On New Year’s Day, the far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro took power in Brazil, posing an urgent threat to Brazilians and to the planet. Bolsonaro has promised to open up the Amazon to rapid development and deforestation, which would lead to the release of massive amounts of carbon into the air and the destruction of one of the earth’s most potent tools in limiting global warming. Like President Trump, Bolsonaro is making environmental decisions that could be calamitous far beyond national borders.

In “Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future,” Joel Wainwright, a professor of geography at Ohio State University, and Geoff Mann, the director of the Center for Global Political Economy at Simon Fraser University, consider how to approach a problem of such international dimensions. They look at several different political futures for our warming planet, and argue that a more forceful international order, or “Climate Leviathan,” is emerging, but unlikely to mitigate catastrophic warming.

I recently spoke by phone with Wainwright and Mann. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.

Does global warming fundamentally change how you evaluate international politics and sovereignty and the idea of the nation-state, or is it more evidence of a crisis that already existed?

Wainwright: One of the arguments in our book is that, under pressure from the looming challenges of climate change, we can expect changes in the organization of political sovereignty. It’s going to be the first major change that humans have lived through in a while, since the emergence of what we sometimes think of as the modern period of sovereignty, as theorized by Thomas Hobbes, among others. We should expect that after, more than likely, a period of extended conflict and real problems for the existing global order, we’ll see the emergence of something that we describe as planetary sovereignty.

So, in that scenario, we could look at the current period with the crisis of liberal democracies all around the planet and the emergence of figures like Bolsonaro and Trump and [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi as symptoms of a more general crisis, which is simultaneously ecological, political, and economic. Maybe this is quibbling with your question, of trying to disaggregate the causal variable. Which comes first—is it the ecological or the political and economic?—is a little bit difficult because it’s all entangled.

Mann: I think we’re going to witness and are already witnessing, in its emergent form, lots of changes to what we think of as the sovereign nation-state. Some of that change right now is super-reactionary—some groups are trying to make it stronger and more impervious than it’s been in a long time. Then, other kinds of forces are driving it to disintegrate, both in ways we might think of as pretty negative, like some of the things that are happening in the E.U., but also in other ways that we might think of as positive, in the sense of international coöperation. There’s some discussion about what to do about climate migration, at least.

I think one of the interesting things that’s happening right now is that we have so few political, institutional tools, and, I would say, conceptual tools to handle the kinds of changes that are required. Everyone knows climate change is happening and it’s getting worse and worse, and everyone’s trying to fight off the worst parts of it, but we’re not really getting together as everyone thinks that we need to.

I think that the nation-state is one of the few tools that people feel like they have and so they’re wielding it in crazy ways. Some people are trying to build walls. Other people are trying to use their powers to convince others to go along with their plans. I think we have so few tools to deal with this problem that the nation-state is kind of being swung around like a dead cat, with the hope that it’ll hit something and help.

One of the most depressing and scary parts of this is that global warming is exacerbating economic problems, and migration and refugee-related problems, that are actually making the political dynamics within these countries worse and opening up a window for people like Trump.

Wainwright: I think your hypothesis, of a cyclical undermining of the global liberal order, is potentially valid. In fairness, it’s not exactly what Geoff and I are saying in the book. You may be right and you may be wrong. If you wanted to strengthen that hypothesis, you’d have to clarify in exactly what way the authoritarian, neoliberal, climate-denialist position that we see represented by those diverse figures—again Modi, Bolsonaro, Trump, et cetera—represents the opposite of something else.

Part of the reason we wrote the book is because—I think Geoff and I would both say—there’s a lot of talk right now in places like Canada and the United States about what we have and what we need, that when it comes to climate change is pretty vague, on the political, philosophical fundamentals. What exactly do Trump and Modi represent? Where does it come from, and why is it so clearly connected to climate denialism, and in what way is that crazy ensemble—or what appears to us as crazy and new—connected to the liberal dream of a rational response to climate change that’s organized on a planetary basis?

This gets to some of the scenarios you lay out in the book, and why you are so pessimistic about the current order. What are those scenarios?

Mann: In the book, we lay out what we think of as possible futures. They’re really, really broad, and there’s lots of room for maneuvers in them and they could blur a bit.

One of them, which we think is quite likely, is what we call Climate Leviathan. Another one is Climate Mao—that would be a sovereign, but it would operate more on the principles of what we might think of as a Maoist tradition, a quasi-authoritarian attempt to fix climate change by getting everyone in line. Then there’s the Behemoth [their term for a reactionary order]. We, at the time we started to work on the book, had in our heads the caricature of Sarah Palin, because that was the moment of “Drill, baby, drill.”

The last thing we call Climate X, and that’s the hopeful scenario. That is the sense we both have that the way to address climate change is definitely not international meetings that achieve nothing over and over again, in big cities all over the world. The attempts by liberal capitalist states like Canada or the U.S. to regulate tiny bits here and there, implement tiny little carbon taxes, to try to get people to buy solar panels. This is not anywhere near enough, nor coördinated in any meaningful way to actually get us out of this problem.

I think Joel and I really feel strongly that Climate X describes a whole array of stuff that isn’t attached to this completely failing set of institutions. So, with Climate X, we’re going to see activity happening at local levels, bridges across boundaries that you don’t think about now, institutions refuting the state entirely, like so many indigenous people from Canada going ahead and doing things on their own, building new alliances, discovering ways of managing the collapsing ecosystems and political institutions around in creative ways. We don’t see a map to this and the attempts to map it thus far have been a total and complete failure. Our hope is that we reinforce what is already happening in so many communities.