Tom Athanasiou

Tom Athanasiou is a long-time left green, a former software engineer and technology critic, a climate-justice activist. He’s the author of dozens of essays and several books on the politics of ecological crisis. He now concentrates on the development and promotion of climate stabilization strategies that are fair enough to actually work.

Tom's first major piece on the climate crisis, "Greenhouse Blues," was published in 1991. In 1996, his first book was published in the US as Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor. In 2000, with Paul Baer, he founded EcoEquity, an activist think tank dedicated to the development of an equitable global climate stabilization framework. In 2002, again with Paul Baer, he published Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming. He has been extremely active in the global climate-justice movement and, to a lesser extent, the domestic CJ movement as well. 

Now, years later, EcoEquity, together with the Stockholm Environment Institute, has completed the initial development of the Greenhouse Development Rights framework. GDRs, supported by a growing number of environmental, development, and ecumenical networks around the world, is a principle-based burden-sharing framework designed to preserve the rights of all people, around the world, to a dignified level of sustainable human development – even in a time of climate crisis. As such, it aims to help break the North / South impasse and support an emergency global mobilization to stabilize the climate.

More generally, Tom’s interests focus on distributive justice within finite environmental spaces. He is now the executive director of EcoEquity, but in his spare time, he’s developing a book on inequality and the climate crisis, the working title of which is A New Deal for the Greenhouse Century.