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25 Inspiring Climate Change Books To Read in 2024

2023 has been a year of tremendous climate extremes. Humanity is learning the extent of the existential threats posed by climate change and ecological destruction the hard way. In a year of such tremendous transformation, leaders and innovators continuously come up with solutions and new ways of thinking that make us reflect and hope. In Earth.Org’s best climate change books to read in the new year, we see a world that is ambitious about humanity’s prospects, but humble about our place in nature. Extremely hopeful for our future, while realistic about what we might have to endure.

2023 was the hottest year on record , supercharged by the  return of El Niño , a weather phenomenon that has pushed temperatures off the charts around the world and that is  expected to last well into 2024 . As expected, the trend continued in the first few months of the new year, with March 2024 becoming the 10th consecutive month to break records , with temperatures at 1.77C above an estimate of the February average for 1850-1900.

In February 2024, the EU weather service Copernicus recently confirmed that the critical 1.5C global warming threshold set in the Paris Agreement   was breached over a twelve-month period for the first time in history , with global temperatures at 1.58C above the 19th century benchmark. While this does not signal a permanent breach of the limit, which scientists say is measured over decades, it sends a clear warning to humanity that we are approaching the point of no return much faster than expected.

Books are some of the best tools to unpack this difficult information and make climate science accessible to all. They offer a platform for experts to share their knowledge, enabling readers to develop a well-rounded understanding of the current state of the environment and the urgent need for collective action.

It is precisely for this reason that Earth.Org revamped and significantly expanded its book review series to include regular talks with authors and more in-depth coverage of their books. But aside from the award-winning writers, world-leading climate scientists, and thought leaders paving the way toward humanity’s brighter future, here is our list of the best books on climate change that everyone should read. 

Best Climate Change Books To Read in 202 4

1. the new climate war , by michael mann.

Michael Mann is arguably one of the closest things we have to a climate superhero.  His story is certainly reminiscent of some cinematic superhero adventures. After hitting the climate science stage hard in 1999 when co-authoring the now-famous ‘hockey stick graph’ that demonstrates how human activity has contributed to average temperature rise, Michael Mann was lambasted, criticised and dismissed by a system perpetrated by our story’s villains, principally the fossil fuel industry and other actors with vested interests But our hero did not back down, and continued to push for the emerging field of climate science to be recognised.

In The New Climate War , Mann explains how the fossil fuel industry has adjusted its tactics, from outright climate denialism to obstruction and shifting the burden of responsibility to individuals, thereby delaying necessary action to push through systemic changes. The book is a fascinating untangling of the intricate web of misinformation, misdirection and deflection perpetuated by the fossil fuel industry since climate change became an incontrovertible reality. Cautiously optimistic, Mann argues that the fundamental challenges we still face today are not tied to a technological or intellectual inability to achieve systemic change, but in the lack of political will required to do so.

2. Supercharge Me: Net Zero Faster , by Eric Lonergan and Corinne Sawers

Supercharge Me (2022) takes a look at how governments, businesses and individuals behave and discuss what has (and hasn’t) worked so far in transitioning the global economy to net zero. Fund manager Eric Lonergan and sustainability adviser Corinne Sawers introduce practical ideas for change that will embolden people to reframe the climate crisis as an opportunity and suggest augmenting traditional economic solutions, such as carbon pricing, with EPICs: extreme, positive incentives for change that “supercharge” behavioural change.

3. Post Growth: Life After Capitalism , by Tim Jackson

For the economics-inclined, Post Growth may be our pick for the most accessible and inspiring technical environmental books of 2021. Professor Tim Jackson , a highly influential ecological economist, first gained fame for his 2009 book, Prosperity Without Growth , a highly researched deep dive into the economics and models that can bring us into a more sustainable and prosperous future.

Jackson’s 2021 foray is a romantic, passionate and highly readable book that illuminates what a future after capitalism, competition and egregious self-interest really looks like, largely doing away with much of the jargon and economics’ parlance used in Prosperity. Grounded in a deep understanding of ecological economics, Post Growth presents one of the most compelling arguments yet that the economy is not at all separate from the natural world, but an intrinsically embedded subsidiary of it. Under this worldview, it becomes clear that constant economic growth is simply untenable.

Whether or not you agree with Jackson’s more fundamental assertions on the nature of capitalism and its role in a prosperous society, this is a book that sheds light on a version of the future where having outright winners does not necessarily translate to having outright losers, where prosperity is not only linked to material wealth but to wellbeing, health and safety for all members of society. Post Growth does not necessarily offer the solutions and technical means that Prosperity does, but it does provide a way of thinking about the future that is hopeful, bright and entirely achievable. 

4. Under A White Sky , by Elizabeth Kolbert

For the more scientifically and solutions-inclined, this is the book pick for you. On a world-hopping adventure from one solution to the next, journalist and author Elizabeth Kolbert guides readers through the sheer madness of ‘fixes’ that humans have attempted to dominate the natural world. The bottom line is this: we like to think of ourselves as ingenious problem solvers, and we certainly can be, but more often than not, our actions have unforeseen and reverberating effects on ecosystems and human populations.

Under A White Sky immensely readable, vividly describing everything from the flooding marshlands of Louisiana to the mind-bogglingly exciting developments in genetic engineering. In each new location, Kolbert dives into the latest technological fix that is being attempted, often to cover up the unintended consequences of the last techno-fix humans tried out. This is a hugely entertaining book that accurately describes some of the most cutting-edge and complex solutions to the environmental crisis that humans have come up with. But it is also a cautionary tale that puts into perspective just how far we’ve gone, and what that has already done to the world.

5. This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs The Climate , by Naomi Klein

Rob Nixon from The New York Times called it “the most momentous and contentious environmental book since Silent Spring” . Hard-hitting journalist Naomi Klein uncovers the myths clouding the climate debate, unearthing how powerful and well-financed right wing think tanks and lobby groups are at the source of the climate change denial.

This Changes Everything (2014) challenges the current “free market” ideology, which Klein argues is unable to solve the climate change crisis.

You might also like: 10 Climate Change Movies To Watch in 2022

6. Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet , by George Monbiot 

7. the nature fix: why nature makes us happier, healthier and more creative , by florence williams.

From eucalyptus groves in California, forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into cutting-edge research, The Nature Fix (2017) exposes the powers of the natural world to improve health, strengthen our relationships and promote reflection and innovation.

8. Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming , by Paul Hawken

Drawdown (2017) gathers the 100 most effective solutions to halt global warming from leading scientists and policymakers, which if adopted, could even reduce the overall greenhouse gasses currently present in the atmosphere . Already firmly anchored in the New York Times bestseller list, Hawken ranks optimal solutions – like moderating the use of air-conditioners and refrigerators, or adopting a plant-rich diet – by the amount of potential greenhouse gases they can avoid or remove.

9. Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life , by Edward O. Wilson

Half Earth (2016), written by one of the world’s greatest naturalists and a double Pulitzer Prize winner, proposes an realistic plan to save our imperilled biosphere: devote half the surface of the Earth to nature. In order to stave off the mass extinction of species including our own, we must move swiftly to preserve the biodiversity of our planet, Wilson urges in one of his most impassioned books about climate change to date. 

10. Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet , by Dieter Helm

The first real attempt to calibrate, measure and value natural capital from an economic perspective, Natural Capital (2015) shifts the parameters of the current environmental debate. Dieter Helm, Fellow of Economics at the University of Oxford, claims that refusing to place an economic value on nature risks an environmental meltdown. He proceeds to outline a new framework to couple economic growth with respect for our natural endowment without sacrificing the former.

11. Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America , by Thomas Friedman

Given the recent buzz about the Green New Deal in American politics, we recommend this brilliant book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author who coined the term, Thomas L. Friedman. Hot, Flat and Crowded (2008) speaks to America’s urgent need to expand national renewables and how climate change presents a unique opportunity for the US – not only to transform its economy, but to lead the world in innovating toward cleaner energy.

12. The Big Fix: 7 Practical Steps to Save Our Planet , by Hal Harvey and Justin Gillis

While being a conscious and greener consumer helps, this won’t be enough to bring our greenhouse gas emissions to zero and save our planet. As energy policy advisor Hal Harvey and longtime  New York Times  reporter Justin Gillis argue in their book The Big Fix: 7 Practical Steps to Save Our Planet (2022), citizens must push for policies that can make a big difference in seven main areas: electricity production, transportation, buildings, industry, urbanisation, use of land, and investment in promising new green technologies.

13. Sustainable Nation: Urban Design Patterns for the Future , by Douglas Farr

An essential resource for urban designers, planners and architects, Sustainable Nation (2018) is an urgent call to action and a guidebook for change. An architect and urban planner, Douglas Farr details how designing cities and buildings with sustainable criteria can mitigate the humanitarian, population and climate crises.

14. The Uninhabitable Earth , by David Wallace-Wells

While the book does not offer solutions, it does make it clear that we already have all the tools we need to avoid the worst effects. But ultimately The Uninhabitable Earth seeks to make clear the horror of the emergency of the consequences before us. Unless we accept the urgency, how can we expect to get ourselves out of this mess?

15. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History , by Elizabeth Kolbert

Kolbert outlines how humans have driven the extinction of biodiversity, or to the brink of extinction, from the Panamanian golden frog nearly completely wiped out in the wild by a fungal disease to the Maui, which is in peril due to deforestation. We are driving these species to extinction in many ways: some connected to the climate crisis through rising sea levels rising and deforestation, as well as by spreading disease-carrying species and poaching. By fundamentally altering earth’s delicately balanced ecosystems, we are risking our own future too. 

16. Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change , by Nathaniel Rich

We have known about the perils of climate change for decades and yet very little to nothing was done about it. This book details the decade from 1979 to 1989 when we were starting to have a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Focussing mainly on the US’s response to the crisis, the book follows the scientists and activists who tried to sound the alarm, and the Reaganite politicians and businesses who worked to make sure that no meaningful action was taken. Rich says that the world came close to signing binding international treaties to mitigate the acceleration of global warming. However, by the start of the 90s, what was once regarded as a bipartisan issue came to be seen as a partisan one after the oil industry “descended and bared its fangs.”Since then, more carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere than in all the preceding years of history of civilisation. Losing Earth is an essential cautionary tale for facing the climate battles ahead.

17. Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change , by Dieter Helm

This book is a measured, balanced view of how we stop causing climate change by adopting a net zero strategy of reducing carbon emissions and increasing carbon absorption. It is a rational look at why the past 30 years’ efforts have failed and why and how the next 30 years can succeed. Like the other books on this list, it is a vital read for anyone who hears ecological activists fighting against climate change, but wonders what they can actually do.

18. Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency , by Mark Lynas

This book delivers an account of the future of our earth, and our civilisation, if current rates of global warming persist.But how much worse could it get? Are we already past the point of no return? Cataloguing the very latest climate science, Lynas explores the course we have set for Earth over the next century and beyond. Degree by degree, he charts the likely impacts of global heating and the consequent climate catastrophe.  

At one degree – the world we are already living in – vast wildfires scorch California and Australia, while monster hurricanes devastate coastal cities. At two degrees the Arctic ice cap melts away, and coral reefs disappear from the tropics. At three, the world begins to run out of food, threatening millions with starvation. At four, large areas of the globe are too hot for human habitation, erasing entire nations and turning billions into climate refugees. At five, the planet is warmer than for 55 million years, while at six degrees a mass extinction of unparalleled proportions sweeps the planet, threatening to end all life on Earth. 

These escalating consequences can still be avoided, but time is running out. We must stop burning fossil fuels within a decade. If we fail, then we risk crossing tipping points that could push global climate chaos out of humanity’s control. 

19. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal , by Naomi Klein 

This book gathers more than a decade of Klein’s writing, pairing it with new material on the staggeringly high stakes of our immediate political and economic choices.

These long-form essays investigate the climate crisis not only as a political challenge but as a spiritual and imaginative one as well. With reports spanning from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef, the annual smoke-choked skies of the Pacific Northwest, post-hurricane Puerto Rico, to a Vatican attempting an unprecedented “ecological conversion,” Klein makes the case that we will rise to the existential challenge of climate change only if we are willing to transform the systems that produced this crisis.

An expansive, far-ranging exploration that sees the battle for a greener world as indistinguishable from the fight for our lives, On Fire captures the burning urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the fiery energy of a rising political movement demanding a catalytic Green New Deal.

You might also like: 10 Must-See Environmental Films on Netflix

20. Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet , by Noam Chomsky & Robert Pollin

The last on our list of books about climate change, Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading public intellectual, and Robert Pollin, a renowned progressive economist, map out the catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change and present a realistic blueprint for change: the Green New Deal.

Chomsky and Pollin show the forecasts for a hotter planet: vast stretches of the Earth will become uninhabitable, plagued by extreme weather, drought, rising seas, and crop failure. Arguing against the fear of economic disaster and unemployment arising from the transition to a green economy, they show how this unfounded concern encourages climate denialism.

The authors show how ceasing to burn fossil fuels within the next 30 years is entirely feasible. Climate change is an emergency that cannot be ignored. This book shows how it can be overcome both politically and economically.

21. Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea , by Callum Roberts

Callum Roberts’ 2013 book, Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea , follows the fascinating relationship between man and water. A powerful warning to save our oceans before it is too late, this book does not hold back – it shows us just how much of an impact overfishing, pollution and climate change have had on marine life. 

Instead of speculating about what may happen in the future, Roberts sticks to proven facts and viable solutions. This makes his book stand out from other recent books on climate change and environmentalist works’ inability to offer solutions for the “doomsday scenarios” they present through their barrage of facts and statistics. The last quarter of Ocean of Life is packed with potential solutions that industries, companies, governments and ordinary people can adopt. 

22. All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis , edited by Ayana Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson

This book is a collection of essays and poetry by 60 leading women climate activists. It shows the power that women have in creating the solutions that we need to mitigate the climate crisis. 

23. Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: How the Natural World is Adapting to Climate Change , by Thor Hanson

While humans wrestle with net-zero targets and greenwashing, other species have had to adapt to the impacts of climate change.  According to American biologist Thor Hanson, plants and animals have “a great deal to teach us about what comes next, because for many of them, and also for many of us, that world is already here.”

