Climate Reading List

Mar 31, 2023

Here’s what I’ve been reading on climate. Please comment if you have suggestions.

Changelog

2023-03-31 First version, covers fall 2022 to now.

Books

The Big Fix: Seven Practical Steps to Save Our Planet (2022)

Hal Harvey and Justin Gillis

Heard on the Volts podcast. This book is all about leverage. Working to change your local building code or influencing your utility’s roadmap to zero carbon has much higher leverage than individual actions.

Whole Earth Discipline (2010)

Stewart Brand

Yep, that Stewart Brand, the techno-optimist. It may be out of print, but if you can get your hands on a cheap copy, it’s worth a read. Keep your skeptical goggles nearby and you’ll learn something from this wide-ranging book. Written before it was cool to write about climate.

Das Ende des Kapitalismus (German, 2022)

Ulrike Herrmann

Heard on the German podcast Hotel Matze. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be an English translation yet. The thesis at the book’s core is that capitalism and decarbonization are fundamentally incompatible and that we need degrowth managed in a way that resembles the British wartime economy. Herrmann is an economist, and something I appreciated about this book is that she defines capitalism and puts it in a historic context and proposes mechanisms and uses data to support her thesis. A nice change from the usual “everything that’s broken in our societies is the fault of capitalism” shorthand.

Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future (2022)

Saul Griffith

Another techno-optimist. Griffith brings data and (swoon) lots of Sankey diagrams of energy usage by sector. Here is a Medium post by the author from 2019 to give you a flavor of his thinking. I appreciated his data-informed take on why we should be less obsessed about keeping fossil fuels for baseload power. Like the authors of The Big Fix, he advocates for regulatory leverage.