This year’s Canova Prize was awarded to The Great Hypocrisies on Climate Against the Sustainability Bureaucrats and the New Climate Deniers , written by Roger Abravanel and Luca D’Agnese and published by Solferino (2024). The ceremony was held yesterday in Rome, in the usual setting of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, in the presence of scholars, journalists and representatives of Italian cultural institutions. The prize, awarded every year to a work capable of combining rigorous dissemination and civil relevance, has an illustrious past: in 1987 it was awarded to Piero Angela for Quark Economia , and in 1989 to Sergio Ricossa for Impariamo l’economia. The 2025 edition stands out for its attention to one of the most urgent issues of our time: the climate crisis and the rhetoric surrounding it. With a direct but well-founded language, Abravanel and D’Agnese offer a critical reading of the discourse on sustainability, questioning both unfulfilled promises and ineffective mechanisms. that dominate public debate.

Climate Hypocrisy and Systemic Responsibilities
In the recent panorama of Italian essays on the climate crisis, The Great Hypocrisies on the Climate , written by Roger Abravanel and Luca D’Agnese, is proposed as a polemical and reflective intervention on three central categories of the current ecological debate: the bureaucrats who administer sustainability, the activists (or public opinion) who sometimes sublimate their claims into symbolic rituals, and the so-called "new deniers", who admit climate change but hesitate with respect to the necessary actions, often for reasons of cost, delay or dilution of responsibility.Abravanel and D’Agnese denounce the existence of contradictory behaviors and widespread "hypocrisy": on the part of companies that embrace the ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) paradigm more as a certification of image than as a substantial change; on the part of states that impose complex but ineffective regulations; and on the part of a public opinion sometimes prone to superficial moralism or procrastination. The text does not limit itself to criticism: it formulates a normative paradigm that the authors call the "sustainability triangle," based on three interdependent vertices—innovative companies, states with effective regulations, and an informed and active public opinion. It is in this triangle, they argue, that the decisive game of our time is being played.


An Institutional Diagnosis of Ecological Failure
The essay rigorously delves into complex and highly controversial territory. It excels at highlighting specific contradictions: ESG as a tool for corporate reputation, excessive regulatory production that can produce paradoxical effects, and technological and infrastructural delays that render the rhetoric of sustainability sterile.
The authors do not fall into sterile technicalities: they use concrete examples, references to European policies, quotations from everyday life to make the discussion understandable but not banal. The central idea is that sustainability cannot be set as the exclusive responsibility of the State or the market, nor as an individual moral issue. An institutional and cultural triangulation is necessary.This concept recognizes the plurality of actors, the political dimension of sustainability, and emphasizes that change is also cultural and symbolic, not just technical or economic.



Against the inflation of emergency rhetoric
One of the most relevant aspects of the work is the mature critique of the rhetoric of emergency. The authors show how climate urgency is sometimes exploited: for marketing purposes (ed. green-washing), for social control, for regulatory imposition, or as a justification for ineffective policies. Recognizing that the "emergency" can also be a communication risk and that it must be accompanied by transparency, realistic measures, and verifiable actions is an important step towards a mature ecological policy.

An Implicit Genealogy: From Ostrom to Latour
On a theoretical level, the volume is part of a network of implicit references ranging from environmental justice theory to political ecology, from collective action theory to democratic pragmatism. The idea that technology is not a neutral panacea but a field of conflict regulated by norms, incentives, and social expectations is clearly indebted to the reflections of authors such as Amartya Sen, Elinor Ostrom, Robert Bullard, and—more recently—Bruno Latour.
The thesis according to which climate change is also a crisis of language, of public narrative, of truth devices, recalls Foucault’s critique of power as discursive production.

Comparison with Klein and Chakrabarty
The comparison with works such as This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein or The Climate of History in a Planetary Age by Dipesh Chakrabarty is enlightening.If Klein denounces the inadequacy of capitalist responses to the environmental crisis, Abravanel & D’Agnese propose a regulative realism that aims for an effective convergence of market, state and civil society. Compared to Chakrabarty, who poses the problem at an ontological and planetary level, Abravanel & D’Agnese’s essay maintains an institutional, more immediately operational perspective, less oriented towards historical-philosophical reflection on the Anthropocene condition.

Responsibility as a public posture
Central to this is the dimension of responsibility: not so much as moral guilt, but as a capacity to respond (response-ability) worthy of the stakes. The book thus falls within the philosophical tradition that, from Max Weber to Hans Jonas, conceives responsibility as a guiding principle for acting in times of complexity. It is no coincidence that the authors insist on the need to design resilient institutions, capable not only of regulating, but of guiding innovation and directing collective choices in an inclusive and sustainable way.

Conclusion
The Great Hypocrisies on Climate Change is neither an ideological pamphlet nor a technical guide: it is a normative essay that walks the line between public ethics and policy analysis. It is a book that questions the credibility of our collective commitment, unmasks reassuring rhetoric, denounces the repetition compulsion of many discourses on sustainability, and proposes—with rigor and clarity—a pragmatic reformulation of our relationship with the future.