Environment books round-up — the generation facing the brunt of climate change
Be alarmed. Be aware. Be informed. Be hopeful. Such are the messages from four new books on climate change, an ever more pressing problem that is spurring a widening set of titles from authors in a variety of fields.
London-based science writer, Gaia Vince, has written the more ominous one, Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval (Allen Lane, £20). It amounts to a chilling warning that vast numbers of people will be forced to migrate on a warming planet that already has twice as many days when temperatures rise above a perilous 50C than it had 30 years ago.
Fires, heatwaves, droughts and floods are set to drive millions from their homes, Vince predicts, and there is no way that people in parts of northern Europe and other climatically luckier zones will be able to keep them out.
Vince thinks the upheaval can be managed. But it will require radical thinking about options such as global freedom of movement, repurposed cities and countries in safer latitudes turning themselves into “caretaker states” for more vulnerable nations until the worst of the global heating crisis subsides.
Meanwhile, another struggle is emerging over who controls the resources powering a shift to cleaner energy, as Henry Sanderson reveals in Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green (Oneworld, £20).
Sanderson, a former FT journalist who covered commodities and mining, has written a potent reminder to green power advocates that a world running on batteries and sunshine may not fight over oil, but it won’t necessarily be free of conflict — or geopolitical tensions.
China’s rise to green tech superpower status has already given it a commanding position in clean energy industries such as batteries and solar cells, as well as the raw material supply chains that feed them.
At the same time, efforts to stamp out child cobalt miners and other “ecological shadows” afflicting poorer countries are complicating an electric car revolution that promises profound benefits but requires careful attention. Our hunger for big electric SUVs alone requires more mining for larger battery packs that might be better used in trucks and vans, not ordinary passenger cars. As Sanderson says, the oil age left a long scar on the 20th century. “We should make sure that the industries of our green future do much better.”
For the many readers still getting to grips with the basic facts of climate change and what to do about it, help is at hand in The Carbon Almanac: It’s Not Too Late (Penguin Business, £14.99). This pleasingly accessible anthology of climate information was put together by hundreds of collaborators, under the guiding hand of editor, Seth Godin, a marketing guru and bestselling author.
It starts by answering fundamental questions (“What is carbon?”; “What is Net Zero?”; “What is an ecosystem?”) before moving on to topics ranging from green steel and ocean acidity to the five climate scenarios in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
There are also sections on the biggest climate philanthropists, the greenest companies, ESG reporting and other topics that are all too often clouded by tedious jargon and unnecessary complexities. This book is likely to appeal to readers of many different ages.
For younger readers, or those keen to hear their views, British teenager, Bella Lack, has written The Children of the Anthropocene: Stories from the Young People at the Heart of the Climate Crisis (Penguin Life, £9.99).
Lack’s stories of a changing climate are told through an array of different voices. A 14-year-old in an arid part of Madagascar collecting water from baobab trees in a drought so dire it left two of his siblings with acute malnutrition as more than a million people struggled to find enough to eat.
A 13-year-old Californian vegan who remembers spending her first day at school in tears after children pelted her with hotdogs. A 20-year-old Nigerian “eco-feminist” who draws a link between the rise of the Boko Haram Islamic terrorist group and the insecurity bred by a drought that shrank water sources providing food and economic opportunity for millions.
Like so many others in this book, this woman’s fears for the future began early, a reminder of how quickly the cheerful oblivion of childhood disappeared for many young people today.
Each of their stories is different but all are united by their membership of a generation facing the brunt of a changing climate that they did almost nothing to create.
Pilita Clark is the FT’s business columnist
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Summer Books 2022
In the last week of June, FT writers and critics shared their favourites. Some highlights were:
Economics by Martin Wolf
Environment by Pilita Clark
Fiction by Laura Battle
History by Tony Barber
Politics by Gideon Rachman
Critics’ choice