Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes
ISBN: 9781978807648
Platform/Publisher: De Gruyter / Rutgers University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited

2020 Choice ​ Outstanding Academic Title

Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes analyzes the looming threats posed by climate change from a criminological perspective. It advances the field of green criminology through a examination of the criminal nature of catastrophic environmental harms resulting from the release of greenhouse gases. The book describes and explains what corporations in the fossil fuel industry, the U.S. government, and the international political community did, or failed to do, in relation to global warming. Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes integrates research and theory from a wide variety of disciplines, to analyze four specific state-corporate climate crimes: continued extraction of fossil fuels and rising carbon emissions; political omission (failure) related to the mitigation of these emissions; socially organized climate change denial; and climate crimes of empire, which include militaristic forms of adaptation to climate disruption. The final chapter reviews policies that could mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to a warming world, and achieve climate justice.


RONALD C. KRAMER is a professor of sociology and former director of the criminal justice program at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. He is the co-author of State-Corporate Crime: Wrongdoing at the Intersection of Business and Government (Rutgers University Press).
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