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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 2023, 464 pages
Paperback:
Feb 2024, 464 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Rose Rankin
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We still have time to change the world. From Greta Thunberg, the world's leading climate activist, comes the essential handbook for making it happen.
You might think it's an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, at a scale and speed never seen, against all the odds. There is hope - but only if we listen to the science before it's too late.
In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts - geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders - to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild's strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried?
We are alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. Together, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now.
1.1
To solve this problem, we need to understand it.
Greta Thunberg
The climate and ecological crisis is the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced. It will no doubt be the issue that will define and shape our future everyday life like no other. This is painfully clear. In the last few years, the way we see and talk about the crisis has started to shift. But since we have wasted so many decades ignoring and downplaying this escalating emergency, our societies are still in a state of denial. This is, after all, the age of communication, where what you say can easily outweigh what you do. That is how we have ended up with such a great number of major fossil-fuel- producing – and high-emitting – nations calling themselves climate leaders, despite not having any credible climate mitigation policies in place. This is the age of the great greenwashing machine.
There are no black-and-white issues in life. No categorical answers. Everything is a subject for endless...
The Climate Book's short chapters and its structure—focused on what we know, what we're doing or not doing, and what we must do—make it an easy and challenging read at the same time. Complex subjects are explained quickly and clearly, before the reader can get bogged down in jargon. But the sheer breadth of the climate catastrophe and its multifaceted impact on every sphere of life might leave the reader feeling overwhelmed. The final section includes actionable shifts in behavior that individuals and nations can take to mitigate the crisis. These are forward-looking—I won't go so far as to say hopeful—essays about changing our consumption, putting the well-being of less economically developed nations first and making sacrifices for future generations, and how these efforts need not be immiserating or an end to daily life as we know it...continued
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(Reviewed by Rose Rankin).
Most of us are familiar with the mantra "reduce, reuse, recycle," and the effectiveness of this slogan inspired a generation of Americans to put plastics of all kinds into recycling bins rather than their trash. The problem is that, as contributor Nina Schrank points out in The Climate Book, "this narrative is perhaps the greatest example of greenwashing on the planet today." Despite shipping the problem out of sight and claiming that new technologies will continue producing plastics without creating waste, the fact remains that the vast majority of plastics can't be and aren't recycled.
Worldwide, only 9% of plastic waste is recycled, and in the U.S. that number drops to 5%, according to recent studies. The reasons for this are numerous...
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