24. The Dolphin Among Orcas , by Tom Meinerz

This story brings to light a global problem that is right under our noses, but invisible to our eyes, which is Ocean pollution and its impact on all sea life. A dolphin pod has a rare occurrence; twin sister calves are born. This is then followed by another, even rarer occurrence, the birth of a malformed calf. Courage was born with a back and tail which were deformed, or malformed in dolphin speak. His birth brings first curiosity, but then ridicule, followed by bullying from other dolphins. He and his mother had to travel behind the pod, most often alone. But Courage overcomes his limitations and instead, turns them into an advantage.

This entertaining story helps middle school readers understand the worsening global pollution threat, for which the middle school generation is likely to find the solutions to clean it up. The tale also addresses what bullying is, and what may happen as a result. It tells the story of how perceived limitations can become unique talents, allowing for a successful life.

25. The Climate Book , by Greta Thunberg

The Climate Book (2022) by Greta Thunberg – the world-famous Swedish climate activist and founder of the global movement Fridays for Future – features essays of over one hundred thinkers and experts, from oceanographers and meteorologists to economists and geophysicists, to raise awareness about the climate crisis and equip us with the knowledge to fight climate disasters and halt global warming. Thunberg also shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. 

You might also like:  10 Inspiring and Educational Environmental Books for Kids

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The best books about climate change – and how to fight it

Temperatures, sea levels and anxiety about the future of the planet are all on the rise. But what can you really do to make a difference? Here are the books you need to read about tackling our climate crisis.

There are few issues facing humanity more pressing than climate change. With temperatures and sea levels rising, it’s never been more important to identify – and to solve – the problems of emissions and carbon footprints in order to create a more sustainable way of life. Our planet’s future depends on it, as the IPCC's stark latest warning has pointed out.

One of the best ways to understand how we got here and how we can change is by learning from the experts. We’ve rounded up a host of books crucial to an understanding of the climate crisis, which posit ideas for change and boldly point the way forward. Get reading toward a greener world below.

Atmosphere of Hope: Solutions to the Climate Crisis  by Tim Flannery (2015)

Palaeontologist, conservationist and leading climate change writer Professor Tim Flannery reminds readers that we still possess the power to make change in our everyday lives, from emission cuts to emerging technologies. Atmosphere of Hope balances between outlining the harsh realities of our situation with much-needed hope for the future. Flannery details what may happen if temperatures rise above the 2°C UN target; while bleak, he also offers advice on how we should proceed, covering the reduction of fossil fuels and potential for the removal of carbon from the atmosphere. 

What did you think of this article? Email  [email protected]  and let us know.

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These 15 Books on Climate Change Are Essential Reading

The urgent environmental problems facing our planet—and some of the proposed solutions—are a page's turn away.

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links.

So you want to learn about climate change—but where to begin? We live in what many scientists call the Anthropocene Epoch, an era of geological time characterized by human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. As the earth’s temperature rises and natural disasters occur with alarming frequency, the environment is quickly careening toward a breaking point from which we can never turn back. But understanding the litany of facts about the state of our planet is just the beginning. Next, you’ll want to explore the sociopolitical intersections of those facts, from the disproportionate effect of climate change on Native populations and people of color, to the corporate profit motives and disinformation campaigns preventing us from ushering in climate-friendly policy initiatives.

We’ve rounded up 15 of the most essential texts about climate change to get you started—some old, some new, all urgently clear-eyed about the problems facing our planet. It’s by no means an encyclopedic survey, but consider it a comprehensive syllabus for anyone looking to broaden their knowledge. Once you’ve read these books, you’ll be ready to call your representatives, hit some Sunrise Movement protests, and become a force for change in your community.

Crown Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, by Elizabeth Kolbert

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns with another sobering look at our Anthropocene Epoch, this time centered not on the countless calamities ahead, but on the trailblazing efforts of scientists to turn back the doomsday clock. Kolbert describes the subjects of Under a White Sky as “people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems”; she turns her lens to human interventions in nature, like the storied redirection of the Chicago River, and to the pressing need for further intervention to correct our folly. Traveling everywhere from the Great Lakes to the Great Barrier Reef, she chronicles her encounters with scientists, who are pioneering cutting-edge technologies to turn carbon emissions to stone and shoot diamonds in the stratosphere. Heralded by everyone from Barack Obama to Al Gore, Kolbert’s urgent, deeply researched text asks if our ingenuity can outrun our hubris.

MCD Losing Earth: A Recent History, by Nathaniel Rich

Spanning the pivotal decade between 1979 and 1989, Losing Earth chronicles the rise of political awareness about global warming, along with the myriad failures of policymakers to address the growing climate emergency. Instead, as Rich reveals in painstaking historical detail, policymakers sided with profit-thirsty corporations, who mounted a massive campaign of disinformation and denialism that continues to shape our political life today. Though the subject of his book is the lost decade in the fight against climate crisis, Rich ultimately concludes on a hopeful note, arguing that we still have time to save our planet. Read Losing Earth ’s stunning story of human greed and human folly to determine if you share his optimism.

Brand: Penguin Press HC, The Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming, by McKenzie Funk

You’ve read about the science of climate change—but what about the economics of it all? In the six years he spent reporting this meticulously constructed book, Funk traveled the world speaking with dozens of entrepreneurs wringing a hefty profit from climate change, from Israeli businessmen getting rich on manmade snow to Dutch architects designing floating cities. Climate crisis, as it turns out, is big business, with ungodly sums of money changing hands between a select few while the global masses suffer. Funk illuminates the craven business practices of environmental tycoons determined to keep society on life support, proving that the conventional wisdom holds true: when in doubt, follow the money.

Beach Lane Books Our House Is on Fire: Greta Thunberg's Call to Save the Planet, by Jeanette Winter

Struggling to explain climate change to the little ones in your life? This inspiring and informative picture book, targeted at children between the ages of three and eight, chronicles Greta Thunberg’s environmental awakening, from how she learned about the climate crisis in the classroom to how she took action for change. The book lays down a galvanizing challenge, asking its young readers what they will do to be a force for change, while celebrating the ability of children to be leaders. Share it with the little ones you love to start an important conversation.

City Lights Publishers Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security, by Todd Miller

Tim duggan books the uninhabitable earth: life after warming, by david wallace-wells.

“This is not a book about the science of warming; it is a book about what warming means to the way we live on this planet,” Wallace-Wells writes in The Uninhabitable Earth . Visceral and alarming, The Uninhabitable Earth transforms scientific predictions into lyrically-rendered realities, with Wallace-Wells painting grim portraits of what life will be like at each degree of warming. He predicts climate displacement, food insecurity, geopolitical war, global plagues, and cascading natural disasters, among other grim realities. The doom Wallace-Wells predicts is terrifying, merciless, and entirely self-inflicted. Consider The Uninhabitable Earth an impossible-to-look-away-from wake-up call, because as Wallace-Wells writes, “It is worse, much worse, than you think.”

Bloomsbury USA Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, by George Marshall

Ever had a maddening argument with a climate change denialist, or wondered why policymakers remain immovable on addressing the growing climate crisis despite the mountain of scientific evidence available? In Don’t Even Think About It , Marshall, the founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network, investigates how our psychology stymies substantive action, arguing that our innate sense of tribalism prevents us from operating in our best interest as a united collective. He also proposes a new language of outreach for the environmental movement—one optimized to win over even the staunchest denialist. Keep this shrewd and actionable book close in advance of your next family Thanksgiving.

Penguin Books Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, edited by Paul Hawken

In this sprawling compendium of innovations, Hawken spotlights one hundred cutting-edge technologies with the power to draw down the amount of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Written by hundreds of expert researchers, these engaging, layman-friendly essays suggest solutions both systematic (educating women in lower-income countries, for example) and small-scale (swapping LED light bulbs into your light fixtures). Implementing these solutions on a global scale will require seismic policy shifts and massive investment, but Drawdown suggests that it’s possible to imagine a better future.

Beacon Press As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock, by Dina Gilio-Whitaker

We can’t discuss our threatened landscape without seeking justice for those from whom it was stolen to begin with: the Native American people, who for centuries have suffered from broken treaties, dispossession of ancestral lands, and food insecurity, among other cascading effects of the climate crisis and white supremacy. Through a lens she calls “Indigenized environmental justice,” Gilio-Whitaker confronts the long, shameful shadows of capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy. She frames the Native fight for environmental justice through the 2016 protests at Standing Rock, spotlighting these brave activists’ centuries-long fight for our fragile planet, as well as the urgent need for Native sovereignty.

Simon & Schuster This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, by Naomi Klein

“Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life,” the acclaimed author of The Shock Doctrine writes in this radical study of the fateful incompatibility between climate justice and capitalism. Klein lays out the disastrous consequences of deregulated global capitalism, arguing that corporations are profiting massively off their destruction of the planet, permitted to occur at a breakneck pace by lobbyists and politicians. The only way forward, Klein insists, is a radical structural overhaul of the global economic system, one foregrounding social and environmental justice. This Changes Everything is a crucial clarion call demanding that we reorganize our economic priorities before it’s too late.

Back Bay Books Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer

Beginning with the question of whether or not he and his family should eat meat, the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer interrogates this complicated personal choice through a journalistic lens, interviewing everyone from family farmers to slaughterhouse workers to anti-meat activists. Foer addresses our willful ignorance about the inhumane realities of the meat supply chain, as well as the escalating effects of factory farming on the fragile environment. At once a personal and philosophical meditation on the familial meanings of food, as well as a rigorous investigation into the dangerous business of animal products, Eating Animals presents readers with a compelling body of research about one of our most important lifestyle choices.

Knopf How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, by Bill Gates

In 2019, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation committed $310 million to support climate adaptation efforts benefitting farmlands around the world. In this wonklike and persuasive book, Gates takes his environmental activism a bridge further, laying out an ambitious plan to reduce greenhouse emissions to zero by 2050. Drawing on data from researchers, policymakers, and engineers, Gates advocates for solutions both scientific (like developing alternative fuels) and personal (like increasing civic engagement in environmental justice issues). If you feel a radical shred of hope reading these galvanizing pages, dare to let in—without hope, we’ll get nowhere.

A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind, by Harriet A. Washington

Environmental racism is a widespread and life-threatening danger; in this enraging exposé, Washington illuminates the staggering extent of it, connecting corporate greed and government irresponsibility to housing discrimination practices, which leave Black Americans experiencing record exposure to pollution. Washington also challenges the dangerous and biased IQ myth, arguing that Black Americans are exposed to lead, mercury, and other toxins at exponentially higher rates than white Americans, leading to lifelong complications like Alzheimer’s, memory loss, and impaired cognitive function. In the final chapter, she lays out a wide variety of solutions to fight environmental racism, from community involvement to nationwide activism. It’s imperative that we reverse this unconscionable discrimination soon, as millions of lives, quite literally, depend on it.

University of Chicago Press The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by Amitav Ghosh

In this surprising synthesis of disciplines, a novelist accustomed to writing climate fiction examines history, literature, and politics to understand why our foremost thinkers so often fail to confront the climate crisis. He argues that there lies “an imaginative and cultural failure” at the heart of the climate crisis, as storytellers and public intellectuals eschew the vital, "unthinkable" task of grappling with this singular moment. In a galvanizing and clear-eyed call to action, he urges that we must find artistic and cultural frameworks to move through and combat this crisis together, as going it alone spells our doom.

Verso The Case for the Green New Deal, by Ann Pettifor

You’ve likely heard a lot about the Green New Deal, but you’d be forgiven if you’re not up to snuff on all the ins and outs of the meticulously-crafted policy. Pettifor, a British economist and a co-author of the Green New Deal, inspires and informs in this succinct book debunking claims that we can’t afford the legislation—in fact, she argues, we can’t afford not to pass it. Though the Green New Deal will require a complete overhaul of the international monetary system, Pettifor lays out a clear road map for the way forward, crafting a persuasive case for why we must act now. At just over two hundred pages, you could read this in an afternoon, then emerged a changed thinker.

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Want to read more books about climate change? Here’s a list to get started

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Want to read more about climate change but not sure where to start? As an environmental writer and self-proclaimed book geek, I get this question quite often from friends and family (not to mention from my own colleagues in the newsroom).

So we figured it was time for me to share a list of books I’ve found helpful, for newbies and experts alike. Some titles are older, others more recent — and each one is strikingly prescient on how climate change touches every aspect of our lives.

This list is by no means comprehensive, but consider it a snapshot of all the many ways you can connect more deeply with the issue. Perhaps it’s a practical guidebook on carbon footprints, or a sharp essay collection, or a rigorous assessment of how we relate to the natural world. I’ve also included a few novels at the end, in case fiction is more your jam.

Let’s start with nonfiction. Here are 16 books (listed in alphabetical order) that I find myself recommending, time and time again:

“All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis” edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson ( One World , 2020): Scientists, teachers, poets, journalists, activists and lawyers come together in this thought-provoking collection of essays, all written by women working at the forefront of climate action. Filled with compassion and nuance, this book offers audacious hope and much-needed inspiration.

“At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth” by Madeline Ostrander ( Henry Holt , 2022): Through on-the-ground stories and profound reflections, Ostrander weaves together vivid accounts of the fires and floods already reshaping four communities on the front lines of climate change (including in Richmond, Calif.). Lessons of resilience bring this book home, as we learn to adapt and reconsider how we want to live.

“Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction” by Michelle Nijhuis ( W.W. Norton , 2021): This book taught me so much about how the conservation movement came to be. It’s a critical — and elegantly written — examination of the western-centric systems guiding environmentalism today. Unsparing with the racism and colonialism baked into modern species protection, Nijhuis helps us understand how to avoid repeating the mistakes of our past as we reckon with our future.

“Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants” by Robin Wall Kimmerer ( Milkweed , 2013): People are a part of nature, not separate from nature, and this quiet but powerful book has shifted the way hundreds of thousands of people see the world. Kimmerer, who is a botanist, professor and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, braids Western science with Indigenous knowledge in a tender and mind-opening way. Originally published in 2013, the latest edition comes with a new introduction.

“The Carbon Footprint of Everything” by Mike Berners-Lee ( Greystone Books , 2022): What is the carbon footprint of flying from Los Angeles to Barcelona? How bad is your morning latte for the environment? This handy guidebook breaks down everyday life for the climate-conscious. You’ll learn quite a few facts (eating a U.S.-reared steak has about the same carbon impact as 100 bananas) and come away with a deeper understanding of how each of us can make a difference on this planet.

