When it was first conceptualized, this book was to have been coauthored with Rasmus Karlsson. Although I ended up writing the book alone, I am grateful to Rasmus for hosting me for some memorable weeks at Umeå University where we formulated the book's central themes, for reading and commenting on the manuscript, and for his ongoing friendship. I also thank Macquarie University's Outside Studies Program for supporting my visit to Umeå.

I am indebted to the commissioning editor Louise Knight and her team at Polity for their constant encouragement and insight; to two anonymous readers and five reviewers of the book proposal; to Susan Beer and Sandey Fitzgerald for assistance with editing; to Dennis Altman, Emma Brush, Sophie Cunningham, Kate Gleeson, Maryam Khalid, Ted Nordhaus and Jessica Whyte for commenting on sections of the text; to a great many friends and colleagues for discussions that have found their way into the book, including Lee Archer, Govand Azeez, Noah Bassil, Leigh Boucher, Barry Brook, Carol D'Cruz, Peter Eckersley, Kingsley Edney, Anna-Karin Eriksson, Roger Huang, Sung-Young Kim, Stephanie Lawson, Lavina Lee, Adam Lockyer, Stephen Luntz, Terry Macdonald, Kate Macdonald, Bryan Maher, Andrea Maksimovic, Andrew McGregor, Clare Monagle, John Morgan, Steven Noble, Jonathan Corpus Ong, Spiros Panigirakis, Carol Peterson, Dominic Redfern, Robert Reynolds, Anna Schurmann, Chris Schurmann, Ben Skidmore, Hsu-Ming Teo, Shaun Wilson and Hendri Yulius; and to my family and especially Matthew Masiruw for their love and support.

The sections of Chapter 6 that discuss solar geoengineering have previously been published as, ‘Geoengineering justice: who gets to decide whether to hack the climate?’ in the Breakthrough Journal. I thank Ted Nordhaus, director of the Breakthrough Institute, for allowing republication. I also thank the Breakthrough Institute for allowing me to attend the 2016–2018 Breakthrough Institute Dialogues. I am indebted to many Dialogue participants, but especially Ted Nordhaus, Oliver Morton and Rachel Pritzker, for insights that have influenced this book.

Most of the book was written either at Macquarie University or at the Kings Cross Library in Sydney. The university is named after Lachlan Macquarie who was the Governor of New South Wales between 1810 and 1821. Macquarie is now remembered both for his work as a progressive reformer and for his genocidal acts – at one point ordering that slain Aboriginal warriors be ‘hanged up on trees in conspicuous situations, to strike the survivors with the greater terror’. The Kings Cross library sits in an historically queer and red light district. Its establishment and its deliberate embrace of homeless patrons is a tribute to the social democratic impulse. Nevertheless, as I sit at the library's windows gazing eastwards I am aware that this land, and all I can see, were stolen from the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation whose rightful ownership I acknowledge.