Book Review: The Rewiring America Handbook (2020). Saul Griffith.

This valuable work is only available (to my knowledge) as an e-book, in .pdf format.  Despite that minor accessibility limitation, the contents are very useful, well-presented and thought-provoking.  This is also the first major publication (it's really the introductory manifesto) of an organization (Rewiring America, at https://www.rewiringamerica.org ) which in the past several years has become an important advocacy group in the United States for finding practical solutions to the climate crisis.

The author is an Australian-American MIT-trained engineer, who (with a group of collaborators) has done detailed studies on what it will take to try to keep the world (and the United States) at a low-enough carbon level to avoid the worst effects of climate change.  His proposals are based on science- and engineering-based analyses of current conditions and problems.  He and his team of researchers are also well-versed in many of the economic issues and challenges related to climate and environmental policy, another crucial part of the story which he weaves into his prescriptions for averting the worst of the climate crisis.

There are a few key arguments made, mixed in with many sub-topics, graphs and studies:  first, meeting climate objectives will require a World-War II-scale industrial program, to build and deploy the technical infrastructure for power generation and the new grid;  second, we can all contribute significantly as individuals, without lowering our standards of living, by simply replacing or adding any personal infrastructure (cars, furnaces, stoves, solar panels) with new-tech all-electric versions;  third, an all-electric economy is cheaper in the long run, but requires heavy up-front investment, requiring inexpensive financing, which should be made widely available to consumers;  and fourth, building the all-electric economy will create on the order of 25 million good new jobs throughout all of American's zip codes, urban and rural.  

It is a very exciting and uplifting vision, with an abundance of supportive technical and financial detail included -- now all we have to do is figure out how to do it politically.  The .pdf of the book can be downloaded from Rewiring America’s site on the web, where you can now find other more specific and detailed reports and white papers on climate issues.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019). David Wallace-Wells.

This book contains a series of essays detailing the extent of climate change damage to the earth and its environment and species that have already occurred, and where current trends are likely to take us.  

The author also makes clear how long we have already known about this problem, and failed to take meaningful steps to remediate it, and outlines much of what we know about what the fossil fuel industry has done to prevent progress on climate change, in order to protect its investments and profits. 

It’s all fairly grim and depressing, but important reading for informed citizens.  Recommended.

Book Review: Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019). Darrell Bricker and John Ibbotson.

Empty Planet is a startling book in the "everything you know is wrong" genre, having to do with population growth.  

The main thesis is that all our current fears about a population crisis for the planet may be way overblown, because the major demographic effects of global urbanization, increasing wealth and education in developed societies, the rise of women as social equals and professionals in the workplace, and the loss of religious belief are to push birth rates well below replacement levels (which is about 2.1 children/woman).  

That has already happened in much of the world, and is happening rapidly now even in the less developed areas.  The authors argue that the real crisis may be in the effects of shrinking and aging populations on societies and economies.  

Lots of details and demographic analysis are included.  This is a very important book for understanding the current immigration debates and crises as well, given the potential value of increased immigration as used in some countries to compensate for population decline.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Echo Maker (2003). Richard Powers.

After reading The Overstory, Richard Powers’ remarkable novel about trees, forests, and how the fate of humans, the environment and the planet is bound to them, I decided to explore some of his other work.  

 

This much older novel weaves a gripping mystery out of the results of a young man’s late-night car crash, and the rare mental condition he suffers from the accident, where he can’t recognize the people and things closest to him.  

 

In the course of this unusual but masterful story, a number of different characters and elements are drawn into the mystery, including the beloved sister he can’t recognize, an alienated older popular neuroscience writer and academic, an old girlfriend of the crash victim, the fate of a local migratory crane population and the river site they visit each year, and other pieces.  

 

The book didn’t look that large or long, but it did seem to last and last, with a slowly unfolding story that held my rapt attention throughout, even though I frequently had no idea where it was leading.  A neurological, philosophical and ecological mystery of the first order.  Recommended.

Book Review: Under the Sky We Make: How to be Human in a Warming World (2021). Kimberly Nicholas (PhD).

This is a different kind of climate crisis book, which focuses more on the personal impacts of climate change: how we think about it, our grief at what will be lost, and what already has been lost, but also what each of us can do to try to minimize the future losses, and give our own lives meaning. 

The author talks about how climate scientists try to cope with their own grief, depression and feelings of futility in the face of a massive human ecological catastrophe that seems impossible to prevent, and about what each of us can do and must do to stay sane, and make good choices in the areas of our own personal, family and work lives we can affect, to try to save the planet. 

This book is a very moving, thoughtful and constructive guide to how each of us can make a difference, and add to our collective positive response as humans to the climate disaster we have created.  Recommended.

Book Review: Under a White Sky (2021). Elizabeth Kolbert.

Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer for The New Yorker, is one of the very best contemporary authors on the environment, nature and climate change.   In her previous book, The Sixth Extinction, she explored the concept of the Anthropocene (the human-dominated geological age, in which we now live), and discussed the massive species die-offs that have been a consistent but now-escalating feature of the rise of human civilization on the planet.  

In this book, she looks at what climate change has already done to nature and the natural world, explores questions of what it means to have a human-managed “natural” environment, and offers thoughts on what we can and should do now to avert the worst impacts of global warming and our destructive effects on the planetary ecology.  

This is must reading for anyone concerned about climate change and our collective future as the apex species on Earth.  Recommended.