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“The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions” by Greta Thunberg ( Penguin Press, 2023): Thunberg , the young Swedish activist famously known for telling it like it is, has brought together a comprehensive and remarkably practical one-stop shop for all things climate. Wisdom from more than 100 scientists, engineers, economists, philosophers, activists, writers and community leaders fills these pages. There’s something in this book for everyone.

“Climate Change from the Streets: How Conflict and Collaboration Strengthen the Environmental Justice Movement” by Michael Méndez ( Yale University Press , 2020): Told through deeply researched stories from oft-overlooked communities in California, this book is a powerful primer on environmental justice. Méndez urges us to see how saving the planet and improving public health are inextricably linked — and how our existing systems so often ignore the people most harmed by climate change.

“The End of Nature” by Bill McKibben ( Random House, originally published in 1989): This is a classic, and yes, people have been sounding the alarm on climate change for decades. When I reread the book this summer, I was struck by just how much McKibben’s impassioned plea still holds. The survival of our planet calls for profoundly philosophical shifts in the way we relate to the natural world, and McKibben continues to offer a way forward.

“The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable” by Amitav Ghosh ( University of Chicago Press , 2016): Don’t be deterred by this book’s academic appearance. Ghosh, an award-winning novelist, takes a fascinating look at how literature and history (as well as politics) have sidestepped or grossly simplified the scale and urgency of climate change. By doing so, we have been conditioned to doubt stories that feel too apocalyptic. The climate crisis, as Ghosh explains, is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.

“The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration” by Jake Bittle ( Simon & Schuster , 2023): Where do you go after your town disappears in a wildfire? What happens to a drowning community after one too many floods? Climate change has already forced numerous people to move from the places they have long called home, and Bittle thoughtfully examines what this less-told story of climate migration means for all of us.

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“The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet” by Jeff Goodell ( Little, Brown , 2023): “Prescient” and “gripping” are two words that come to mind when describing Goodell’s latest book. Yes, you will feel a sense of dread as you learn about all the insidious ways extreme heat can upend our lives. But this is the reality, and Goodell guides us incisively with clear science and great storytelling.

“Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have” by Tatiana Schlossberg ( Balance , 2019): Balancing the call for individual actions, as well as the need for systemic change, is a tricky message to communicate. But in short, we need both. Schlossberg empowers each of us to rethink all the tangible ways we can make a difference. Above all, this book is about collective action — and the power we have as voters and consumers to drive meaningful change.

“The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet” by Michael E. Mann ( PublicAffairs , 2021): Mann hits hard on disinformation, exposing how corporations (led by the fossil fuel industry) have delayed climate action and deflected blame. He also holds no punches on the questionable narratives and arguments that have worked their way into the climate debate. This book is blunt, but you will come out of it more equipped to navigate your own feelings on various climate solutions.

“This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate” by Naomi Klein ( Simon & Schuster , 2014): Klein makes a piercing case that capitalism and saving the planet are incompatible. Through meticulously reported examples, she explains why letting go of a “free market” economy is critical to our survival — and how responding to climate change can be a catalyst to fixing long-broken systems. Start with “This Changes Everything” if you’re new to Klein’s work, and then check out her latest book, “ On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal .”

“Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future” by Elizabeth Kolbert ( Crown , 2021): For those of you wondering about geoengineering (such as turning carbon emissions into stone or shooting planet-cooling particles into the sky), this book, to put it in Kolbert’s words, is about “people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning author takes a hard look at human intervention, with sharp observations on what we stand to lose.

“What Can I Do? The Path From Climate Despair to Action” by Jane Fonda ( Penguin Books , 2020): Jane Fonda needs no introduction, and her spirited, no-nonsense crash course on climate change offers a number of pragmatic ways to help save the planet. Each chapter is filled with specific resources and advice on how to take action, and, as the book declares: “What Can I Do?” is not a wish list — it’s a to-do list.

Like fiction? Try these novels:

“A Children’s Bible” by Lydia Millet ( W.W. Norton , 2020): Slim but evocative, with darkly funny turns, this novel is hard to describe without giving too much away. Using a clever allegory, Millet , a prolific author and lifelong environmental writer, prompts us to reflect on the generational consequences of climate change.

“Cloud Cuckoo Land” by Anthony Doerr ( Scribner , 2021): This one’s a doozy, but trust that Doerr , author of the blockbuster novel “All the Light We Cannot See,” will take you on an epic and deeply imaginative journey. Through intersecting stories that span the past, present and future, Doerr brilliantly addresses climate change and the state of the world we are passing down to our children.

“Flight Behavior” by Barbara Kingsolver ( Harper Perennial , 2012): Nuanced and closely observed, this novel peels back the layers of climate change through monarch butterflies and a spirited young woman in rural Tennessee. Kingsolver (who just won a Pulitzer Prize this year for “Demon Copperhead”) writes with profound empathy from perspectives not usually seen in climate writing. Intricate themes of faith, denial and socioeconomic struggle intersect with the underlying story of environmental devastation.

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“Migrations” by Charlotte McConaghy ( Flatiron Books , 2020): In a near-future fraught with human disregard to nature, an ornithologist embarks on a harrowing mission to find the last Arctic terns on the planet. McConaghy writes beautifully — and with heart-wrenching clarity — about the landscapes and wildlife that we’re losing. But not all hope is lost in this gripping story about a world on the brink of collapse.

“The Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson ( Orbit , 2020): Set in the very near-future (think, 2025), this page-turner urges us to think about the climate crisis through the Ministry for the Future, a newly created agency whose mission is to advocate for the world’s future citizens. Robinson deftly integrates wonky details and environmental policy debates, so you’ll learn a lot in the process of reading such an enthralling and mind-expanding work of science fiction.

“Weather” by Jenny Offill ( Knopf , 2020): Another slim but mighty book that is well worth your time. Lizzie, a college librarian with a side hustle of answering doomsday emails, embodies both the anxieties of daily life as well as the mounting dread we feel when thinking about climate change. Brisk and urgent, punctuated with laugh-out-loud moments, this novel hits you with an immense range of emotion.

Ask a Reporter: Inside the project

What: Times reporters Rosanna Xia and Sammy Roth will discuss “Our Climate Change Challenge” during a live streaming conversation. City Editor Maria L. LaGanga moderates. When: Sept. 19 at 6 p.m. Pacific. Where: This free event will be live streaming. Sign up on Eventbrite for watch links and to share your questions and comments.

If the Golden State is going to lead the world toward a better, safer future, our political and business leaders — and the rest of us — will have to work harder to rewrite the California narrative. Here’s how we can push the state forward.

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Rosanna Xia is an environment reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting, and her award-winning book, “ California Against the Sea ,” has been praised as a poetic and mind-expanding exploration of what we stand to lose in the face of rising water.

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The Year You Finally Read a Book About Climate Change

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Selected by the editors of the Books and Climate Desks

April 19, 2020

P erhaps you prefer reading to escape reality, not confront it. But if the 50th anniversary of Earth Day has inspired you to decide that now’s the time to pick up a book about climate change, we’re here to help you find the right one for you.

I don’t even know where to start.

What We Know About Climate Change

by Kerry Emanuel

An M.I.T. climatologist and a conservative, Emanuel sounds the alarm in a measured and scientifically sound way, making clear what we know and what we don’t know. There is little panic in this slender book, but there is a lot of troubling information.

Emanuel specifically thought of his book as a way of offering ammunition to those trying to convince family members or friends who are skeptical or don’t understand the science.

“Young adults who are disputing this problem with their own parents or an uncle or something — they can hand the book to them and say, ‘Will you at least read this?’” Emanuel said in a 2013 interview with The Times. “One at a time, you might change minds.”

I just want to understand how we got here.

The End of Nature

by Bill McKibben

McKibben wrote this book in 1989 when global warming was still referred to with the more innocuous sounding phrase “the greenhouse effect.” It was an abstract worry in the future even for environmentalists, who were still reeling from the fight to save the ozone layer. For McKibben the crises were connected and spoke to a bigger problem: a disregard for nature and how humans were capable of harming it.

His book is a lament that nature has lost its independence. Even if everything could be done to stave off warming, McKibben writes, it would have to come from human ingenuity and depend on our intervention into natural processes. This is another sign that we have encroached too far — that nature itself is over, as McKibben puts it.

His only solution, one we certainly have not heeded in the decades since, is to take a step back, “to go no farther down the path we've been following.”

I’m ready for the hard truth. Don’t sugar-coat it.

The Sixth Extinction

by Elizabeth Kolbert

Reporting from the Andes, the Amazon rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef and her own backyard, Kolbert registers the impact of climate change on the life of our planet. What emerges is a picture of the sixth mass extinction, which threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all species on Earth within this century.

All the warnings are here, in Kolbert’s elegant, accessible prose: sea levels rising, deforestation, the dispersion of disease-carrying species. But she also digs deep, offering an intellectual history of “extinction” and placing in context the catastrophes ahead by grappling with how life on Earth ended and was regenerated in the distant past.

“By disrupting these systems,” Kolbert writes, “we’re putting our own survival in danger.”

You might also like: “ Field Notes From a Catastrophe ” by Elizabeth Kolbert

For the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, The New York Times is bringing you The Greenhouse, a five-part digital event series on climate change. Join us on our next live video call this Wednesday at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, where the Times Book Review editor Gal Beckerman and climate journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis will discuss this recommended list. They will also be joined by Amitav Ghosh, the author of "The Great Derangement."

Who saw this coming?

The Drowned World

by J.G. Ballard

With its vision of a London swamped by the rising Thames River and a warming planet leading to an urban landscape of lush tropical foliage, Ballard’s dystopian fantasy — written in 1962 — laid the groundwork for generations of climate-change fiction to come. The book imagines the dawning of a new geologic age like the one environmentalists now call the Anthropocene, with resulting changes to a broad swath of plant and animal species, humans very much among them.

The plot involves a looter who refuses to leave London even as the water grows hotter, and an expedition of scientists trying to determine whether civilization might someday take root again. “But the main action is in the deeper reaches of the mind,” Kingsley Amis wrote in a 1963 review of the book for The Observer, “the main merit the extraordinary imaginative power with which whatever inhabits these reaches is externalized in concrete form. The book blazes with images, striking in themselves and yet continuously meaningful.”

You might also like: Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy

I’m fascinated by how people behave when things get bad.

by John Lanchester

Lanchester’s novel, published in 2019, elegantly and chillingly imagines how current political attitudes might play out as the repercussions of climate change grow more severe. With sea levels rising and extreme weather events increasingly common, an island nation that closely resembles Britain has built a concrete wall around its entire perimeter to hold back both the water and the desperate tide of refugees from harder-hit areas.

The narrator, Joseph Kavanagh, has embarked on his mandatory two-year service as a “Defender,” guarding a section of the wall against outsiders even as he falls in love and mulls in restrained language about what the future will bring. That includes the threat of invasion, as a government official tells the Defenders at a pivotal moment: “The shelter blew away, the waters rose to the higher ground, the ground baked, the crops died, the ledge crumbled, the well dried up. The safety was an illusion. … The Others are coming.”

Did we learn anything from Hurricane Katrina?

Salvage the Bones

by Jesmyn Ward

Set in the days leading up to and immediately after Hurricane Katrina, this National Book Award-winning novel follows a black family in Mississippi as it prepares for, and recovers from, disaster. Esch, a pregnant teenager, is at the center of the story. A fierce, mythology-loving young woman, she’s quick to connect the events of her own life with those of the Greeks.

For all the devastation at its core, this is an insistently hopeful book. As our reviewer put it: “Like every good myth, at its heart, the book is salvific; it wants to teach you how to wait out the storm and swim to safety.”

I live on the coast. How scared should I be?

The Water Will Come

by Jeff Goodell

“Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity,” Goodell writes at the start of his book, published in 2017. “It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine.” This book takes us there, to a place where we can picture Miami completely underwater.

Goodell, who has written other books about climate change, here travels the world to cities like Lagos, Rotterdam and Venice that are at risk of vanishing if the rise in water levels follows current projections.

Maybe the most interesting element he explores is people’s inability to see the rising tide. Talking to an influential developer in Miami, Goodell asks if he’s worried about the future when the ocean takes over. He isn’t, he says. “Besides,” the developer adds, “by that time, I’ll be dead, so what does it matter?”

New York is the center of my universe.

New York 2140

by Kim Stanley Robinson

It can be easy to forget that the island of Manhattan is just that, an island — but as rising waters encroach on coastal lands everywhere, life in the city has the potential to change dramatically. Robinson’s novel, published in 2017, envisions a financial district with canals in place of streets and an uptown crowded with skyscrapers as the wealthy move to higher ground.

A thought experiment with an ensemble cast, the novel is less concerned with a conventional plot than with showing a slice of life across various classes, with particular attention to the workings of the economy and other social systems. Maybe the most remarkable feature of the story is how little it imagines life changing, despite the drastically revised landscape: The building super works on repairing submerged apartments, the police inspector looks for missing squatters and the hedge funder bets on mortgages that are (literally) under water.

What’s happening to the Great Lakes?

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

by Dan Egan

Egan tells the story of the Great Lakes as a series of radical ecological mutations. Ever since the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, and accelerating after the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959, the lakes have experienced a parade of ever more villainous invaders, from the vampire-like lamprey to a small bug-eyed fish called the alewife. The attempts to defeat them only led to a series of unintended consequences that made matters worse.

This is a classic case of human meddling. Lake Erie in particular provides water to 11 million people and experiences more debilitating algal blooms than any of the other Great Lakes. It is suffering because of the presence of life-sucking mussels that have made their way around the lakes on the hulls of speedboats.

All this means, Egan writes, that we could soon experience “a natural and public health disaster unlike anything this country has experienced in modern times.”

You might also like: “ The Ice at the End of the World ” by Jon Gertner

I know it’s all politics. So who’s to blame?

Losing Earth

by Nathaniel Rich

How did we get here, and more importantly, how long have we known it was going to get this bad? Rich’s book comes to the shocking conclusion that, as he puts it, “nearly every conversation we have in 2019 about climate change was being held in 1979.”

This is a history of what could have been. Rich frames his narrative through a central character, Rafe Pomerance, a Friends of the Earth lobbyist who first came across the issue of global warming in a 1979 E.P.A. report. The problem was met with immediate concern, even by conservatives. But then? The initial clarity and momentum was lost. Rich sees politicians and energy companies as bearing most of the blame.

