The NOMOS series has long served as a flagship venue for American political and legal philosophy, bringing together scholars to interrogate a single concept from multiple angles. Each volume gathers contributions that, while authored independently, are expected to speak to one another and to a shared theme. What makes the LXVII installment notable, according to Christie’s review, is that the contributors genuinely achieve that ambition. Rather than producing a scattered collection of essays, the authors build on one another’s central theses across the book, sustaining what the reviewer describes as a connected and coherent thread from beginning to end.

At the heart of that thread is a provocative claim: climate change cannot be adequately understood without placing it within a trifecta of law, ideology, and power relations. This framing pushes back hard against the widely held assumption that the climate crisis is primarily a market failure to be corrected with the right carbon price or a technology gap to be closed with better engineering. Instead, the volume’s contributors argue that the shapes of our economies, the legal frameworks that protect them, and the ideological commitments that legitimize them are themselves constitutive parts of the problem. Fossil fuels are not simply an energy source in this account; they are entangled with what scholars call fossil capital, the accumulated economic and political power of industries whose business models depend on continued greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the volume’s most distinctive contributions, the review notes, is its political economic analysis of consumer sovereignty. In mainstream economic thought, consumers are treated as sovereign actors whose aggregate choices determine what markets produce. The contributors to the volume subject this assumption to sustained critique, asking whether the idea of consumer sovereignty obscures the way corporate power, advertising, infrastructure, and law structure the very choices individuals appear to make freely. By linking climate change to this critique, the book connects the crisis to modern economic and political regimes and to the ideologies that sustain them, suggesting that individualizing responsibility for emissions may itself serve powerful interests.

This line of argument places the volume in conversation with a growing body of scholarship that treats economic dominance as a form of oppression. Christie’s review highlights that the book offers readers an opportunity to critically assess power distributions in market relations and to ground contemporary understandings of economic dominance in the concrete realities of a warming planet. In other words, the climate crisis becomes a lens through which long-standing debates in political philosophy about domination, exploitation, and justice acquire new urgency and new empirical content. The atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, on this view, is not merely an environmental indicator but a record of who holds power and how that power has been exercised over centuries of industrial development.

The intellectual lineage behind such arguments is visible in the works the review cites as context. Matthew Huber’s Climate Change as Class War, published by Verso in 2022, argued that climate politics is inseparable from class politics and that decarbonization is a struggle over who controls production. Romain Felli’s The Great Adaptation examined how capitalism adapts to, rather than merely causes, climate catastrophe. The review’s reference list also reaches back to Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology, signaling the volume’s engagement with the tradition of ideology critique, the project of exposing how ideas that appear natural or neutral serve particular material interests. Scholars of resilience and adaptation, including Mikulewicz’s critique of climate-resilient development, further inform the volume’s skepticism toward technocratic solutions that leave power relations untouched.

The breadth of epistemic frames represented in the book is one of its strengths, according to the review. Contributions draw on political philosophy, political economy, legal theory, and interdisciplinary environmental thought, and the volume is positioned to interest critical and interdisciplinary climate scholars across these fields. The subjects associated with the review itself, ranging from philosophy of economics and political economy of energy to ecocriticism and political anthropology, reflect that breadth. This interdisciplinarity matters because climate change, as the volume insists, is a complex social and economic problem that resists capture by any single discipline. The physical science of the climate system, as synthesized by bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2022 report on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, establishes the urgency; the volume’s contributors argue that understanding why societies fail to respond adequately requires the analytic tools of the humanities and social sciences.

Yet the review is candid about the book’s limitations. Christie observes that although the authors advance their arguments from various epistemic frames, the volume offers no practical guideposts for readers who desire them, particularly those interested in policy and decision-making. There are no prescriptions for carbon pricing schedules, regulatory designs, or international treaty frameworks. This absence is not presented as a fatal flaw; indeed, for a volume in a philosophy series, the omission may be deliberate, reflecting a view that action without adequate diagnosis risks reproducing the very structures that produced the crisis. Still, the reviewer notes that practitioners, policymakers, and applied researchers may finish the book with a sharpened critical toolkit but without direct guidance on what to do next, and the scholarly contributions remain substantial despite this gap.

The tension the review identifies, between diagnostic depth and prescriptive clarity, mirrors a broader debate within the climate research community. One camp holds that the urgency documented by climate science demands immediate, actionable policy, and that philosophical critique is a luxury the planet cannot afford. The other camp, which this volume represents, contends that decades of policy action have failed precisely because they have not confronted the underlying distributions of power, the legal entrenchment of fossil interests, and the ideological commitments that make high-carbon lifestyles appear normal and inevitable. From this perspective, work like that collected in NOMOS LXVII is not a detour from climate action but a prerequisite for it, since solutions that ignore structure tend to shift burdens onto the vulnerable while leaving the drivers of emissions intact.

For readers seeking a rigorous, coherent, and unflinching examination of climate change as a phenomenon of law, ideology, and power, Christie’s review suggests that Cordelli and Lane’s volume delivers. It frames the crisis within the economic and political regimes that produced it, challenges comfortable assumptions about markets and consumer choice, and grounds debates about domination and justice in the realities of a warming world. Its scholarly contributions are substantial and its internal coherence notable for an edited collection. Its refusal to provide a practical roadmap will frustrate some, but it may also sharpen the questions that any adequate climate politics must eventually answer: not only how to decarbonize, but whose power must be confronted, whose ideology unmasked, and whose laws rewritten in the process.

Subject of Research: Political philosophy of climate change, examining fossil capital, consumer sovereignty, and the role of law, ideology, and power relations in the climate crisis

Article Title: Chiara Cordelli and Melissa Lane. Climate change: NOMOS LXVII

Article References: Christie, E. (2026). Chiara Cordelli and Melissa Lane. Climate change: NOMOS LXVII. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01145-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01145-5

Keywords: climate change, NOMOS, political philosophy, fossil capital, consumer sovereignty, political economy, ideology, power relations, book review, Chiara Cordelli, Melissa Lane, NYU Press