From the power of renewables to the wisdom of animals — notable new books on the environment

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Anyone who writes regularly about the environment is invariably asked at some point to name the one book to read about climate change. Alas, it is growing harder to find a single title covering all aspects of climate science, climate diplomacy, green finance, net zero technology or the scores of other topics in this vast and expanding field. But some excellent books on crucial climate issues have come out this year, including Rob Jackson’s Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere (Allen Lane £25).

The author is a professor of environmental sciences at Stanford who wants us to rethink our approach to the greenhouse gases heating the planet. Having taken so long to act, we should — he argues persuasively — be looking beyond emissions reduction targets to also set goals for what he calls “atmospheric restoration”. That means using nature and technology to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, an idea that unnerves many environmentalists who fear it distracts from the need to slash emissions. 

Jackson acknowledges the risk but shows an array of potential benefits as he analyses the work of entrepreneurs and scientists at the cutting edge of reduction and removal efforts. His own work on methane, the greenhouse gas that’s more potent but more shortlived than carbon dioxide, is nothing less than eye-opening. It is impossible to think of gas stoves in the same way again after learning how much methane they can emit in a home, even when turned off.

Methane also offers what Jackson calls the best and perhaps only lever we have to shave peak temperatures and curb weather extremes soon. In fact, he writes, “restoring methane to preindustrial levels would save 0.5C of warming and could happen in your lifetime”. That is a message that needs to be heard a lot more. 

The same goes for much of what former BBC science and environment journalist Richard Black writes in The Future of Energy (Melville House £8.99). Black’s slender, sparky book offers an enjoyable introduction to the global effort to wean the world off fossil fuels and on to cleaner, healthier sources of energy. 

He thinks the shift can be achieved primarily with just five technologies: renewables such as wind turbines and solar panels; batteries and other storage systems; electric cars; heat pumps; and green hydrogen. All five, he argues, can be mass-produced and are likely to follow Wright’s Law, meaning the more they are made, the cheaper they become. That doesn’t apply to big, largely bespoke energy generators like nuclear reactors or power stations with carbon capture and storage. 

One of Black’s more enjoyable chapters is about what he calls “confusion monkeys”: lobbyists, journalists and influential experts who stymie efforts to shift to cleaner energy. The power of lobbying is illustrated by a survey commissioned by an energy and climate think-tank he once ran that asked MPs in the UK to name the cheapest form of new electricity generating capacity in their country. Only 8 per cent gave the correct answer: onshore wind.

Marine biologist Helen Scales has more unsettling news in What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean (Grove Press £18.99). She charts the pollution, overfishing, warming waters and disease afflicting everything from the emperor penguin to the gannet and orca. But she also shows what is possible when authorities step in to stop the carnage, as they did in the early 2000s on the Caribbean island of Little Cayman.

Tens of thousands of Nassau groupers used to gather around Little Cayman to spawn in shoals so dense that sometimes no water could be seen between fish. They were badly fished out, recovering only to suffer fresh onslaughts from fishermen, who in 2001 caught 2,000 of around 7,000 groupers in just a week. Fishing in winter spawning months was duly outlawed and grouper populations slowly grew back. As Scales writes: “Ocean wildlife has a tremendous capacity to regenerate and recover from dreadful losses and depletion. Often all that is needed is for the exploitation, destruction, and pollution to stop.”

That encouraging thought chimes with the charming stories in The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth (Greystone Books £18.99). Author Martin Wikelski is the director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and has spent years trying to understand how animals seem to know when to flee before an earthquake or avoid an oncoming storm.

In the process he has been charged at by a quarter-tonne sea lion in the Galápagos and awoken by a bite on the backside from a rat. “I was shocked but I didn’t hold it against the rat,” he reports. “It was just being a rat after all.” But his work also helped to develop Icarus, or International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space, an initiative that allows scientists to spy on wild animals to learn about their behaviour.

Wikelski hopes the programme will produce an “internet of animals” delivering a daily “lifecast”, like a weather forecast, showing what’s going on around the planet. Porcupine activity in Russia might suggest an imminent volcanic eruption. Birds in the Himalayas could show it’s risky to climb Everest today. And so forth.

His vision is compelling. But so is the need for humans to do more to protect the climate and the wilderness on which they and all creatures depend. 

Pilita Clark is an FT business columnist

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