The sad fact we’re left with is that even though the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988, a hopeful convergence, more carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere since then than in all the preceding years’ of history of civilization.

Someone must be profiting from climate change. Where’s the money?

by McKenzie Funk

In this deeply reported 2014 book, Funk covers the globe to find the stories of those companies and countries that are responding to global warming in the most craven way imaginable. Rather than search for solutions, they are imagining the best means for making money off the changing contours of the planet.

Shell and Chevron are investing billions in oil fields in the Arctic, where retreating ice has created more exploitable land. China and speculators from Wall Street are setting up huge farms in African countries to take advantage of coming food shortages. Then there is the private security industry, which is gearing up to help prevent the movement of climate refugees with improved walls and surveillance equipment.

It’s a sad tale, which Funk tries to mitigate by also profiling those companies pouring their energies into creative responses to these situations.

I’d like a novel that taps into my current, IRL dread.

by Jenny Offill

Lizzie, the narrator of Offill’s latest novel, is a mother who’s juggling fears on multiple levels: concern for her brother, a recovering addict; financial worries; and general apprehension about the direction of the world. This taxonomy might feel familiar to many readers: How can you reconcile your personal, daily inconveniences with the fear that the world as we know it is ending?

Our reviewer pointed out the book’s narrative dilemma, asking: “What happens when the horror of climate change gets lodged so deep under our skin we can’t escape it any longer? What happens when an author manages to translate this horror from an abstraction to a gripping tale of immediate particulars?”

Ultimately, this slim book is an “attempt to tell a story about climate change that carries the same visceral force as our private emotional dramas — that is, in fact, inseparable from them.”

What are some future scenarios?

The Madaddam Trilogy

by Margaret Atwood

Atwood’s terrifying, though often very funny, series imagines the societal, economic and biological fallout from an ecological disaster right down to glowing rabbits, labs with names like the RejoovenEsense Compound and pseudo-foods called ChickieNobs.

“Oryx and Crake,” the first book, focuses on a character named Snowman, who makes his way as one of the last remaining humans in a post-pandemic world. “The Year of the Flood,” the next novel, essentially retells that story from other perspectives, giving Snowman’s backstory, set against the backdrop of the arrival of a disaster long feared by a religious cult. And as our reviewer wrote of “MaddAddam,” the finale: It “lights a fire from the fears of our age, then douses it with hope for the planet’s survival. But that survival may not include us.”

I’m a dystopian. Prepare me for the worst.

The Fifth Season

by N.K. Jemisin

This fantasy novel, the first in Jemisin’s astonishing Broken Earth trilogy, imagines social collapse going hand-in-hand with geologic catastrophe on a planet as violent as the people who inhabit it. With the world’s single supercontinent in the process of dividing, and climate change wrought by vast clouds of volcanic ash, the ruling elites work to subjugate a minority population that has some ability to influence planetary events.

In The Times, the science writer Annalee Newitz praised the book for exploring a science that is “oddly neglected in science fiction: the geophysics of exoplanets. Though we have plenty of stories about the physics of space travel and the biology of alien life, very few authors tackle the actual rocky, gassy, molten stuff that planets are made of. Jemisin does it brilliantly, crafting a tale that is both intensely moving and scientifically complex.” The book was the first by an African-American writer to win the Hugo Award for best novel, but not the last: Each of its sequels also won, making Jemisin the first author ever to win the Hugo for every book in a trilogy.

I need help arguing with my denialist uncle.

Merchants of Doubt

by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway

Two historians of science, Oreskes and Conway, take a step back to understand the ways that science itself can be co-opted. They begin by looking at how the tobacco industry got scientists to refute studies that linked smoking and lung cancer, and move on to the pernicious role that right-wing think tanks have played in undermining the scientific data about acid rain and the ozone layer.

The latest and perhaps most dangerous of these campaigns has been waged against climate change. Oreskes and Conway detail how little known but well-funded groups like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have managed to sow doubt on behalf of industries that don’t have an interest in confronting global warming.

The authors also have another warning: In the interest of balance, journalists have sometimes propagated ideas that are false and harmful, inadvertently helping to spread confusion.

I’m just an old-fashioned tree-hugger.

The Overstory

by Richard Powers

Trees are the real heroes of this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a series of interconnected stories that follow characters from 1800s New York to the timber wars of the Pacific Northwest. Whether it’s an immigrant family staking its new life on the American chestnut or an 11-year-old coder who has an unfortunate encounter with a Spanish oak, humans’ connections to trees make up the emotional core of this book.

As our our reviewer, Barbara Kingsolver, wrote of Powers: “Using the tools of story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size.”

You might also like: “ Barkskins ” by Annie Proulx

What about the animals?

Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

The sudden, unusual appearance of monarch butterflies rattles a rural Tennessee farm town, and a rift soon opens up in the community: Religious residents see the insect swarms as a sign from God, while others are drawn toward scientific explanations. Dellarobia, a young mother in an unhappy marriage, is one of the latter. When an entomologist comes to town to study the butterflies, he hires Dellarobia to work alongside him, offering her a chance to expand and improve her life.

Kingsolver, who was a scientist before she began writing novels, seamlessly weaves together the story of a biological aberration and a woman’s coming of age.

I only have time for one canonical read.

Parable of the Sower

by Octavia Butler

It’s 2024 California and the situation is dire: Water is scarce, communities are walled off and a pill called “pyro” gives immense pleasure to people who start fires. As one character puts it: “People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.”

This 1993 classic is composed of diary entries by an African-American teenager, Lauren, who’s determined to make her way in this new world. The daughter of a Baptist minister, she develops her own belief system, Earthseed, and has “hyperempathy,” which causes her to experience other people’s pain and pleasure as if it were her own. Eventually, she’s forced to flee her home and head north, accompanied by a group of survivors who rally behind her vision for a better world.

What will inspire the climate activist of the future?

Our House Is on Fire: Greta Thunberg's Call to Save the Planet

by Jeanette Winter

With charming artwork and straightforward language, this picture book, aimed at children aged 3 to 8, uses the inspiring life story of the young climate activist Greta Thunberg to help kids understand climate change — and to give them a sense of what they can do about it.

By following Thunberg’s story — of a girl who at 15 decided she wasn’t going to be complacent about the crises she kept hearing about — young people can see how powerful an individual can be when they decide to act.

Though it’s aimed at informing and motivating, the book, like Thunberg, is also about urgency. Her dramatic words guide the tone: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic … I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”

You might also like: “Science Comics: Wild Weather: Storms, Meteorology, and Climate” by MK Reed and Jonathan Hill

What will our grandchildren think of us?

The Great Derangement

by Amitav Ghosh

Ghosh gets right to the heart of the matter, imagining how our great grandchildren will view us and offering a disturbing vision: We are deranged. Our inability to deal with a catastrophe we can’t see but know is coming indicates a failure of imagination.

The interesting contribution of this book, which comes out of a series of lectures Ghosh delivered at the University of Chicago in 2015, is his indictment of the culture-makers. It has become unfashionable to seem too concerned. To make climate change the theme or setting of a novel, Ghosh writes, is “to court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence.”

His bigger point is that we need a change of narrative. But to do this means that those who make our narratives need to lead the way, to bring their talents of storytelling to bear on what is, he writes, no less than an “existential danger.”

What I can do right now?

The Story of More

by Hope Jahren

Jahren, the author of the acclaimed memoir “Lab Girl,” turns her attention to climate change and specifically the responsibility we each bear for contributing to the problem. It’s not a scolding book — Jahren approaches the problem from the perspective of her own personal life, her youth in the Midwest and her decision to move to Oslo in 2016 because of the state of scientific research in America.

She looks at the way our decisions about what we eat affect the planet as a whole. What concerns her is the divide between those who consume and waste more and those who live on much less. By looking at the global disparities, she comes to stark conclusions about who is the cause of the problem and what could be a solution.

As she puts it, “What was only a faint drumbeat as I began to research this book now rings in my head like a mantra: Use Less and Share More.”

You might also like: “ Fashionopolis ” by Dana Thomas

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Climate Education

13 must-read books on the environment and climate change.

• 13 must-read books on…

August 27, 2019

As vacations end and many parts of the world prepare to head back to school and work, a little reeducation may be in order.

We recently shared our favorite books for budding environmentalists , but if your tastes skew a little older, we’ve got you covered. Earth Day Network pulsed its staff for their favorite books on the environment, and here’s what they’re recommending this season.

Below are some of our favorites, covering a range of topics, including sea-level rise, species protection, plastics pollution and the climate refugee crisis. Hey, we never said they were beach reads…

Rising | Elizabeth Rush Dispatches from the New American Shore In “Rising,” Elizabeth Rush takes readers to the physical and cultural edges of the country, from the marginalized and forgotten citizens of places like Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, to the glass castles of Facebook and Google in Silicon Valley. As high tide and massive storms become the new normal, those at the coasts, especially those with lower incomes, will be most at risk of flooding and all that comes with it. At stake are not just coastlines; entire communities stand to lose their homes and lifestyles to climate change, becoming the first of many climate refugees. The question is not a matter of if but when we lose these lands, and Rush explores how we cope with this knowledge. — Brandon Pytel, Communications Manager/Writer

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The Ends of the World | Peter Brannen Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

As we stare down the barrel of our own (man-made) catastrophe, science journalist Pete Brannen takes us on a walk down memory lane over millions of years to examine the planet’s five mass extinctions. With paleontologists as our protagonists, “The Ends of the World” uses fossil records across the globe to autopsy our five mass extinctions and portend our future. While the topic might sound as dry as a fossilized trilobite, Brannen’s wit may leave you chuckling aloud, from Ordovician to Cretaceous — call it rock and droll.

— Justine Sullivan, Director, Communications and Digital Media

How to Give Up Plastic | Will McCallum A Guide to Changing the World, One Plastic Bottle at a Time

Plastics are everyone’s problem, and unless we as individuals, governments and companies all share responsibility, we won’t solve ever solve it. In this book, Will McCallum, head of oceans at Greenpeace UK, frames the current state of global plastic pollution and the environmental consequences of our throwaway, single-use culture. Part history, part guide, “How to Give Up Plastic” helps us understand our plastics addiction while giving us practical, ambitious steps to correct it.

— Brandon Pytel

Storming the Wall | Todd Miller Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security

It’s time to open our eyes to the economic and political implications of climate change. In “Storming the Wall,” Todd Miller tells the story of climate change refugees that have been forced from their homes and paints a larger picture of how wealthy countries like the United States are putting up walls, militarizing borders and bloating detention centers to restrict those seeking refuge and maintain the status quo of the haves and have nots.

— Michelle Pawliger, Director, Food and Environment Program

The Uninhabitable Earth | David Wallace-Wells Life After Warming

Need to get up-to-speed on our climate emergency? “The Uninhabitable Earth” may be the book for you. In 200-odd pages, columnist and editor David Wallace-Wells deftly unpacks the past, present and future of life in the time of anthropogenic global warming. Remarkably, Wallace-Wells’s prose manages to convey not only the urgency (and anxiety) of our environmental crisis, but the opportunity we still have to seize the solutions right in front of us and turn things around. First you’ll get scared straight; then you’ll get straight to work.

— Justine Sullivan

Losing Earth | Nathaniel Rich A Recent History

“Losing Earth” explores the environmental decade that never was: 1979–89, when we knew all we needed to know about global warming to stop it. Tracing the political and scientific history of the climate crisis, Nathaniel Rich reports how the public, with scientific backing, lined up to tackle climate change — until a coordinated campaign by lobbyists, corporations and politicians cast doubt on the whole thing. We all know what happened next. To understand how we got to where we are, we must look to the shortcomings of our past. “Losing Earth” does just that.

Don't Even Think About It | George Marshall Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change

Why is our response to climate change so woeful? George Marshall explores how we make choices to act or ignore. And when it comes to climate change, it’s usually the latter. Climate change is a “wicked problem,” Marshall writes, a complicated challenge with no clear enemy and no silver-bullet solution. To tackle this problem and mobilize action, “Don’t Even Think About It” argues we need science, but just as importantly, we need emotional, compelling narratives.

— Nick Nuttall, International Strategic Communications Director  

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? | Frans de Waal

People have long assumed that complex thought and emotion were exclusive to humanity. Primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal challenges this assumption, outlining the evolution of human understanding of animal cognition and exploring case studies of animal problem solving, tool use and social structures. This book is a source of provocative research findings, a history and critique of the field and a personal narrative of de Waal’s own career evolution. The result drives readers to reevaluate what it means to be intelligent while deepening their appreciation for the unique and diverse talents across the animal kingdom.

— Kira Heeschen, Education Coordinator

Salvage the Bones | Jesmyn Ward

Facts and figures may drive policy, but they rarely stir emotion with the strength that pure human storytelling can do. “Salvage the Bones” is the only work of fiction on this list, but author Jesmyn Ward comes from a place of enormous truth to tell the story of the Batiste family — bolstered by community, defined by pride and threatened by extreme heat and the battering of ever-stronger hurricanes. Like the book’s protagonist, 15-year-old Esch, Ward grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and lived through Hurricane Katrina, a category-5 hurricane that pummeled communities already made vulnerable by wetland degradation, local land subsistence and flooding. Ward’s prose rises above the cut-and-dried news coverage of the time to tell the story with a dignity and intensity that demonstrates all that we can create together and all that we stand to lose by climate change.

Where the Water Goes | David Owen Life and Death Along the Colorado River

The Colorado River provides water for nearly 40 million people, but with climate change and booming populations, this river’s tap is close to running dry. David Owen takes us on a journey down this prized waterway, from the snowmelt atop the Rocky Mountains to the dried-up deserts of Mexico. After nearly a century of division by lawyers and politicians, overuse by farmers and cities and redirection by engineers and bureaucrats, the Colorado River’s resilience is waning. We’ve created this mess, but we can also pull ourselves out of it, Owen argues, before the tap runs completely dry.

This Radical Land | Daegan Miller A Natural History of Dissent

When most still believed the natural world was a limitless resource for the taking, early environmentalists saw an ideal in which humans could coexist with the natural world, rather than exploiting it. Through a series of essays, Daegan Miller highlights efforts to bring together ideals of environmental justice, conservation and sustainable development at a time in history when American progress was viewed through the lens of unhindered extraction and expansion. This journey into the earliest beginnings of environmentalism is a reminder that radical, innovative ideas have always been a part of the effort to live in harmony with our planet.

