Just over a century ago the ocean liner Titanic struck an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean. Within three hours it lay on the seabed, leaving 1500 dead. It’s a story that’s been told so many times that Mark Diesendorf and Rod Taylor don’t need to spend more than a few paragraphs on it. And yet they draw the reader’s attention to one perhaps lesser-known fact: which was that Titanic was going too fast.

Today, say the authors at the start of their superb ‘The Path to a Sustainable Civilisation: Technological, Socioeconomic and Political Change’ (Palgrave Macmillan, £22.99, ISBN 9789819906628), planet Earth is much like that doomed ship: “a complex and trusted system capable of spectacular failure.”

As with Titanic, warnings are being ignored in order to rush through economic priorities. Little is done to safeguard the least powerful of the passengers and crew. And there’s scant respect for the environment, as everything plays into the interests of those in...