6 Must-Read Books on Climate Change and ECO Activism
The concern over climate change is growing, but there’s a lot of misinformation and science denial that we face. If you want to be an environmental activist, you need to be well-read on climate change, the environment, new technologies in the renewable energy world, and the tactics being used to stop the advancement of new energy.
Read up on the facts and the most up-to-date views on climate change, how environmental activism is taking on big corporations spreading misinformation, and what our potential futures could look like post-climate change. Here are 6 books you have to read to get the tools you need to prepare for a future with climate change.
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6 Must-Read Books on Climate Change and Eco Activism
This Changes Everything – Naomi Klein
This Changes Everything is an award-winning book by Naomi Klein that takes a look at climate change through an economic and political lens more than a scientific one. She argues that climate change is not a carbon problem, but a fundamental economic problem: our country is based on capitalism, and globalized, unregulated capitalism is the base-problem that has brought on climate change and threatened the stability and resilience of the natural world. Therefore, before confronting climate change, we need to change the rules of our economy.
There’s even a trailer for the book:
For those less book-oriented, there is a documentary also of the same name!
Six Degrees – Mark Lynas
Six Degrees by Mark Lynas is a look into a future of our world with climate change. A world with refugees displaced by rising seas, record-setting hurricanes causing world-wide devastation, and international tensions rising with a potential World War 3 on the horizon. Some call it sensationalist and alarmist, but the book is based on actual scientific evidence that describes what a world would be like with a 6-degree average rise in temperature across the globe. The book is divided into 6 sections: one for each 1-degree of warming and what effects we will see: chapter 1 is the effects of climate change we will see at 1-degree C, chapter 2 is the effects we will see at 2-degrees C, etc. It’s a scary, but eye-opening look into what one potential future for planet Earth could be.
The Future We Choose – Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
Whereas Six Degrees is a dark, scary look into our future, The Future We Choose is a practical, inspiring, and optimistic look into the choices we have to fight climate change, and how we can positively influence our world and create a better future post-climate change. Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac led negotiations for the United Nations and present a determined, head-on approach to taking on climate change. This is the book to read to be inspired into action!
Merchants of Doubt – Naomi Oreskes
The subtitle of this book says most of what you need to know: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Merchants of Doubt is a dive into the tactics used by big industries like the oil and tobacco industries, and how they utilized a small group of scientists in mass-misinformation campaigns to obscure the truth and mislead people to doubt science in order to continue profiting in industries that would otherwise suffer losses. Knowing your opponent’s strategies is half the battle, and in the case of climate change, the continued science-denial is immensely harmful in a world that is growing more and more hostile to life.
Clean Disruption – Tony Seba
Clean Disruption is a deeply insightful look into the near-future of clean energy technology, and how the entire energy industry will soon face massive disruption from renewable energy technologies. For over 20 years, Tony Seba has been able to accurately predict the advancement of renewable energy, the development of electric and self-driving cars, and the transition into distributed energy to amazing accuracy. His predictions continue to be accurate and paint a picture of a renewable energy future that WILL come, despite any political or industry push-back, due purely to the indisputable benefits of renewable energy: cheaper costs, distributed/independently generated power, and better reliability and safety. It’s a fantastically well-reasoned, scientific, analytical look into how unstoppable renewables will change the world, whether you like it or not.
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming – Paul Hawken
This is the ultimate compilation of solutions to climate change. Paul Hawken worked with a large team of scientists from all over the world to identify the best solutions in several different industry sectors including electricity, food/agriculture/land use, transportation, health/education, and carbon sinks. The solutions are each presented and ranked from highly effective to less effective, and emphasizes the fact that no matter how highly ranked a solution is, it is important that we strive to implement ALL solutions that we can as soon as possible in order to reach ‘drawdown,’ which Hawken defines as “the point in the future when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to steadily decline, thereby stopping catastrophic climate change.” If the world could come together to implement all of the solutions in this book, we would be well on our way to stopping climate change. Anyone who is interested in reading about the solutions to climate change and the kinds of systems we need to begin to implement to fight back against climate change should absolutely read this book.
Be sure to also check out the website at https://www.drawdown.org/. An updated report was released this year, describing the progress we have made, and the work we still have left to do, and can be downloaded for free from their website.