— David Ayer, End Plastic Pollution Campaign Manager

Merchants of Doubt | Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway

In “Merchants of Doubt,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway draw a direct line between the tobacco industry's initial response to secondhand smoke and our contemporary way of thinking about science, specifically global warming. As the books explains, a few industry-backed scientists led a coordinated campaign to cast doubt on science: Cherry-picking facts, misrepresenting views and celebrating unregulated capitalism as inherently American. It's a common theme in our history and one that is still playing out today: Thanks to a few very powerful people, facts have been misconstrued and the public misguided in favor of unregulated, corporate-friendly ventures. Meanwhile, global warming has accelerated and so, too, has our own doubt about it.

COOL: Women Leaders Reversing Global Warming | Paola Gianturco and Avery Sangster

Women and girl leaders around the world are guiding organizations that are reducing – and over time reversing – the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming.

- Learn More

Want more book recommendations?

Check out these 12 books curated by climate activists.

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The 10 best books to understand the climate crisis, according to experts

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• Educating yourself about climate change can help you evaluate your relationship with the planet.
• We talked to climate scientists Elizabeth M. Cook and Logan Brenner for their book recommendations.
• These books cover climate activism as well as how cities, food, and fashion impact global warming.

Reading news about how we have less than a decade to try and prevent irreversible, devastating climate change can be daunting, especially if we want to find ways to limit our carbon footprint or get involved in the fight to save our planet. 

I reached out to climate scientists Elizabeth M. Cook, Ph.D. , editor of the book " Resilient Urban Futures ," and Logan Brenner, Ph.D. – both assistant professors at Barnard College – to get their recommendations on books for people who want to better understand the current climate crisis as well as how they can live more sustainable lives. Many of these books also touch on how climate change affects individual communities around the world.

If you ever feel hopeless about what you can do to help protect our environment, you can spend time reading these books — and also share them with your friends and family if they're struggling to grasp the dangers of the climate crisis. 

10 great books on climate change, according to climate scientists:

An overview of climate change, urban development, "the sixth extinction: an unnatural history".

Growing up, many of us learned about dinosaurs going extinct, which may be where we're heading. In "The Sixth Extinction , " journalist Elizabeth Kolbert argues that climate change may be leading us to a man-made sixth extinction by drawing upon past and more present extinction events. "It explains how carbon emissions and toxins released by the burning of fossil fuels are changing the planet in ways that could cause millions of species to go extinct," Cook said. 

"The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What's Possible in the Age of Warming"

Written by journalist Eric Holthaus, "The Future Earth" looks at what positive outcomes could occur if we do the work now to fight climate change. "[It] is a hopeful book that illustrates for readers what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions to address the climate crisis," Brenner said. "It features engaging interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists." If you're feeling hopeless, this could be an important book for you to see how the world taking drastic steps can save our planet. 

"All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis"

"All We Can Save" is an anthology of essays highlighting the voices of women fighting climate change on the frontline – which may inspire you to take justice in your own hands as well. "This book is my go-to source for a diverse range of perspectives on the complex problem of climate change and I love that the contributors all embrace a justice-oriented approach to problem-solving," Brenner said. 

"The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success: Overcoming Myths that Hinder Progress"

This book offers guidance on what people can do individually in their daily lives to curb their carbon footprint and highlights essential actions we should fight for, including phasing out cars that use gasoline. "By identifying essential actions and policies, [Jaccard] ensures we won't be paralyzed by how daunting the problem of climate change can seem or waste time pursuing ineffective efforts," Brenner said.

"Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change"

In "Extreme Cities," Dawson outlines how different cities around the world are taking steps to protect people from climate change-related disasters, including by relocating their inhabitants as a consequence of cities' contribution to climate change. This book outlines the unique threat that climate change poses to these populated areas, especially those near bodies of water. "Using examples from New York, Alaska, and Holland, the author describes how the world's megacities, most of which are located in coastal zones, are causing as well as dealing with the repercussions of increased carbon emissions and rising sea levels," Cook explained.

"Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility"

Climate change and racism are closely interlinked. In this book, environmental sociologist Taylor details how the locations of hazardous facilities in low-income largely BIPOC communities have been contaminated, threatening the health of its residents in cities like New Orleans. "It draws on historical and contemporary case studies from across the country to explain why poor and minority neighborhoods are the ones most affected by pollution ," Brenner said. 

"Our Changing Menu: Climate Change and the Foods We Love and Need"

Food is very closely woven into many cultures around the world, which can make sacrificing certain types of food difficult. However, as "Our Changing Menu" highlights, we need to act now in order to preserve food for the people that follow us. "It describes what happens next and offers useful tips for reducing food waste as we seek to make better, more sustainable choices that will preserve the planet for future generations," Cook said. 

"Hot, Hungry Planet: The Fight to Stop a Global Food Crisis in the Face of Climate Change"

 In "Hot Hungry Planet," Palmer focuses on ways to support food security and resilience due to ongoing climate change. She also highlights case studies of how different areas around the world – India, sub-Saharan Africa, the United States, Latin America, the Middle East, and Indonesia – can tackle socioeconomic inequality and world hunger. " Without sustainable agriculture, preservation of biodiversity, and thoughtful attention to a swelling global population , it's clear that humans will not be successful in staving off the worst effects of climate change," Brenner said. 

"Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion"

Many people buy fast fashion because it does not take a toll on our budgets, but the short time we wear these clothes can be a burden for our environment. "[This book] clearly illustrates the toll that our obsession with cheap clothes – which we typically wear just a few times before discarding – is having on our society, our environment, and our economic well-being," Brenner said.

"Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes"

In "Fashionopolis," Thomas details the toll fast fashion has on our environment and the abuse that workers in this industry often endure. "It gets into not only the sustainability problems caused by fast fashion, but also the human rights abuses and economic devastation," Brenner said. This book is a reminder that the types of clothes that we buy can have far-reaching consequences. 

• Main content

What to read to understand climate change

Seven texts that explain how the climate is changing—and what to do about it.

C LIMATE CHANGE touches everything. It is reshaping weather systems and coastlines, altering where crops can be grown , which diseases thrive , and how armies fight . Rising temperatures affect geopolitics, migration, ecosystems and the economy. It will remake societies and the world. In November, delegates will flock to Egypt for COP 27, this year’s edition of the annual UN climate confab. The science, economics and politics of climate change are so legion, complicated and interconnected they can be hard to get a handle on. These six books and one report offer an excellent introduction to the climate crisis.

What We Know About Climate Change. By Kerry Emanuel. MIT Press; 88 pages; $15.95. Blackwells; £11.99

This primer—first published in 2007 and substantially updated since, most recently in 2018—is an accessible introduction to the science of climate change . Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist and meteorologist at MIT , canters through how and why the Earth’s systems changed in the past, how humans have affected them by burning fossil fuels, and describes the main unanswered questions in climate science. He also summarises the politics of climate change. Though Mr Emanuel is a self-described conservative, he is no partisan. He criticises politicians of all stripes for failing to rise to the enormous challenge climate change represents.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. By Elizabeth Kolbert. Picador; 302 pages; $15.99. Bloomsbury; £12.99

The fact that climate change is causing change and damage to the planet’s biodiversity is widely known. But the great extent and potentially catastrophic consequences of this crisis are not. Human societies depend on healthy ecosystems, and damage to them poses as great a risk as any other feature of climate change . In “The Sixth Extinction” Elizabeth Kolbert, of the New Yorker magazine, documents Earth’s five previous mass extinctions and looks at evidence that another is underway. She presents a variety of case studies, including of bats killed off by fungus, coral reefs weakened and wasted by ocean acidification, and the ever-decreasing numbers of amphibians. The result is, somehow, simultaneously uplifting and depressing. It is a reminder of the breadth and beauty of life on the planet, as well as its ongoing devastation. (Read our full review , from 2014.)

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. By Bill Gates. Knopf; 272 pages; $26.95. Allen Lane; £20

Unlike Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, two tech billionaires obsessed with the idea of settling space, Bill Gates’s response to the climate crisis is more down to earth. One of the world’s most influential philanthropists, Mr Gates thinks that green innovation must accelerate significantly if the costs of climate change are to be manageable. He writes sensibly about the low-carbon technologies that he thinks have the most potential, and the ways in which they should be implemented. He is keen on nuclear power , decarbonising electricity and particularly bullish on carbon pricing –all of which are increasingly gaining traction. None of his arguments is particularly new, but that is part of their attraction. They are realistic, considered suggestions on how countries and businesses might organise themselves in the face of a monumental challenge, offered by someone with first-hand experience of changing the world. (Read our full review , from 2021.)

Climate Justice. By Mary Robinson. Bloomsbury Publishing; 176 pages; $16 and £9.99

After serving as Ireland’s first female president and the UN ’s High Commissioner on Human Rights, Mary Robinson set up an NGO that focuses mostly on improving lives in Africa. Doing so, she says, taught her just how disproportionately climate change affects the world’s poorest, who are least responsible for causing it. In this book, Ms Robinson tells the stories of people whose lives and livelihoods have been harmed by rising temperatures. The issues it raises about international justice are particularly worth thinking about ahead of COP 27, given that many delegates to the conference want to discuss whether and how much compensation rich countries should pay for the global warming their emissions have caused .

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report: Summaries for policymakers

Working Group I: Physical science (published August 2021) Working Group II: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability (published February 2022) Working Group III: Mitigation (published April 2022) Every few years since 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ) has released encyclopaedic reports assessing the state of climate science. The sixth looked at the physical science , the impacts of climate change and possibilities for mitigation . These are remarkable works of scientific collaboration by hundreds of authors. Pithier summaries of the report are negotiated and signed off by policymakers—sometimes presenting watered-down versions of the main reports’ findings. Their conclusions are nonetheless stark: climate change is widespread, rapid and intensifying and the world must quickly and completely curtail greenhouse-gas emissions to avert catastrophe. The reports also propose emergency policies that might mitigate or limit the damage done by extreme warming. They are an essential guide to the scientific consensus on climate change.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline. By Andreas Malm. Verso Books; 208 pages; $19.95 and £10.99

Despite its eye-catching title, this book is not a how-to guide to terrorism. Yet it is an impassioned argument for climate activists to move beyond non-violent protests and to damage the infrastructure that underpins the fossil-fuel economy. The author, a Swedish academic, does not advise hurting people. He offers an account of what has, and has not, been achieved by climate resistance , especially by protesters in rich countries. He looks at massive sit-ins in Europe in the early 2000s; demonstrations against oil pipelines led by Native Americans, such as the one at Standing Rock; youth activism whipped up by Greta Thunberg and her peers; as well as the newer incarnations of climate groups including Extinction Rebellion. Even for those who disapprove of “How to Blow Up a Pipeline”, it is a useful guide to the noisiest climate activist voices.

The Ministry for the Future. By Kim Robinson. Orbit; 576 pages; $30. Little, Brown; £20

Climate change is not an easy subject for novelists . It is most often tackled through science fiction, which inevitably makes the issue seem removed from reality. “The Ministry for the Future”, Kim Robinson’s sprawling, wonkish novel, readdresses that problem. Set in the near future, it is by no means far-fetched. Fatal levels of heat and humidity—which in the book’s terrifying opening kill some 20m people across India’s northern plains—are becoming more common in the real world. Mr Robinson’s tale, which revolves around a United Nations agency given the task of averting total climate catastrophe, is also notable for its focus on diplomacy and international co-operation—as frustrating and slow as they might be—alongside flashier technological solutions. It is a book that helps the reader to think about the consequences of climate change and the messy, imperfect ways humanity might respond to it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Also try:

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World. By Oliver Morton. Princeton University Press; 440 pages; $16.95. Granta; £12.99

As the pace of climate change quickens, so too do the more outlandish discussions of how it might be averted. Among the most controversial suggestions for dealing with climate change is geoengineering, in which humans wilfully intervene in climate processes to bring temperatures down. In this book one of our senior editors discusses the science and history of these strategies, and their potential implications, including ethical challenges that would arise if they were attempted.

Our own correspondents and editors write regularly about climate change. A lengthy article from 2021 considered the challenges of stabilising the climate . More recently an article on Asia’s energy transition (from October 2022) followed another lengthy one on the general costs of shifting to cleaner sources of power . This one looked at the challenges of measuring emissions and more.

Correction (October 31st, 2022) : An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Mary Robinson as Ireland’s first female prime minister. She was the country’s first female president. No woman has ever served as taoiseach. Sorry.

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From Naomi Klein to Barbara Kingsolver, these authors explain the consequences of our warming planet — and imagine its future.

BuzzFeed News Reporter

BuzzFeed Books recently asked Goodreads about books on climate change and the environment — both fiction and nonfiction — that its users have loved. Here are 17 of the highest-rated and most popular titles.

1. this changes everything: capitalism vs. the climate by naomi klein.

Naomi Klein's provocative book unveils the myths surrounding the climate change debate and explores how the "free market" is holding us back from important changes.

Promising review: "Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything is absolutely essential for understanding, confronting, and meeting the challenges of the 21st century. [...] I am very inspired by this book and I cannot wait for others to read it and react to it." — Chris

Get it from Amazon for $14.32 , Barnes & Noble for $18.99 , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

2. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

Merchants of Doubt follows a group of high-level scientists and advisers who have purposefully misled the public, denying evidence of climate change in an effort to placate corporate and political interests.

Promising review: "Exceptional. Put this book at the very top of your reading list. The authors provide a clear, stunning, and engaging history of how a handful of scientists were able to keep doubt alive during every occasion in which scientific evidence threatened to cut into a corporation's profit or a politician's proposed policy." — Charlene

Get it from Amazon for $11.39+ , Barnes & Noble for $19+ , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

3. Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island by Earl Swift

Earl Swift provides a thorough, intimate look at the small, tight-knit community of Tangier Island, Virginia — and how that community is responding to its destruction by the effects of climate change.

Promising review: "A well-told story about the watermen of the Chesapeake Bay and the blue crabs and oysters that sustain them. Swift does a remarkable job of explaining the character of the families and their community on this remote island. He paints a vivid portrait of the perils they face from their work — and from climate change, although, despite acknowledging the incessant shrinking of their island, they do not accept the notion of sea level rise. Recommended for anyone with an interest in the Bay and the historic watermen who live there." — Paul Goldberg

Get it from Amazon for $15.93 , Barnes & Noble for $24.64 , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

4. Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas

In Six Degrees, Mark Lynas sketches out what the real, tangible effects of our planet's warming will be, degree by degree — from the loss of coral reefs and mountain glaciers to, ultimately at 6 degrees, the elimination of most life.

