Living Hot: Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Planet

Living Hot tells the blunt truth about our current climate change predicament: it’s time to get cracking on making Australia resilient to intensifying climate extremes. If we prepare well, we can give ourselves a fighting chance to preserve some of the best of what we have, build stronger and fairer communities, find a path through the escalating pressures of a warming world – and even find new ways to flourish.

To get there, we must leave behind both the doomism and the wishful thinking currently holding us back. In Living Hot, highly respected academic Clive Hamilton and policy consultant George Wilkenfeld shift the emphasis away from reducing carbon emissions and on to making Australia resilient, outlining a vision for an all-embracing and on-going program of investment and social change to protect ourselves from the ravages of a changing climate.

Living Hot is a sober assessment of the challenges we face, and a farsighted road map for what we must do next if we want to survive and even thrive on our heating planet.

About the Authors

Clive Hamilton is an Australian author and academic. His influential books include Silent Invasion, Growth Fetish, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change and Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. For fourteen years he was the executive director of The Australia Institute, a think tank he founded.

A professor at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, he has held visiting academic positions at the University of Oxford, Yale University and Sciences Po. His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, The New York Times, Times Higher Education Supplement, Nature and Scientific American.

George Wilkenfeld is an independent energy policy consultant who helped develop the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, star-rating labels for energy and water efficiency, and Australia’s corporate greenhouse emissions reporting system. He has over 35 years’ experience conducting energy and greenhouse policy studies for the Commonwealth, State and Pacific region governments. He has written extensively on the history of electrification.