Among the most provocative theoretical developments in the contemporary humanities is what has recently been called “critical climate change.” 1 At once an institutional initiative and a conceptmetaphor, this phrase speaks to two overlapping concerns. The first concern is the so-called anthropogenic or man-made crisis of the planetary climate system resulting inadvertently from the residual carbon footprint of two centuries of fossil-fuel capitalism centered in the Global North. Thinkers from Marx to Braudel to Lefebvre have long emphasized the dialectical co-production of socioeconomic practices and nonhuman environmental systems as an essential dimension of any historical analysis worthy of the name. But the advent of what climate scientists have recently begun to call the “anthropocene” involves an epochal transition from humanity understood as a “biological agent” whose activities alter this or that particular environment within the life span of several