Promising review: "This is the most frightening book I've ever read. I mean that as a resounding endorsement. [...] It should be required reading for anyone who thinks they have an opinion on climate change. It is happening and it is terrifying. [...] Lynas reminds us repeatedly that it's not too late to do something about it. Let's listen to him." — D.J. Cockburn

Get it from Amazon for $13.78+ , Barnes & Noble for $16.95+ , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

5. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

Prominent novelist Amitav Ghosh interrogates our seeming inability to fully grasp or reckon with the scope of climate change, looking specifically at the dearth of examinations of its repercussions in literary fiction.

Promising review: "If I had to suggest to anyone a single book about climate change, it would be The Great Derangement . I have never read someone so succinctly, eloquently, and urgently explain the roots — capitalism and imperialism — of the climate crisis, and how those roots grow up into the forest of our culture/popular imagination. [...] Ghosh confirms my worst fears — i.e. that the politics of the spectacle have no power to end the systems that perpetuate climate crisis — with a clear, moral force. Then, once I was enwrapped in his brilliant and devastating blanket of prose, Ghosh also managed to insert a tiny, tiny bit of hope." — Easton Smith

Get it from Amazon for $14.04+ , Barnes & Noble for $15+ , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

6. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan

Dan Egan examines the ongoing threats against the Great Lakes — which hold 20% of the world's supply of fresh water — and the catastrophic effects of their destruction.

Promising review: "If you care about the environment and sustainability, you must read this book. Even if you live thousands of miles away from these North American freshwater marvels, this book makes the case why we should all care about the impacts of invasive species, eutrophication, and the larger issues of climate change and access to fresh water. An unparalleled work of reportage and science writing." — Lauren

Get it from Amazon for $12.19+ , Barnes & Noble for $17.95 +, or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

7. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

In its long, long history, our planet has experienced five periods of mass extinction, each of which dramatically decreased the diversity of life. Elizabeth Kolbert contemplates the idea of a sixth extinction — the result of climate change — and the ways in which human beings are responsible for changing life on earth in a way no other species has.

Promising review: "The writing style is fluent and coherent, and the combination of the topics to give a holistic view before the tragic conclusion was suspenseful (yes, although it is non-fiction) and very well done. [...] This is more than a science book. It's also a cautionary tale. It's bringing context to what we've done to the world so far, and what we'll probably continue doing to it, and what the outcome will likely be. It therefore also provides the answer for an alternative. A very important book that I wish more people would read." — Trish

Get it from Amazon for $10.87 +, Barnes & Noble for $15.30+ , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

8. The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery

Tim Flannery pulls no punches in this call to arms, explaining not only the history and likely future of climate change, but also specific actions we can take to improve our dangerous reality.

Promising review: "A well written, scientifically-based description of climate change. Flannery writes beautifully, keeping the reader engaged as he explains some of the science, uncertainties and dangers of climate change. Definitely a nice way to digest the info if you're a non-scientist. A nice reminder to scientists on how to communicate the science to others." — Jenwah

Get it from Amazon for $11.02 , Barnes & Noble for $17 , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

9. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben argues we've already created a new, irreversibly changed planet in Eaarth — one that's "recognizable but fundamentally different." Now, he explains, our survival depends on our ability to change our own actions — the actions that led to the already present destruction.

Promising review: "[ Eaarth is] an excellent, comprehensive look at the damage we are causing to our planet. The author goes into detail about how things are changing here on Earth due purely to the actions of mankind, and as a result, we are now living on a planet different from the one we evolved on; he calls this 'new' planet 'Eaarth.' In all the reading I have done about conservation, climate change, anthropogenic changes, and the like, this is the first thing I've read that has gathered all of that information and data and then some in one (well-written) place." — g-na

Get it from Amazon for $13.50 , Barnes & Noble for $16.99 , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

10. An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It by Al Gore

Published as a tie-in with the groundbreaking documentary, An Inconvenient Truth presents high-level climate change research in accessible charts, graphs, and illustrations, as well as incorporating personal anecdotes.

Promising review: "Good, solid data on climate change in a digestible narrative. Most of the data is not news, especially if you've been following environmental issues and research. It's nice to have all that data organized, compiled and illustrated with solid visuals." — Hazy A.

Get it from Amazon for $13.82 , Barnes & Noble for $23.95 , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

11. The Overstory by Richard Powers

Spanning centuries and continents, The Overstory follows a group of seeming strangers — a scientist, an artist, a Vietnam War vet, among others — who’ve each been deeply affected by a tree at some point in their life, and who are drawn eventually to the same place, a final stand for the last acres of virgin forest in the world.

Promising review: "Brilliant, slow, and meditative. It made me evaluate my ideas about sustainability, wood, and trees and how I can be a better person in the world." — Spencer Orey

Get it from Amazon for $11.72 , Barnes & Noble for $12.54 , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

12. Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

Dellarobia Turnbow, having grown restless in her life as a farm wife who got pregnant young, finds new excitement in the possibility of an affair. But when she sneaks out to meet for a tryst she discovers a valley which hides a lake of fire. News of the phenomenon spreads throughout and beyond the community, sparking awe, bewilderment, curiosity, and fear in all those who witness it.

Promising review: "This book is about global warming without being all about global warming. Somehow Kingsolver, a biologist herself, has woven the frightening and undeniable crisis of global warming into a beautiful coming-of-age story about a woman whose teenage-hood was cut short by pregnancy and early marriage, but who is finally learning to find her real self." — Janet

Get it from Amazon for $10.95+ , Barnes & Noble for $16.99+ , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

13. Clade by James Bradley

Clade travels into an apocalyptic future, tracking the destruction of the planet through the eyes of one family over the course of three generations — beginning with one couple, and a scientist overwhelmed by his frustration over the fact that no one seems to understand the changing climate as the threat that it is.

Promising review: "This is a very human telling of how people and families try to cope in the face of existential threat through love, art, science, and wonder. It is also ultimately a very optimistic tale in a context of horror and the nature of human existence in a timeless universe. Highly recommended." — Christopher Wright

Get it from Amazon for $13.91 , Barnes & Noble for $14.95 , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

14. The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Colorado River is dwindling and the people of the American Southwest are in constant fight over water shares. Angel Velasquez is known as a "water knife" — a for-hire hitman who cuts off the water supply to impoverished communities and directs it instead to wealthy clients trying to maintain their luxurious lifestyles. When Angel sets off to investigate a rumored new source of water, he meets an investigative journalist and a young refugee, and together the unlikely group fall into a life-threatening situation.

Promising review: "Bacigalupi does everything well: characterization, world structure, action sequences. They are all meticulous. The Water Knife may appeal to the imagination of a population that is still struggling with the undeniable idea of global warming. Yet it is the human struggles that make this book work." — Marvin

Get it from Amazon for $10.87+ , Barnes & Noble for $16.95+ , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

15. Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta

Earth's landscape — geographic and political — has shifted irrevocably because of climate change, and much of the world is in the midst of water wars. Scandinavia is occupied by a state called New Qian; here, 17-year-old Noria Kaitio is following in the footsteps of her greatly respected father and training to be a tea master. The role comes with much responsibility, including knowledge of the locations of secret water sources — knowledge that quickly puts Noria's life at risk.

Promising review: "While it tells the heartbreaking story of how humans have destroyed their own world, Memory of Wate r remains the story of a young girl who has the power to make a difference. Symbolic of the cleansing, ever-changing properties of water, Noria’s actions and her choices are what drive the story. It is a beautiful, thought-provoking tale." — Kathleen

Get it from Amazon for $8.23+ , Barnes & Noble for $14.99+ , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

16. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Snowman, formerly known as Jimmy, might be the last human being alive. Struggling to survive in the lonely aftermath of a worldwide plague, he begins a journey through the wilderness that was once a city, mourning the loss of his best friend Crake, and surrounded by a new breed of humans — the remnants of corporate-run genetic engineering gone awry.

Promising review: "I could go on and on about the relentlessly inventive elements of this book and how it eventually touches at the emotional core and tugs at the heartstrings. It leaves me in an unusually pensive frame of mind. Any book that can do that deserves the highest recommendation." — Apatt

Get it from Amazon for $10.70+ , Barnes & Noble for $13.60+ , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

17. Tentacle by Rita Indiana

In a post-apocalyptic Santo Domingo, a young humble maid named Acilde Figueroa discovers she's able to travel back in time — and that a prophecy calls for her to do so and save the world by saving the ocean. With the help of a sacred anemone, she sets off on a mission that tackles issues of climate change, technology, queerness, colonialism, and Acilde's own gender identity.

Promising review: "There's nothing straightforward or derivative of this trippy, timely tale of saving the Caribbean from environmental collapse. Incorporating Afro-Caribbean religious traditions, literalizing the concept of gender-fluidity, and masterfully manipulating verb tenses to tell its story of personalities split across time and bodies, the prose is absolutely mesmerizing and weaves a story that I can't imagine being told as powerfully or cohesively in any other medium than the novel." — Sean Kottke

Get it from Amazon for $9.77 , Barnes & Noble for $13.95 , or find it at Indiebound or your local library.

Warmer: An Amazon Original Stories Cli-Fi Collection

Comprising seven novellas from Lauren Groff, Jess Walter, Jane Smiley, and more, the Warmer collection tells stories about life in the midst of climate change, blending the personal and the public, the political and the environmental.

Promising review: "It's less about the end of the world and more about how we go on in the face of overwhelming anxiety and odds. What we do when there's nothing left, and the ways we can do that, small and large and wonderful." — Brendan M. , about The Way the World Ends

Read or listen to the collection at Amazon .

For more from this series, click here .

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Science News

In ‘warming up,’ the sports world’s newest opponent is climate change.

The book shows how we can preserve endangered games

On an unusually warm day in January 2023, skiers in Austria glide down an artificial snow slope. Climate change threatens skiing and other sports.

CHRISTOF STACHE/AFP via Getty Images

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By Darren Incorvaia

June 26, 2024 at 11:01 am

Warming Up Madeleine Orr Bloomsbury Sigma, $28

It’s easy to think of sports as an escape from reality, removed from the glaring problems of our world. Researcher Madeleine Orr shatters that illusion in Warming Up: How Climate Change Is Changing Sport. In her debut book, Orr shepherds readers through an at-times overwhelming deluge of all the ways climate change is disrupting sports around the world, providing a compelling case for action from athletes, sports leagues and fans alike.

Orr, a sport ecologist at the University of Toronto, draws on her academic expertise to outline how climate change is upending sports, be it wildfires almost destroying a high school football program or rising seas subsuming coastal golf courses. While Orr bolsters her argument with data and interviews with experts, it’s the personal stories that are most powerful. There’s the heartbreaking story of University of Maryland college football player Jordan McNair, who died of heat stroke suffered at practice. Orr, an avid skier, shares her beef with global warming literally melting away winter sports around the world — and the local economies they sustain.

In the introduction, Orr says that the order of the chapters is irrelevant. But the chapters do follow a loose organization, and grouping them into sections would have made the overall trajectory of the book easier to follow. The first 11 of the book’s 17 chapters mainly focus on how warming temperatures , rising seas , increasing wildfires and other consequences of climate change are already impacting the industry and will worsen in the future ( SN: 12/6/23 ; SN: 11/9/22 ; SN: 9/15/21 ). For instance, outdoor pond hockey, a crucial part of Canada’s culture and the launchpad of many of ice hockey’s greats, is at risk of disappearing altogether as winters become warmer and ice becomes rarer.

It’s refreshing to see Orr explicitly talk about how climate change is disproportionately impacting nations that are least responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions, a point that can get lost in Western reporting on the topic. High temperatures are threatening Kenyan runners. Rising seas are eroding a famous rugby beach in Fiji. A 2022 flood devastated Pakistan’s sports leagues — along with much of the country.

But against the backdrop of climate change’s harrowing reality, Orr keeps hope alive in the last six chapters. The sports world can adapt to climate change to reduce its own culpability and to ensure that imperiled sports survive. She spotlights the past and present activism of athletes who are fighting for sustainability.

One heartening example is Innes FitzGerald, a teenage cross-country runner who refused to fly from Britain to Australia for the 2023 World Athletics Championships out of concern for air travel’s carbon emissions ( SN: 5/14/20 ). Before FitzGerald, “no athlete had actually passed up championship opportunities because of a moral quandary with flying,” Orr notes. Like climate activism in so many other sectors of society, it seems changes in sports will be spearheaded by the youth.

Orr’s writing is authoritative and conversational, and while she sometimes slips into academic jargon, her language is largely accessible even to readers with no scientific background. The book is jam-packed with information and has something for sports fanatics and casual fans alike. In the fight against climate change, Warming Up shows us that it’s time for the sports world to play ball.

Buy Warming Up from Bookshop.org. Science News  is a Bookshop.org affiliate and will earn a commission on purchases made from links in this article.

More Stories from Science News on Climate

How powdered rock could help slow climate change

A heat dome is baking the United States. Here’s why that’s so dangerous

The Arctic is warming rapidly. These clouds may hold clues as to why

Warm water is sneaking underneath the Thwaites Glacier — and rapidly melting it

‘The High Seas’ tells of the many ways humans are laying claim to the ocean

As the Arctic tundra warms, soil microbes likely will ramp up CO 2 production

A new approach to fighting wildfires combines local knowledge and AI

A ruinous hailstorm in Spain may have been supercharged by warming seas

Subscribers, enter your e-mail address for full access to the Science News archives and digital editions.

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Nonfiction Books » Environmental Books » Climate Change Books

The best books on climate change, recommended by duncan clark.

The Rough Guide to Green Living by Duncan Clark

The environment writer suggests the best reading on carbon costs, climate science and technological solutions to save the planet

The Rough Guide to Climate Change by Robert Henson

Ten Technologies to Save the Planet by Chris Goodall

How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee

Kyoto2 by Oliver Tickell

Fixing Climate by Robert Kunzig & Wallace S Broecker

1 The Rough Guide to Climate Change by Robert Henson

2 ten technologies to save the planet by chris goodall, 3 how bad are bananas the carbon footprint of everything by mike berners-lee, 4 kyoto2 by oliver tickell, 5 fixing climate by robert kunzig & wallace s broecker.

