Climate Change Isn’t Everything: Liberating Climate Politics from Alarmism by Mike Hulme

Mike Hulme’s Climate Change Isn’t Everything: Liberating Climate Politics from Alarmism provides a provocative critique of climatism, an ideological framework that Hulme argues is shaping environmental governance in counterproductive ways. Hulme defines climatism as “the settled belief that the dominant explanation of social, economic, and ecological phenomena is a ‘human-caused change in the climate.’ It frames the complex political and ethical challenges confronting the world today primarily in terms of a changing climate” (20). As an ideological framework, climatism provides a “thought map” or a “master narrative” that “offer[s] comprehensive explanations of historical experience and/or knowledge about the future” (90). For Hulme, the danger with climatism is that it narrows our political vision of global environmental governance so that environmental but potentially nonclimate values, like biodiversity conservation and sustainable development, become subordinated to immediate climate action. These latest reflections on climate change from Hulme provide some of his most...