Climate Radicals: Why Our Environmental Politics Isn’t Working

Foreign Policy editor Abadi debuts with an insightful if dispiriting study of the contrasting ways Germany and the U.S. have addressed climate change. Many more Germans than Americans believe in man-made global warming, and yet, despite the Green party being propelled into the national government in 2020, Germany has so far failed to implement a sweeping anti–climate change agenda, Abadi notes. In contrast, the Biden administration’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act will significantly reduce carbon emissions, despite it being “riddled” with concessions to big oil and to the country’s robust demographic of climate change skeptics. The lesson Abadi draws from these differing outcomes is that incrementalism trumps radicalism, a position he bolsters with an intriguing overview of how the past decade of climate radicalism in Germany (with activists gluing themselves to street intersections and throwing food on works of art) has alienated the German public and led to government backtracking. But Abadi’s emphasis on the necessity of a tempered approach and compromise transitions unsatisfyingly into an argument that the movement should concede before it even gets to the bargaining table—that focusing the movement’s demands on adapting to global warming, rather than stopping it, is a winning move. “The truth,” he writes, “is that the best that democratic political systems can accomplish may never amount to what is required of them.” It’s a hard pill to swallow. (Sept.)