor, capital, and government if we are to fully divest from the fossil fuel industry, which while all true is also plainly obvious to anyone already invested in addressing climate change (the audience for this book seems somewhere between center-left MSNBC libs and soft-leftists).

Ideas like degrowth and energy quotas are brought up and discarded in the span of a few paragraphs, while whole chapters are given to outlining accelerationist technologies like carbon capture and nuclear energy which hinge on somehow converting up-to-now destructive capitalist enterprises into public utilities (while also somehow preventing the government corruption that has allowed oil companies to mark the planet off as a tax break). It's a very convenient narrative for the global north, where the work is almost entirely political and rhetorical, costing us little in the form of convenience or wealth or global authority.

Buck tries to balance a very clear US-centrism by occasionally bringing up the ways the global north has pillaged the global south and why it will be harder for many countries there to end fossil fuels, but this doesn't extend to an analysis of how the US can only exist as it currently does due to the exploitation of the global south. Doing so would undermine the already vague solutions presented in the book as incompatible with a globally equitable future, which will require the north to surrender certain lifestyle aspects both for the future well being of our planet but also to remediate the centuries of harm done to the south who will feel the effects of climate change hardest.

Yes, net zero is not enough, but neither are the solutions presented here. Political pessimism makes it easy and appealing to choose the path of minimal resistance (which, to be clear, would still be significant), but we will have to become much more utopian if we're ever to build a society that actually escapes the death sentence we've constructed.