T ell me about The Rough Guide to Climate Change .

So it’s a non-partisan digest of climate science aimed at a reader who knows nothing?

So that’s the overview. Now let’s talk about Chris Goodall’s Ten Technologies to Save the Planet.

Chris Goodall is a former economist and business consultant. He comes from a business background, which makes him quite a rarity. He stood as a candidate for the Green Party in Oxford [UK] – probably the only person in the Green Party who used to work in McKinsey. So he’s very numbers focused, and very business savvy.

What Chris does in Ten Technologies is give an on-the-ground, up-to-date idea of where these technologies are and what role they could play in reducing emissions. Henson gives the overview on climate science. What this book does is address the various ways in which one can actually combat climate change . Take wind power. People in the press like to say that wind is inefficient as a generator, because it’s intermittent. Well that’s true, but what Chris does is say that there’s intermittency at a monthly level, a daily level, or at the level of an hour or minute, and he explains how it’s quite possible to compensate for all of them if you have the right infrastructure in place. So he’s very much a realist. There are others who write about technology who don’t know how business works, who don’t have the experience to make an educated guess about which technologies really do have a chance of being economically viable. For example, the possibility of filling the Sahara desert with solar panels.

A good idea?

How bad are bananas?

Here’s a bit of light relief from the hardcore end of the discussion. How Bad are Bananas? was written by Mike Berners-Lee, whose job is to help businesses understand the carbon footprint of individual products. If Chris Goodall’s book is looking at technological solutions, this is looking at more lifestyle based solutions – lifestyle decisions that might be made by individuals or considered by the government.

Astonishingly, until this book came out there was no good survey of the carbon impact of different activities and objects. It’s always been easy to know the carbon footprint of fossil fuels, but what’s much more complicated is to work out the carbon footprint of, say, a bottle of wine. There is this huge debate about how much carbon emission making that bottle of wine generates. Actually it’s an impossible question to answer precisely.

How does he answer it?

Your next choice is Kyoto2 by Oliver Tickell.

We’ve touched on technological solutions and lifestyle solutions, but the elephant in the room is of course political solutions. Unless you can create a global cap on the amount of carbon that’s emitted, you’re never going to be able to tackle this problem in any meaningful way. Oliver Tickell’s book isn’t so much a brilliant piece of writing, it’s simply the vehicle for a very brilliant and original idea.

We all worry about carbon emissions at the point where they are released into the air, from cars or from power stations. But if you think about it, that’s almost impossible to control politically, because there are so many millions of separate points of emission. More effective is an upstream approach which simply limits the amount of fossil fuels available on the market to the amount we calculate is compatible with a stable climate.

But fossil fuels aren’t the only culprits are they?

No, but given that other problems, such as deforestation, might in theory be tackled quite quickly, the amount of fossil fuel we take out of the ground is the most important factor. The problem is that Kyoto1, which the UN has been attempting to negotiate the sequel to, is so obsessed with limiting the damage at point of emission that Tickell’s solution is probably politically unworkable. But it gets to the heart of the matter in a way the UN process has totally failed to do.

He’s suggesting a completely centrist, top-down approach?

It’s an anti-national solution really, isn’t it? We’d have to belong to a global state.

Probably, which is why my last book, Fixing Climate by Robert Kunzig and Wally Broecker, suggests an alternative solution – addressing the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere, sucking that carbon out and storing it away somewhere. It’s not to do with making energy from cleaner sources, it’s a sub category of geoengineering. But the authors of this book have been very keen to point out that it shouldn’t be classified as such because it has no side effects.

Whereas other fixes do?

Yes, most of them do, like filling the air with sulphates to stop so much sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth. That solution doesn’t deal with the fact that there’s still carbon in the atmosphere, acidifying the ocean, and if we ever stopped the sulphates it would get very hot very quickly. Sucking carbon out of the air is a fix the authors compare to the problem of sewage in the 19th century. There were people then who said there’s no point in trying to clean up the sewage because there’s too much of it. We’re always going to produce all this human mess. Well, the quantities are actually quite similar.

So how does the fix work?

It works through a clever sort of plastic polymer that attaches to the CO2 in the air. Then you put the plastic in a vacuum, flush it with steam which displaces the CO2, and then you put the CO2 somewhere safe, such as basalt rocks in Iceland.

Which lock in carbon?

That’s right. The gas fuses with the rock and becomes solid. Of course the advantage of that is that you get CO2 from all sources, and in addition you can put your capture funnel by the basalt rocks and capture carbon emitted all around the world, with no need for pipelines.

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Why don’t we just turn it all into diamonds?

Like in Superman , you mean, when he makes Lois Lane a nice diamond out of a lump of coal?

The thing is it would take quite a lot of energy, and create quite a lot of CO2. But seriously, this is a book to read. It’s not just that Wally Broecker, one of the authors, is the scientist who originally coined the phrase “global warming”, it’s that the other, Rob Kunzig, is one of the finest science writers in the business. It’s a book with authority, but you could also read it just for the lovely prose.

June 2, 2011

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Duncan Clark

Duncan Clark has worked to raise environmental awareness as a writer, journalist and campaigner. He is a consultant editor at the Guardian , and a director of the 10:10 campaign , which requires participants to reduce their greenhouse emissions by 10% within a year. In May 2010, the UK’s coalition government signed up to the project. His books include The Rough Guide to Green Living

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Books | ‘Cli-fi’: Minnesotan’s new collection of…

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Books | ‘cli-fi’: minnesotan’s new collection of stories tackles climate change in imaginative ways, besides talking bears, her book is made up of humorous, horrific, satirical stories.

“ Experts See Eco-Disaster for These Polar Bears ” shouted a headline in the New York Times recently. The story says polar bears in the Southern Hudson Bay, an “indicator species,” could go extinct as early as the 2030s because the sea ice that helps them hunt for food is thinning.

This doesn’t surprise Minnesotan Ashley Shelby . Her new book, “ Honeymoons in Temporary Locations ,” begins with polar bears in the story “Muri.” It’s narrated by the captain of an icebreaker bringing the last pod of Baffin Bay polar bears to the coast of Antarctica in an attempt to keep them alive. The bears, who can talk, take over the ship under the leadership of the bear Muri, and turn it back north. They know they will die of starvation but they want to do so in their ancestral home.

“That’s one of the challenges of writing something speculative,” Shelby said of this intersection of fiction and reality. “It takes years to write a book and the speculative becomes documentary. These are strange times, strange and uncanny and hard to make sense of.”

“Honeymoons in Temporary Locations,” a story collection Shelby will launch this week in Minneapolis, is one in the growing category of climate change fiction dubbed Cli-fi. There’s debate in the literary world about whether Cli-fi is a genre or a spin-off of science fiction. Shelby, who worked in New York publishing, feels it’s a “problematic term” that creates barriers for readers to find the work.

“My argument at this point is that Cli-fi is realistic fiction,” she said. “It’s not a term of art; it’s a term of convenience used in publishing, like ‘chick lit.’ I would say to the reader that I acknowledge climate change is not part of your regular thinking and these stories might be weird to you. These are not your traditional stories for the most part, taking you to places you might not have expected or even wanted to go. I want the reader to walk away thinking ‘Wow, that really resonated with me,’ or ‘I hated this book.’ I ask them to think about it.”

Shelby acknowledges she never thought she’d write anything like “Muri,” inspired by Herman Melville’s 1855 novella “Benito Cereno,” about an 18th-century slave revolt on a Spanish slave ship.

Besides talking bears, her book is made up of humorous, horrific, satirical stories told not in the usual narrative style but in imaginative ways — a travel brochure for “impact cruises” of endangered cities, menus (including Saddle of Squirrel in Merlot Sauce), medical patient impact studies, a Support Group for Recently Displaced Millionaires, a podcast titled Climate Crime Files. The only thing that hasn’t changed is bureaucracy, as shown by the story “Federal Eligibility Questionnaire from the Temporary Aid to Climate-Impacted Deserving Poor Benefits Program.”

One unsettling thread is emails from staff of a marketing campaign for Climafeel, a drug in development that treats the disease Solastalgia, a term you will be hearing with increasing frequency as our world literally heats up. Environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term in 2005 to describe the specific kind of grief human beings experience as the natural world changes around them, a grief that anticipates a separation while you are still in the place you know you will leave. Or lose.

“Albrecht’s brilliant neologism haunts and disturbs me,” Shelby writes in her acknowledgments. “In these pages I’ve processed his concept by imagining solastalgia into an illness the world tries to cure, a disease to be eliminated, a mental illness to be treated. But grief is not pathological. It’s the inevitable endpoint of love.”

Shelby isn’t surprised therapists are reporting increased anxiety in their clients.

“When I got finished copies of my book I saw this was about solastalgia, written by someone who has it,” she said. “Biophilia (the urge to affiliate with other forms of life) is also a real thing. We have something bone-deep in us that reaches out to the natural world and creatures in it. As we see the connection starting to fray because of what’s happening in the world it impacts our mental health and experience of living in the world. That’s what I am feeling. I am not alone. This is not free-floating depression. Something is happening.”

The last generation

Shelby, 46, lives in an old farmhouse in Shorewood near Lake Minnetonka with her husband, Emmanuel (Manny) Benites, son Hudson, 17, and Josephine, 14, who prefers to be called Joey

On their acre of property Shelby has a garden “with so many little winged things.” Her favorite books growing up were “Watership Down” and “The Incredible Journey,” which gave her access to thoughts and emotions of animals. Now one of the things that bothers her most is “how the blameless fellow creatures are trying to make sense of what climate change is doing to them.”

Ashley’s family lives not far from the Excelsior home of her parents, Don and Barbara Shelby.

“I was born in Texas but I am a Minnesotan through and through,” she says. “My sisters (Lacy and Delta) and I were raised in Minneapolis’ Linden Hills area when it was mixed-income, before it became a wealthy enclave. It’s the place I go to in my mind sometimes and think of the good times. My generation is the last to have free rein, turned out of the house on our bikes, back at dinnertime.”

After graduating from Hopkins High School, Shelby earned a degree in journalism from Indiana University-Bloomington, and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. Her first book, “ Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City ” (Minnesota Historical Society Press/Borealis Books, 2003), was nonfiction about the historic 1997 flood in Grand Forks, N.D. It is dedicated to Don Shelby, Emmy Award-winning retired WCCO reporter/anchor, who taught Ashley the importance of research and accuracy.

“My dad was a big figure in my life growing up,” she recalls.

Don Shelby, 77, is also an author. His book “ The Season Never Ends: Wins, Losses and the Wisdom of the Game ” was inspired by his life-long love of basketball. He admitted in a phone chat that he is still feeling “a little grief” after culling about a third of his formerly 10,000-book library. One he definitely kept is “Honeymoons in Temporary Locations.”

“It’s an incredible book. Important stuff, literature that changes minds.” he said. “It’s not dystopian in the sci-fi sense. What would be considered talk of the future ends up being true. Ashley has this Nostradamus piece of her that interests me.”

Shelby takes no credit for Ashley’s writing (“she got her mother’s brains”) but he does credit her growing up in a household watching news and being around her dad’s colleagues including Dave Nimmer, godfather to Ashley and her sisters. The Shelby daughters also saw their dad, who loves the outdoors, introduce environmental/climate change reporting years before anyone took it seriously, with some 800 stories aired on WCCO.

Don Shelby has worked hard at his commitment to the Earth as a volunteer helping mitigate the damage already done by rising temperatures. He participated in a project to reforest the 52-mile Mississippi River National Park that replaced dying or dead ash trees with species more accustomed to the climate farther south because trees are moving north. He has attended a climate change meeting in Oslo presented by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee as well as belonging to Climate Science Rapid Response Team, a match-making service to connect scientists with lawmakers and the media. He also serves on the board of Minnesota-based Climate Generation, which believes in the power of youth to have an impact on the systems perpetuating the climate crisis.

Writing for Beno

After Ashley wrote “Red River Rising,” she turned to fiction with her 2017 comic novel “South Pole Station” (University of Minnesota Press paperback), about a person who joins the National Science Foundation’s Artist & Writers program in Antarctica that becomes the center of global controversy when a fringe scientist claims climate change is a hoax.

“I am not a scientist,” Shelby says. “I wanted to be one but my mind didn’t trend that way. It takes me a lot more reads of scientific material to suck out meaning. Sometimes I wish I were better at science, but I’m glad I am not. I can utilize abstraction and imagination and creativity in a way that scientists cannot do day-to-day.”

After “South Pole Station” was published, Shelby started another book set in the climate-affected world, but it didn’t go well:

“I had difficulty using the tools I’d used for ‘South Pole Station.’ They weren’t up to the task of narrative, framework, characters and dialogue. Now I know it was (because of) my grief at what had happened and what will happen. I started having strange thoughts after reading ‘Benito Cereno,’ Melville’s masterpiece. For some reason, I thought, ‘What if it was bears?’ They are the most salient image used about climate change, a trope we look away from because it’s so upsetting. But I dismissed the idea as too big an ask of the reader, too ridiculous. No one would accept this premise.”

That changed when she started telling a story about talking bears to Beno, her son’s friend.

“He was only 11 years old, but he looked at me seriously, nodding, and said, ‘This is going to be bestseller,’ ” Shelby recalled. “That conversation made me go back to my desk and write ‘Muri.’ I didn’t think I would ever show it to anyone, but I would write it for Beno who saw something in it.”

To Shelby’s surprise, when “Muri” was published as a limited-run chapbook in Radix Media’s Futures: A Science Fiction Series, people not only read it, but it was adopted in university courses teaching climate fiction.

“I am so grateful for the generous readers of speculative fiction who wanted to know more about these bears,” she said. “This filled me with happiness and joy. It allowed me to have the courage to process grief about climate change in a way my brain was telling me I could do it, not with traditional forms but telling the story in your head as you are experiencing it without worrying about narrative form.”

The kids will understand

“This book is written in a way that will appeal to younger people,” Shelby says. “A story about a podcast resonates with them. Marketing documents for a drug resonates with a generation that has come to be suspicious of the pharma industry.”

Shelby’s concern for the confusion in some young people also runs through her stories. She’s writing about the in-between generation, youngsters who never knew the world in which their parents lived. As one character says, “How do you explain to a child who has never experienced the normal contours of spring why many adults preferred death than a world without it?”

