What would a postcarbon future look like? What would it take to build and maintain a more just, regenerative world? How would it feel to live—and to thrive—in that world? In Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2026), Billy Fleming and a wide set of contributors critically engage with the above questions and more.

Around the globe, people are transforming their social, ecological, and economic systems in response to the climate crisis. This book guides readers through 29 of these exemplary works, which span 43 nations and 6 continents. From Cuba to Kiribati, Iceland to the Andes, the prairies of North America to the expanding Gobi Desert, these case studies foreground the tactics and modes of practice being employed, often by marginalized peoples, to create more humane, hospitable places. With dispatches from more than a dozen leading scholars working on the front lines of the climate justice movement, Building Postcarbon Futures is both a celebration of action underway and a clarion call to the planners, designers, policymakers, and activists who are pushing this planet toward a future of collective flourishing.

Billy Fleming is a leading voice on the role of design in responding to the climate crisis in our cities, communities, and landscapes. He is founding codirector of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank focused on climate and political economy, and assistant professor of landscape architecture at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia.

This interview was conducted by Timi Koyejo. He is an urbanist and housing policy researcher at the Climate and Community Institute.

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The twenty-first century has seen major transformations in the US electricity sector—but while the use of coal power wanes and the need for renewable energy becomes more urgent, financial actors maintain a complicating influence on the trajectory of energy transition. Brokers of Power: The Financialization of the US Electricity System (University of Minnesota Press, 2026) identifies changing patterns of investment intertwined with the shift from state-regulated electricity monopolies to a market-driven price model and the embrace of wind and solar hookups to the grid.

Drawing from case studies such as catastrophic Winter Storm Uri that hit Texas in 2021 and in-depth interviews with people working in the electricity and financial sectors, Dr. Conor Harrison reveals how the various entanglements of private equity, investment banking, and financial modeling are shaping the future and raising the costs of this vital infrastructure. Today’s financial firms, he shows, are engaged in the electricity industry beyond matters of investment: they own electricity generation infrastructure, trade electricity on markets, capture federal renewable energy tax credits, and advise on electricity firm operating strategy.

Looking beyond technology and policy, Dr. Harrison interrogates what it means to have powerful financial institutions as the primary agents of change in the fraught and ongoing energy transition. A timely and invaluable contribution to the fields of geography, environmental studies, and the energy social sciences, Brokers of Power is a cautionary account delving into the complexities surrounding the push for decarbonization.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Environmental politics is clearly at an impasse, increasingly foreclosed by a fragmenting elite consensus on climate change, an escalating populist backlash on the right, and a pervasive sense of climate doom on the left. This book considers what new openings might be offered by a labor-centered transition focused on our creative agency and our collective capacities to design new worlds.

Whilst political mobilizations and smart policy are vital for making progress on decarbonization, Designing the Just Transition: Design-Politics, Labor, and the Battle for Post-Carbon Futures (Bloomsbury, 2026) suggests that a more environmentally and socially just future will also have to be materialized and built, coded and created, imagined, desired, and enacted by many hands, many skills and many forms of visible and invisible design labor. The mainstream design industry is not to be trusted. Nevertheless, this book brings political ecology and environmental-labor studies into dialogue with critical design praxis, activism, and scholarship. It critically appraises traditions of worker-centered design, ecological and regional planning, sustainable and climate-smart architecture, and 'design when everyone designs.'

Rather than embracing a scolding green politics of limits or techno-utopian propaganda, Designing the Just Transition points to a wealth of resources for thinking about how we still might engage in democratic world-making on a warmer, more restless, and more turbulent planet.

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