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Published by Fox Island Press · Printed in Canada
Canadian readers: soft back books print in Canada, hard back may be printed in Canada or the US — no duties, fast shipping.
The connection between concentrated wealth and climate failure is not coincidental. It is causal. This book traces the money, names the mechanisms, and shows where the pressure points are.
In the last forty years, billionaire wealth and atmospheric carbon dioxide have risen together. This book argues that the connection is causal, not coincidental: the fossil fuel economy that created the climate crisis is the same economy that created billionaire oligarchy.
Fossil fuel companies kept the profits while passing trillions of dollars in environmental and health costs onto the public. Then the accumulated wealth was used to block the very policies that would have closed the gap. The Koch network, the petrostates, the think tanks, the dark money—these are the specific, documented mechanisms.
The rise of tech billionaires has not corrected this trajectory. Instead, tech oligarchs now control the platforms that shape public opinion, their AI operations consume enormous amounts of energy, and their preferred ideology of “techno-solutionism” functions as a new form of delay. Old money and new money converge through shared political infrastructure—including the International Democracy Union, an 84-party alliance chaired by Stephen Harper with a former Koch operative as its treasurer.
Written in plain language from a Canadian perspective, with specific attention to Nova Scotia, this book traces the money, names the people, and shows where the pressure points are. Because every mechanism of influence described in these pages is a mechanism that can be disrupted.
“The fossil fuel money and the tech money do not need to coordinate with each other directly. They converge through the political parties they fund, and those parties coordinate with each other through organizations like the IDU. The money flows in at the national level. The coordination happens at the international level. The climate policy obstruction is the output.”
— Chapter 9: More Alike Than They Look
This book was written to Canadian music — artists who have questioned progress, inequality, and environmental harm for decades. The playlist sets the mood behind the arguments.
Artists who have questioned progress for decades
Listen on Spotify →Neil Young · Joni Mitchell · Bruce Cockburn · Leonard Cohen · Tragically Hip · Sarah McLachlan · Stan Rogers · Gordon Lightfoot · Buffy Sainte-Marie · k.d. lang · Blue Rodeo · Sarah Harmer
The first seventeen pages — the introduction and the opening of the argument.
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Published by Fox Island Press · Printed in Canada
Canadian readers: soft back books print in Canada, hard back may be printed in Canada or the US — no duties, fast shipping.
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