Must Have Books and Podcasts on Climate Change for 2023
Books and podcasts that focus on the knowledge, history and expertise needed to help address the climate crisis.
Hi everyone
This is the 3rd out of 4th list for must have books and podcasts for 2023. I’m looking at those focusing on climate change and the environment more broadly today.
Speaking of the environment, I’m writing this after just walking 26kms through England’s green belt as part of the kick off of the Walk It Back campaign. Look out for a dedicated post on this in the coming week.
In the meantime, here are some great books and podcasts to get stuck into this year!
As always, if you think any of your networks will be interested in this post please share, like and post this newsletter and encourage friends and colleagues to subscribe.
Warmly
Mick
The Nutmeg’s Curse, by Amitav Ghosh
This history book is an eye opening take on how present debates over environmental degradation, energy poverty and climate change cannot be fully understood without a firm grasp of the last 400 years of geopolitics. The clear link across the centuries, argues Ghosh, is colonialism, exploitation and power pure and simple. Ghosh draws on the history of the cultivation and exportation of the nutmeg spice, native to Indonesia’s Banda Islands, to drive home his point. He also outlines how energy companies invested millions into a marketing campaign to convince US taxpayers that solving climate change is a matter of “personal responsibility and consumer choice.” What this framing “excludes”, Ghosh notes,”are institutional emissions, like those related to the US military and to the projection of American power… It is as if ordinary Americans contributed nothing to defense expenditure—even though a significant part of their taxes are earmarked precisely for that purpose.” Ultimately, and in contrast to technologists like Bill Gates, Ghosh argues that breakthroughs on climate change - and true climate justice - will only be achieved through accompanying reconciliation at a far deeper level.
I read The Nutmeg’s Curse against the backdrop of negotiations on loss and damages and calls for climate justice and reparations from poorer nations, climate vulnerable countries and indigenous communities. It definitely helped me understand more where these communities’ representatives were coming from and the ongoing frustrations they felt at not being heard in the great capitals of the world. The Nutmeg’s Curse also reinforces the learnings I’ve taken away from my work with Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados and her Bridgetown Initiative, which focuses on reforming the inequities inherent in the global financial system for the betterment of climate vulnerable countries like her own.
Prime Minister Mottley herself, like Ghosh, often invokes history to argue her point. Speaking at the recent COP27 climate talks in November, she pointed out how the proceeds from slave driven, plantation based exploitation of countries like her own had enabled western nations to industrialize. Now, as a result of the high emissions of those same industrialized countries, poorer nations are arguably being forced to pay again for a problem they did little to cause. As Mottley said, “we were the ones whose blood, sweat and tears financed the industrial revolution…Are we now to face double jeopardy by having to pay the cost as a result of those greenhouse gases from the industrial revolution? That is fundamentally unfair.”
Near the book’s conclusion Ghosh narrates visiting the Banda Islands in the present day and reflects on the trauma and legacy of the Dutch colonization of the Banda Islands, which resembled what we would arguably describe today as a genocide. I had my own similar reflection earlier this year when I visited Bridgetown in Barbados as part of the initial meetings for Prime Minister Mottley’s Bridgetown Initiative. On the last day of the meetings I went to a house that George Washington had once stayed in. Barbados was the only country outside the US he ever visited (although they were both under the yoke of the British at the time). And the reason was apparently to learn the ways of the plantation farmer (carried out on the backs of people enslaved). The US colonies would eventually perfect the Caribbean style of plantation driven exports, and the rest is history. Today, the US remains by some margin the largest historic carbon emitter in human history.
Fortunately, this was also a year in which gains and concessions were made. Loss and damage, long neglected on the global agenda, got its first agreement with the creation of a new fund. Now the next struggle will be getting it funded and deciding who is eligible. Ghosh leaves little doubt who he thinks should be paying.
The Carbon Removal Show (Podcast)
Anyone genuinely interested in action on climate change should subscribe to this podcast. To avoid temperate rises greater than 1.5 degrees, it’s now generally agreed that some degree of carbon removal will be required. This is in addition to deep and significant cuts to our carbon footprint, such is the damage we’ve already done to the Earth’s atmosphere.
To illustrate the scale of the challenge, according to The Carbon Removal Show, forty percent of annual emissions produced by power plants will still be in the atmosphere 100 years from now. Ten percent, 10,000 years from now!
The challenge however is that investment into carbon removal technologies is still quite nascent, expensive and ultimately nowhere near the scale necessary to remove an estimated 5-15 gigatons of carbon annually (roughly 10-15% of our existing annual emissions). It’s also not clear the extent to which we can rely on “panic planting” (i.e. trees and nature based solutions) to carry this burden, although they will be essential in buying time whilst other technological solutions develop.
