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The planet has just had its hottest year on record. Seawater temperatures have warmed to hot-tub levels in some parts of the world. Extreme weather has wreaked havoc. Should people panic, protest — or try something else entirely? A new crop of books reflects the widening mix of views on how to handle the gathering menace of global warming.
The most hopeful title comes from Hannah Ritchie, a University of Oxford data scientist who has written Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet (Chatto & Windus, £22). Its fans include Bill Gates, who says Ritchie does for the environment what Swedish academic Hans Rosling did for public health and development: using data to show we are a lot better off than we think.
The best parts of Ritchie’s highly readable book certainly do this. It is refreshing to be reminded of how much progress has been made on acid rain, the ozone layer and (in some places) air pollution. It is also uplifting to see Ritchie briskly take on claims that, by 2050, the oceans will be almost empty of fish because of overfishing, or jammed with more plastic than fish. Likewise, she shows why it is “bonkers” to claim, as some have, that soil is degrading so quickly we have only 60 years of harvests left.
Ritchie also shows progress has been made on the thornier problem of climate change. Many of the countries that grew rich by burning fossil fuels have begun to cut their emissions while their economies have grown. Massive strides in technology mean people in a country such as the UK use far less energy than their grandparents did. The world passed the peak of per capita emissions a decade ago and there is every reason to think total global emissions will peak in the 2020s. As Ritchie says, these facts are not widely known. Polls show people think US emissions rose more than 20 per cent in the past 15 years when they actually fell 20 per cent.
Unfortunately, the solutions she offers are less inspiring. Most are depressingly familiar, largely because they have been hampered by political barriers that Ritchie is inclined to gloss over. She writes that every economist she has asked about tackling climate change has told her to “put a price on carbon” — which they have been saying for decades. But the obstacles to this theoretically admirable measure are so great that the IMF has calculated average global carbon prices were just $6 per tonne of CO₂ in 2022, far below the levels needed to curb emissions.
Outside the realms of politics and diplomacy, more books are arriving for ordinary citizens frustrated by governments that have spent 30 years failing to solve the climate problem. A second edition of Margaret Klein Salamon’s Facing The Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth (New Society Publishers, £14.99/$19.99) came out last July, as activist groups funded by the Climate Emergency Fund, which Salamon runs, pushed for faster action.
And this month brings Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action (Columbia University Press, £16.99/$19.95) by US sociologist Dana Fisher. You should avoid this title if the sight of a glue-bearing Extinction Rebellion activist infuriates you. But it offers useful insights into the increasingly disruptive climate campaigns spreading around the world.
Fisher has spent more than 25 years studying climate politics and activism, and co-authored the most recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. She has also been to many of the big annual UN global climate COP conferences that began in 1995. But she is convinced that supposed breakthroughs such as the 2015 Paris climate agreement, or even the 2022 US Inflation Reduction Act, are no match for “vested interests that have amassed wealth and power through the extraction and burning of fossil fuels”.
The book is partly an analysis of the political responses looming for governments that keep approving oil drilling or coal mining despite pledging to cut emissions, and a climate movement splitting into incremental centrists and more radical, disruptive activists. But it is also a handbook for activists in a world facing more “climate shocks”, such as heatwaves, floods and wildfires.
Fisher thinks campaigners should borrow from the US civil rights movement and build resilient social networks in communities affected by such shocks. But, ultimately, she thinks a huge “risk pivot” — a heightened sense of risk that can spur social change — is needed to drive the shifts for a meaningful global response to the climate problem.
That makes her what she calls an “apocalyptic optimist”, who thinks we can save ourselves from the climate crisis — but only after a “mass mobilisation that is driven by the pain and suffering of climate shocks around the world”. It is a far less appealing message than Ritchie’s. Let’s hope it also proves to be less necessary.
Pilita Clark is an FT business columnist
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