• A world parliament with two chambers. The first is directly elected. The second consists of a democratised UN General Assembly, whose members' votes are weighted according to the size of their population and their position on a global democracy index.
• The scrapping of the UN Security Council and the transfer of its powers to the democratised General Assembly.
• The closure of the IMF and World Bank, and their replacement with an International Clearing Union of the kind first proposed by John Maynard Keynes.
• A global trade regime which permits poor nations, but not rich ones, to protect their infant industries, and subjects multinational companies to mandatory fair trade laws.

Monbiot suggests ways these proposals could be implemented against the resistance of the world's most powerful governments. In particular, he shows how the developing world can use their massive debts to demand concessions from the rich.

The book also contains a withering attack on some of the anti-globalisation movement's policies. Monbiot's search for solutions has forced him to re-examine his own beliefs. He lambasts people who try to retreat from globalisation into purely local solutions. He ruptures his ties with those who believe that everything which can be bought locally should be bought locally, demonstrating that this position is grotesquely unjust.

George has been persona non grata in seven countries and had a life sentence in absentia from Indonesia. As an investigative journalist he was shot at, beaten up by military police, hospitalised by security guards, shipwrecked, stung into a coma by poisonous hornets, and pronounced clinically dead after contracting cerebral malaria. He has held visiting fellowships or professorships (in environmental policy, philosophy, politics, environmental science, and planning) at five universities. He's also won radio production and screen-writing prizes. Nelson Mandela presented him with the UN Global 500 award for outstanding environmental achievement. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling 'Captive State', which 'The Times' (London) described as "uniquely influential".