About half the planet’s carbon dioxide emissions originate in urban areas: the cities and suburbs where a growing majority of humanity lives. To survive this century, we’ll have to live together in new ways. Few issues are as fundamental to climate politics as this one. And few are as visceral: the urban is rapidly becoming one of the chief terrains of twenty-first-century struggle.

But the politics of slashing urban emissions and transforming urban regions are one of the great question marks of the current climate debate, especially on the Left. Peppy technocrats dominate discussion of cities and carbon, while leftists struggle to articulate the link between climate and already-existing urban politics.

Naomi Klein’s bestselling book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (TCE) is no exception. The tome details the joint threats of climate change and capitalism and argues that only a wide-ranging coalition of grassroots movements can tackle them both.