Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

In Carbon Shock, veteran journalist Mark Schapiro takes readers on a journey into a world where the same chaotic forces reshaping our natural world are also transforming the economy, playing havoc with corporate calculations, shifting economic and political power, and upending our understanding of the real risks, costs, and possibilities of what lies ahead.

In this ever-changing world, carbon―the stand-in for all greenhouse gases―rules, and disrupts, and calls upon us to seek new ways to reduce it while factoring it into nearly every long-term financial plan we have. But how?

From the jungles of the Amazon to the farms in California’s Central Valley, from ‘greening’ cities like Pittsburgh to rising powerhouses like China, from the oil-splattered beaches of Spain to carbon-trading desks in London, Schapiro deftly explores the key axis points of change.

For almost two decades, global climate talks have focused on how to make polluters pay for the carbon they emit. It remains an unfolding financial mystery: What are the costs? Who will pay for them? Who do you pay? How do you pay? And what are the potential impacts? The answers to these questions, and more, are crucial to understanding, if not shaping, the coming decade.

Carbon Shock evokes a world in which the parameters of our understanding are shifting―on a scale even more monumental than how the digital revolution transformed financial decision-making―toward a slow but steady acknowledgement of the costs and consequences of climate change. It also offers a critical new perspective as global leaders gear up for the next round of climate talks in 2015.

Mark Schapiro is an award-winning investigative journalist who explores the intersection between the environment, economics, and international political power. His writing appears in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Yale Environment 360, The Nation, and other publications. His most recent book, The End of Stationarity, reports from environmental tension zones around the world where the costs of climate change are being experienced and fought over. His previous book was Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power. He is an adjunct professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He was formerly senior correspondent at The Center for Investigative Reporting.