The Fossil Fuelled Climate Crisis: Foresight or Discounting Danger?

This book analyses the threat of fossil fuels by utilizing Elizabeth Shove's social practices approach and using Murphy's own social closure framework to examine the accelerating treadmill of carbon-polluting practices. It incorporates externality theory to investigate the environment as a medium for intergenerational monopolization and exclusion in the Anthropocene. Murphy exposes a common pattern when exploiting valuable but dangerous resources as different as oil and asbestos, and assess proposed solutions to determine their possibilities and limitations. The book then moves on to expand Beck's theory of the staging of risk to the more prevalent staging of safety, and his hypothesis that the anticipation of catastrophe will incite emancipation is evaluated. Murphy argues that faith 2.0 in the mastery of nature is emerging as a belief in just-in-time technological solutions to circumvent changing fossil-fuelled social practices. He proposes ways to enhance foresight and mitigation to avoid incubating disaster. This book will appeal to readers interested in an original social science analysis of this creeping crisis and its resolution.