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he thinks the current predicament says more about the continuities with colonial history than it does about some ruptured future. For some people in the world, the catastrophe has already happened. 

"I come from a part of the world where we didn't have very rosy expectations of the world or the future," says Ghosh. "We knew there would be a lot of upheavals, and we witnessed these upheavals at first hand, so in that sense I think Westerners had a belief in stability and the promise of the future that I didn't share."

a massive-scale economic adaptation to a new distribution of resources, is too scary to consider: The end of capitalism would be as bad as the end of the world.  "The people who saw the climate crisis first are at the absolute other end: farmers, fishermen, Inuit, indigenous peoples, forest peoples in India, and they've already had to adapt, mainly by moving, finding new livelihoods," says Ghosh. "And indigenous peoples have already lived through the end of the world and found ways to survive."

Ghosh thinks it's no coincidence that the constraints of the bourgeois novel began to form at the same time as the West began to use fossil fuels to project its power around the world.

"Climate change is absolutely an aspect of empire," he says. "The British Empire was essentially built on fossil fuels: It was the British mastery of coal that gave it a huge military advantage over the rest of the world."

"If renewables really were adopted at scale, it would completely shake up the global political order." He argues that oil and gas have to flow through maritime chokepoints controlled by the US, Australia, Britain and Canada, giving them a complete geopolitical advantage.

in the Eastern hemisphere, the issue of historical injustice is central to the issue of climate change. "If you go to any Indonesian, or Indian, or Chinese, even people who are perfectly well aware of the climate threat, and say to them: 'why don't you immediately cut all your emissions?' What will you hear? The answer is always profoundly political, it's: 'The West made this problem, let them give everything up first. This is the terrible dilemma in which we're caught."

"We're always told that rich countries will adapt better: I don't think that's actually true. I think countries with very complex systems, like the United States and in Europe, are in many ways much more fragile. Just consider food distribution."