The lack of awareness and the need for more investment, is part of the reason why my friend Craig Cohon is quite literally Walking It Back, which he began on January 3rd. He is currently walking from London to Istanbul in a journey of redemption to help catalyze a movement in support of carbon removal, which he describes as “the mission-critical next frontier of climate action.” He has also committed to wipe clean his entire lifetime of carbon emissions. Already, he has committed over $1M to remove all 8,147 tonnes of carbon he has emitted since his birth in 1963. Through walk it back he plans to set in motion spin-off campaigns to remove no less than 100,000 tonnes.
I joined Craig on one of the first legs of his journey as he set off from London at the start of this week. I’ll be posting about this in the coming week. In the meantime, I highly recommend the Carbon Removal Show podcast. It provides a great overview of what carbon removal is, breaks down the different methodologies in lay terms (i.e. technologies involving biochar and direct air capture), and most importantly what police change is needed to address it at scale.
Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World by Katharine Hayhoe
I have probably recommended this book more than any other over the past year. This was especially true following the disillusionment that many climate activists suffered following the lack of implementation of the COP26 Glasgow outcomes.
Climate change, I’m convinced, will only be successfully addressed through increasing the number of people meaningfully engaged in both finding solutions and advocating for policy change. In Saving Us, Professor Hayhoe, a Christian living in Texas and regarded as one of the world’s foremost communicators on climate change, provides a blueprint on how to do exactly that. Providing a useful layperson's breakdown on the fundamentals of climate science, Hayhoe outlines how to broach the subject with friends, family and even local community leaders and decision makers such as your elected representative, mayor and/or employer. Talking about climate change sounds simple, but generally it’s not something we actually do all that much despite, in Hayhoe’s opinion, it being one of the most powerful actions each of us can take. According to Hayhoe only 35% of us discuss climate change at least once in a while.
So, how best to initiate a conversation on climate change? Hayhoe suggests not berating people with facts, statistics and science, nor trying to provoke feelings of guilt, fear and shame. Both approaches, Hayhoe argues, are unlikely to be effective and may even be counterproductive - encouraging apathy and disillusionment rather than a bias for action. She suggests grounding climate-related conversations about potential solutions in shared values and offers a bunch of real world experiences where she has found this to work in her own life. They range from framing climate change in the context of the values of a particular organization (like Rotary International’s 4 way test), to religious principles, or even in common interests such as beer and wine (a past trip to Burgundy, France illuminated for me the impact of climate change on this historic wine region’s prime soil!). Almost any interest or value can be framed in the context of climate change.
And what about the small minority whose identity is so caught up with climate denialism, to challenge their opinion is to challenge their identity? Hayhoe says to ignore them and their “zombie arguments.” Concentrate on the rest of society.
Personally, listening to the end of the audible version of Saving Us while traveling back from Glasgow in November, 2021 proved the perfect antidote to all the mixed emotions that attending COP26 had provoked. By the time I was home, I felt re-energized and convinced that the public engagement work we do at Global Citizen was never more important. Indeed, one of my takeaways from COP26 was that rather than us advocates competing with one another for attention, we would be far more effective, as one activist observed, if we redirected our energy towards building new platforms to engage more people and empower them to have conversations in their social circles and local decision makers.
Ultimately, as Professor Hayhoe powerfully articulates, one of the most powerful motivating forces comes from when people see others in their communities taking action and implementing solutions, however small. If each of us takes on the responsibility to have conversations with our friends, colleagues, family and community leaders about what we’re doing on climate change then imagine the exponential potential impact we could collectively have in nurturing and promoting agency as opposed to indifference or anxiety. Near the book’s conclusion Hayhoe offers up one story to prove the point. A gentleman in the audience of one of her speeches comes up to her to let her know that as a result of just a few conversations in his networks, he has since been able to track 12,000 subsequent conversations that took place as a result of others discussing it with their own networks. And he had some powerful outcomes as a result, such as his local council declaring a climate emergency and committing to divest its investments from fossil fuel and increase its reliance on renewable energy.
If you perhaps don’t have time to read the full book, check out this interview our team at Global Citizen did with Professor Hayhoe back in October, 2021.
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates
Along with Saving Us, whether you’re starting out on your own personal journey to be a more informed citizen or looking to become a more effective advocate, Gates’ relatively brief book is worth a read. Gates’ begins by setting out the overall scale of the challenge that must be addressed if we’re to avoid calamity. Specifically, that we must reduce our current annual greenhouse gas emissions of 51 billion tons a year down to zero by 2050 - “the hardest thing humanity’s ever done.” By point of reference, cites Gates, 1 billion tons is equivalent to the emissions of approximately 10,000 fully-loaded U.S. aircraft carriers.