“This generation knows things are changing,” Shelby says. She sees the toll climate change takes in her own family.

“My daughter has asthma and has difficulty breathing,” she says. “During soccer season in the summer she has to bring an inhaler and separate medication. Asthma rates are skyrocketing. For my daughter it’s always been like this. My and my dad’s generations don’t see it, but my kids see it clearly and they will understand how to address it in maybe uncomfortable ways. These climate change activists who deface artwork and block traffic are telling us in all different ways ‘this is the future.’ They are relying on us, but the people in power, the ruling class, are foisting this on us, making us feel guilty for using fuel or plastic straws. We are beholden to CEOs who create rocket ships and pay no attention to what they caused. It gets to me. That’s the emotion distilled in these stories..”

In the end, Shelby returns to our longings: “Solastalgia exists because we love Nature, and as long as we still love Nature, there is hope.”

Honeymoons in Temporary Locations

What: Ashley Shelby launches “Honeymoons in Temporary Locations” in conversation with Eric Holthaus, a St. Paul-based leading journalist on all things weather and climate change who has written for the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Grist and The Correspondent, where he currently covers our interconnected relationship with the climate.

When: 6 p.m. Tuesday, June 25

Where: Moon Palace Books, 3032 Minnehaha Ave., Mpls.

Admission: Free (masks required in the store)

Publisher/price: University of Minnesota Press ($22.95)

Information: Moonpalacebooks.com/events

For readers who want to dive into more climate fiction, here are titles that most often appear on reading lists.

• “American War,” Omar El Akkad
• “Barkskins,” Annie Proulx
• “Blackfish City,” Sam J. Miller
• “The Drowned World,” J.G. Ballard
• “Flight Behavior,” Barbara Kingsolver
• “How Beautiful We Were,” Imbolo Mbue
• “The Ministry for the Future,” Kim Stanley Robinson
• “Parable of the Sower,” Octavia E. Butler
• “The Overstory,” Richard Powers
• “The Water Knife,” Paolo Bacigalupi
• “War Girls,” Tochi Onyebuchi
• “The Swan Book,” Alexis Wright
• “Tentacle,” Rita Indiana
• “Oryx and Crake,” “The Year of the Flood,” “MaddAddam” trilogy, Margaret Atwood

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Climate change wānanga held at Mākirikiri Marae in Dannevirke

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Iwi leader Mike Smith has won the right to sue seven big polluters for their role in causing climate change. Photo / NZME

Te Whare Taiao o Rangitāne o Tamaki nui-ā-Rua held a one-day climate change wānanga on Monday, June 24, at Mākirikiri Marae in Dannevirke.

The purpose of this initial wānanga is to raise whānau awareness on the impacts of climate change. We wanted to know what climate change is, how we’re affected, and what we can do about it. The wānanga also examined the effects climate change has on our communities, using Cyclone Gabrielle as a reference tool, and considered how we can strengthen our resilience for future extreme weather events as they become more commonplace. Attendees had the opportunity to discuss and determine ways we can minimise climate change effects both as an individual and collectively.

Learning more about climate change helps prepare communities for untimely natural disaster events so that our homes and neighbourhoods can be safe havens where we can live and thrive with confidence.

The key outcomes are that whānau gain knowledge and understanding on climate change and its consequences. Encouraging changes in behaviour by promoting sustainable practices, and building resilience in the face of climate change, we look to a more sustainable and safe future for all.

Te Whare Taiao o Rangitāne o Tamaki nui-ā-Rua is extremely fortunate that veteran activist Mike Smith (Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Kahu) spoke at this wānanga. Mike is a climate change spokesman for the Iwi Chairs Forum, a national forum of tribal leaders. He recently celebrated a major victory in a landmark decision in the Supreme Court unanimously determined he has the right to sue seven New Zealand-based corporations, claiming they have contributed to climate change. Mike’s children were raised in Dannevirke and attended kohanga reo and Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Rangitāne o Tamaki nui-ā-Rua.

One of the things Mike shared with attendees is that the starting point for change is with our whānau.

“All good things start at home, and particularly climate change. Its impacts impact severely on families and individuals within families and escalate out from there to impact on communities and the wider society.”

Chris Kumeroa, director of Global Risk Consulting Group (security consulting and security management systems) specialising in enterprise risk management, was also a keynote speaker. Chris has recently developed a Threat and Risk Assessment Platform (SecIntel), Crisis Management Tool, Covid-19 Risk Management Technology (with the Government) and, more recently, an Indigenous Civil Defence Natural Disaster Vulnerability System. Chris spoke on how iwi can manage response in an emergency and build capacity and resilience so that the needs of Māori and vulnerable communities are met.

We hope that by encouraging local conversation, we can gain a better understanding of the implications of climate change, how it affects whānau and what can we do about it.

Te Whare Taiao o Rangitāne o Tamaki nui-ā-Rua will be planning future wānanga for climate change and other environmental, educational and te reo Māori kaupapa.

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Money blog: 'Bleak' new security measure seen in Tesco store

Welcome to the Money blog, your place for personal finance and consumer news and tips. Leave a comment on any of the stories we're covering below.

Tuesday 2 July 2024 02:17, UK

Energy price cap falls

• Energy price cap falls today - here's what you need to know
• Thinking about switching? These are the cheapest energy tariffs available right now
• Are prepayment prices the cheapest way now?
• Will energy prices return to levels seen before COVID?

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Olive oil has become the latest staple to undergo "bleak" anti-theft measures.

The cooking product was spotted encased in netting and tagged with an alarm in an unspecified Tesco store, leading one customer to ask: "What has the world come to?"

It is just the latest product to be subject to supermarket security measures that have surprised customers, after an out-of-hours smoke machine was introduced in another Tesco store last month.

Neither security features are part of a universal policy and have been implemented only in individual stores, Sky News understands.

"All 'anti-shoplifting' measures are theatre," said one shopper on X, beneath a photo of the olive oil.

"This is so bleak," said another, while a third joked the oil "has to wear fishnets now".

We revealed earlier this year that there had been a 110.5% increase in the price of olive oil since January 2021.

High temperatures and droughts in Spain, the world's leading producer and exporter, have dented the harvest - a problem only worsened by global inflationary pressures.

Separately, a bacterial disease called Xylella Fastidiosa has attacked and killed century-old olive trees, severely diminishing yields in southern Europe.

And heightened prices have led organised criminal gangs to steal the "liquid gold".

Read more on what's behind exploding olive oil prices here...

We feature a lot of data on the changing prices of houses in the UK, but how do they compare to the rest of the world?

New data shows the UK ranked 37th for house price growth out of 56 countries analysed by Knight Frank for the Global House Price Index.

At 1.6% up over the year to the end of March, the UK underperformed (with the global average at 3.6%) but outstripped its European neighbours.

Only 11 countries saw prices fall, eight of which were European, with France (-5.2%) and Germany (-3.9%) feeling the effects of slower economic growth and high recent inflation.

Across all 56 markets, 82% saw annual price growth in the first quarter of the year - the strongest showing since the last quarter of 2022.

"Many markets are suffering from a lack of properties to sell as well as slow new-build delivery, leading to relatively healthy demand pushing prices to new highs," said Liam Bailey, Knight Frank's global head of research.

"In the longer term, however, only lower debt costs will sustain price growth."

With a 52% price increase, Turkey was at the top of the table by a huge margin - 36 percentage points - but there's more to this figure than meets the eye.

Consumer Price Index inflation in Turkey has risen 50% in the year to March, meaning in real terms house prices have actually fallen by 9.9%.

Recently we reported on how Barcelona had cracked down on tourism by planning to abolish short-term holiday lets . 

The Spanish city has now gone further in its war on overtourism by banning the display and sale of "offensive" souvenirs. 

It says sexist and homophobic messages on some souvenirs are tarnishing Barcelona's image. 

The ERC's deputy spokesperson Jordi Coronas said the ban included products such as "penises with the Barcelona brand, T-shirts with sexist or homophobic comments, or simply comments that, when displayed on these products, devalue Barcelona". 

Ahead of our Q&A, switching service Uswitch provided us with a list of what it considers the cheapest energy tariffs on the market right now.

It's worth reading the advice from Which? in our Q&A below (see 15.02 post) before deciding to switch from a standard variable tariff (that's what most households are on) - but if you're aware of the risks, then cheaper energy is available...

A big thanks to all those who submitted a question for our Q&A on the day the energy price cap fell - and sorry if we didn't get to yours.

A big thanks also to Emily Seymour, Which? energy editor, and Kate Mulvany, a principal consultant at Cornwall Insight, for tackling 10 of your questions so thoroughly.

Scroll down to read through their answers.

Does the UK have a secure enough energy supply in your view and what would it take for blackouts to occur this or any other winter?

Kate Mulvany, a principal consultant at Cornwall Insight, says..

The outlook for the upcoming winter appears promising, with strong gas reserves across Europe providing a healthy buffer to seasonal demand. 

While a very cold winter would increase the need for gas for heating across Europe, the UK's ability to secure gas and electricity from multiple sources keeps the risk of disruption to the flow of energy relatively low. 

Quite a few things would need to go wrong at the same time for there to be an increased risk of a widespread blackout. 

However, short-term blackouts would still be possible - as indeed at any time of year - due to storms or other weather incidents, as well as through localised network issues. 

It's worth mentioning that ministers have claimed the UK faces blackouts without new gas-fired power stations...

The bigger risk for homes in the UK is the pressure on energy bills. Although electricity and gas supplies appear healthy, affordability remains a concern, as seen in recent winters - particularly 2022-23.

Edward Morgan:

What's the best deal currently on the market in your view and does it come with any risks?

Emily Seymour, Which? energy editor, says...

As we said in one of our previous answers, there isn't a "one size fits all" for the best deals out there as it will all depend on individual circumstances. 

However, there are some tariffs available that are cheaper than the current price cap and might be worth considering. 

When Which? last checked, Ecotricity and Ovo both had fixed deals available for cheaper than the July price cap. 

However, Ecotricity's deal requires a smart meter - or you to agree to have one fitted - and Ovo's is only available if you also buy annual boiler cover, so you'll need to weigh up if this is right for you. Both also come with exit fees if you want to leave early. 

Tracker tariffs change in price relative to the price cap every three months when the price cap is reset to offer slightly cheaper rates than you'd be paying otherwise, and could be worth considering. They're currently available from E.ON Next , Scottish Power and Fuse Energy .

Consumers can use switching services - like Which? Switch Energy - to keep an eye on the best fixed deals available and compare deals to see what's cheapest for them. 

We'd always recommend checking the exit fees on fixed deals so you're not tied into a tariff if something better becomes available.

Why doesn't the government de-link the price of fossil fuel-generated electricity from that generated from renewable sources? Surely cheaper energy would be the result?

The current government has explored various methods to decouple wholesale gas and electricity prices through a programme called the Review of Electricity Market Arrangements (REMA). 

However, each option identified presented potential drawbacks for customers, as well as benefits. 

For example, one proposed solution was to set different prices for electricity generated by renewable sources compared to that generated by more carbon-intensive methods, such as burning gas. 

A significant challenge is that the country cannot yet generate all its electricity from renewable sources 24/7. 

During shortfalls, such as on a winter evening with low wind, non-variable renewable generation methods would still need to be used, meaning customers would still see the impacts of gas prices in those of electricity.

If I do not qualify for pension credit but receive housing benefit on top of my state pension, will I qualify for extra heating allowance/cold weather payment?

For the Warm Home Discount, Cold Weather Payment and Winter Heating payment, you should receive any discounts automatically if you're eligible. 

For the Warm Home Discount, each energy supplier also has its own eligibility criteria, which are approved by the energy regulator Ofgem, so you should check with your provider to see whether you meet its requirements.

If you were born before 25 September 1957, it's also likely you'll be able to get Winter Fuel Payments of between £100 and £300 for winter 2023-24. 

The payments are to help pay for your gas or electric heating in winter. You should get this automatically and should contact the Winter Fuel Payment Centre if you think you're eligible but haven't received anything. 

Energy companies are obliged to help you if you tell them you are struggling to pay and will not disconnect you if you miss a bill payment. 

If you are struggling with your bills, let your provider know and explain that you want to establish a payment plan that you can afford. 

Discuss your options with them, as they may include a review of your payments, a reduction in your payments or a payment break, more time to pay, and access to hardship funds.

Will energy prices ever return to levels seen before COVID - if not, why not?

Kate Mulvany, a principal consultant at Cornwall Insight, says...

At this point in time, we are not expecting a return to pre-COVID prices.

This is primarily due to the significant rise in the wholesale prices of electricity and gas following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

The cost of the fuel - the wholesale cost or the commodity cost - is the largest part of the energy bill. 

Although some non-wholesale components of energy bills may decrease, the main factor driving prices is the cost of commodities. 

The UK's heavy reliance on imported electricity and natural gas exacerbates this issue. 

Therefore, increasing investment in domestic renewable and low-carbon energy sources is crucial to reduce this dependency.

Additionally, implementing measures to decouple electricity and gas prices in the wholesale market could help lower bills.

Why does Ofgem allow the price cap to be so high when we know how high the profits of energy companies are which in turn causes so much hardship for UK families?

The price cap limits the unit rates and standing charge levels that suppliers can charge domestic customers across many circumstances. 

Some parts of the energy price cap are directly regulated by Ofgem, while others, such as wholesale energy costs, reflect market conditions. 

The price cap includes various elements such as wholesale energy costs, network costs (the cost of moving gas and electricity around the country), operating costs, environmental and social policy costs, and the allowable profit for suppliers.

The role of energy suppliers is to purchase electricity from generators and sell it to customers, managing customer service, billing and other retail functions. 

Ofgem's formula for the price cap includes an allowance for suppliers to make a profit, which is overall a relatively small percentage of the total price cap amount. 

Headlines about energy companies' profits can refer to companies involved throughout the energy industry, not just suppliers. 

For example, companies that extract and transport gas or which generate electricity might not have prices directly regulated by Ofgem. 

There is global competition for energy, and so attempts for the UK to control wholesale costs might have an impact on security of supply. 

Since the cap limits unit rates and standing charge levels, but not the total bill, there has been increasing support for a social tariff, which would offer discounted deals to vulnerable households. 

Social tariffs for energy are not a new policy; they have been implemented before and are currently used in other sectors, such as telecommunications and broadband.

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