By Joe Mancini
Published September 2026
The United Nations (UNEP) report, Limiting Overshoot, confronts the reality that the world needs to face the inevitability of exceeding 1.5°C global warming beyond the 2015 Paris climate accord threshold.
Do the warnings against increased extraction and burning of coal, oil and gas fall on deaf ears even while we face decades of increased weather-related disasters, rising seas, melting ice and glaciers, and extinctions?
According to the CBC, “this July was the hottest on record for North America and Europe, where successive heat waves have led to thousands of heat-related deaths, dried up rivers and fire-scorched landscapes. That includes Canada, which has already seen more than 4.1 million hectares of woodland go up in flames and produce thick smoke that blanketed much of the eastern half of the country and parts of the northern U.S.”
1.5°C warming will stress food production and increase drought and water shortages especially throughout the southern hemisphere. All we can expect is amplified extreme weather that will provoke more ecological disasters.
Worse is the stunningly low consciousness of the need to reduce fossil fuel use. The momentum is at a snail’s pace. The knowledge and technological change to stop burning fossil fuels is ready but politicians and economists are negatively biased against change.
Here are six books that undermine negative thinking. Each author seeks to solve practical barriers that would change our political, economic and social outlook so that humanity has a chance to survive on this earth over the next 30 years!
Rethinking Economics
John Galbraith and Jing Chen in Entropy Economics, zero in on how economics ignores the reality of the physical and biological world. Mainstream economics pays no attention to the alarm bells of global warming, focused only on continual extraction of resources to boost GDP, with no concern for environmental degradation. Galbraith and Chen plead for common sense. What is the true cost of extracting resources? How can society absorb that cost into its accounts?
Steven Keen in The New Economics: A Manifesto questions the antiquated decision-making models of neo-classical economics which are based on values from the 1700’s. Such a model misjudges how people live and work in the economy. Worse, these misguided calculations caused the 2008 economic crisis, and he fears another one is around the corner.
Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics popularizes how a lay person can rethink the tenets of economics. Her handbook gives the reader a full understanding of why economics must change and what that change would mean for a society to be regenerative and redistributive in a way that respects the limitations of the environment. It is a highly accessible and readable economic textbook, something to treasure!
Rethinking How the World Works
Here Comes the Sun is an anthem for Bill McKibbon. Does anyone in Ontario, especially the government, know that since 2024, a gigawatt of solar panels is installed every 18 hours on our planet. That is the size of a coal plant or nuclear reactor. The transformation to a distributive solar economy is upon us and we in Ontario are lagging. The remaking of our economy around electricity generated by the sun, saved in batteries and distributed cheaply is here, all we have to do is direct our energies and efforts to this goal. McKibbon and many others are writing books to show how this is now possible.
Peter Barnes has worked out a deeply needed model in Ours: The case for Universal Property. Barnes starts by recognizing the ways in which the discipline of economics has ignored the Commons. He goes on to demonstrate how the potential property income of the Commons could fund many aspects of society, and details how this knowledge has been ignored for too long. Common models for joint property ownership of resources abound across the world, and in Waterloo Region, Kitchener Utilities and Enova are excellent examples of that model. Barnes highlights that new mechanisms are necessary for society to fund its growth, and his ideas are a good starting point.
At a Working Centre Common Table meeting in May, Thomas Fraser announced with joy that Jeremy Lent’s book on Ecocivilization was now available for order. Lent’s book offers the kind of rethinking we need, to relook at common assumptions in new ways. When the book arrived, its jacket stated clearly that it was “A transformative roadmap for our generation – not just another sustainability book, but a complete re-imagining of civilization that synthesizes decades of visionary thinking and policy…” Lent takes the reader through critical thinking while amalgamating ideas around the Economy, Community Enterprise, Agroecology, Common Property Trusts, Convivial Tools, Financial Reform, Social Infrastructure, Democracy, the Commons and Culture and Community – a compendium of major aspects of society that can be redesigned together into a coherent whole, creating the conditions for flourishing at the community level.