With the problem clearly defined, the majority of the rest of the book deals forensically with each major source of emissions (manufacturing, transport, electricity, agriculture etc) and what addressing each sector looks like. This includes a discussion on the potential technological innovations needed, and where they already exist, the so-called “green premium” that needs to be drastically reduced if the technologies are to be economically affordable and thus capable of being used at scale. Despite obviously being an avowed technologist, Gates makes clear that little of the innovation needed is going to happen by itself without the involvement of government, whether through providing dollars for research and development or various incentives to shape consumer demand and bring budding technologies to market. Some proposed measures are seemingly quite simple, albeit vigorously opposed, such as permitting plant based meats to be labeled as meats and thus appear in the meat section of a supermarket.
This last point by Gates, on the critical role of government should not be understated, less Gates’ overall point be misconstrued as was arguably the case with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Having ruled against any adjustments to Australia’s current and far from adequate 2030 emission reduction targets, Morrison set out a climate policy that seemed largely to take the technology innovations required to get to net zero (including the controversial carbon capture and storage) as a given and thus, according to this logic, there was no need to make significant short term cuts as the technology would eventually exist at some point prior to 2050 to achieve net zero with less economic sacrifice. The whole point of Gates' book is the opposite however, as this article pointed out ahead of Morisson’s remarks at COP26 in 2021.
Ultimately, without ambitious short and long term targets, and the right policy settings and financial incentives in place to achieve them and drive innovation in a targeted way, much needed technological breakthroughs will likely come too late, if at all, to avoid a climate crisis. Gates himself is acutely aware of this, noting that for all the talk of cheap solar and wind energy that even if we achieve 100% renewable energy that only solves 25% of the problem and as yet we have no viable alternative when it comes to cement and steel production for instance or long haul travel. His message is one of urgency, not complacency, and the need for governments to address this head on.
Finally, and very important from my perspective as an anti-poverty advocate, while Gates dedicates the majority of the book addressing how to reduce emissions he also dedicates a chapter to discussing the impact climate change is already having, particularly on the world’s poor. While the whole of the African continent is responsible for less than 4% of emission, Gates notes how particularly in the area of food production, the continent will be adversely impacted. A 4 degrees temperature rise, for instance, would reduce the amount of available arable land across sub-Saharan Africa by as much as 20%. Thus would devastate livelihoods and increase food prices with resulting rises in hunger. To mitigate this impact, Gates calls for an upsurge in research investment to help smallholder farmers produce more nutritious food in spite of a warmer world. He uses the examples of how investments in the 1970s led to the Green Agricultural Revolution which dramatically increased the amount of food that could be produced from land, saving arguably millions of lives in the process.
Along similar lines to Gates’ book, I would also recommend John Doer’s Speed and Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now which adopts a similar approach but arguably with even more technical data. I constantly use it as a reference book.
Value(s): Building a Better World for All by Mark Carney
This was recommended to me by my friend, Jamie Drummond, and it certainly didn’t disappoint. Mark Carney is the only person (as far as I’m aware) to have served as Central Bank Governor of not only one, but two G7 economies. So the book serves as part memoir; part history on money, finance, the evolution of value as a concept and the role of central banks; and finally a blueprint on how “to transform the value of the market [self-interest] back into the value of humanity” (or as Carney says, citing the Pope, how to “turn grappa back to wine”) and thus address some of the biggest issues of our time, from covid to climate change.
On climate in particular, Carney is explicit that the world of finance has moved far too slowly, exclaiming: “If we had started the energy revolution in 2000, we could have kept within a 1.5 degree temperature rise by halving emissions every 30 years. Now we must half it every 10 years. If we wait another 4 years we will have to halve emissions every year. If we wait 8 years it will be too late… The transition must begin now.”
One of the core themes throughout value(s) is the collapse of trust in traditional financial institutions. To Carney the only way to restore such trust is through demonstrating that markets and financial systems can be successfully reorientated towards providing workable solutions that actually meet peoples’ needs. This is of no surprise given that building confidence and trust has also been a central priority in Carney’s role over the past two years as former British prime minister Boris Johnson’s climate finance advisor in the run up to COP26 in November, 2021 and underlies his attempts to broker credible standards - rules of the road - to govern, amongst other mechanisms, voluntary carbon markets. He knows that such schemes illicit criticism and skepticism because historically they haven’t been done well. Proving they can work and actually help facilitate the transition to a low carbon economy as well as provide much needed financing for developing communities, would in turn arguably boost public confidence in such schemes.
In this respect Carney faces an uphill battle made all the more difficult because of the shortcomings in our global response to covid. Undermined by the very wealthy countries who were meant to fund it, the COVAX facility’s failure to initially achieve its vaccine distribution targets in 2021 was a case in point. Again, Carney recognizes such shortfalls (and the resulting decline in trust) and so is pragmatic enough not to propose a new rules based global order, knowing there is little appetite for western led agendas. Instead he concludes by advocating for a new kind of “Cooperative multilateralism” that is outcomes based rather than rules based. Focused on improving the lives of all citizens and respecting the sovereignty of the nation state, Carney looks to the type of global stimulus responses that was agreed on by consensus of the G20 in the aftermath of the 2008-9 financial crisis as a possible guide.