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Is it really possible to make green cement or green steel? How did Copenhagen get to be such an environmentally friendly city? What exactly is carbon farming? Developments like these are proceeding at such a pace that it’s often hard for experts to keep up, let alone the interested lay person.
The American author John Berger addresses both groups in Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth (Seven Stories Press, $28.95). He is by no means the first writer to travel the world to tell the stories of the politicians, business leaders, farmers and financiers working on ever more successful ways to cut carbon emissions; a minor industry of such writing has emerged in recent years. But Berger’s readable and well-researched account is a welcome addition.
From the North Dakota carbon farmer who has turned eroded dirt into dark productive soil to the Republican mayor in oil-friendly Texas spurning fossil fuels for renewables, he offers an uplifting assessment of how much green change is being achieved.
By contrast, the latest book from Oxford university economist Sir Dieter Helm, Legacy: How to Build the Sustainable Economy (Cambridge University Press, £16.99), will bring you back down with a thud.
Helm’s central message is that no serious progress on climate change has been made, despite 30 years of trying — and that radical developments are now needed, not least in his own profession. The ghosts of Keynes, Hayek and other economic greats lurk behind today’s economic prescriptions, he writes, even though “none had a primary concern with the environment”.
“Many of their tools break in the hands of the sustainable economy,” he goes on. “It is not about marginal changes to discrete bits of the economy and cost-benefit analysis; it is not primarily about utility, utilitarianism and making people happy.”
His proposed mix of solutions includes a form of universal basic income, sweeping regulatory changes, and measures to ensure carbon polluters finally pay a meaningful price. The latter would be radical and difficult: “Serious decarbonisation is going to hurt — probably a lot.” But it’s needed, he adds, as is a constitution that sees off “the tyranny of the current selfish generation over the next”.
Speaking of generations, the US writer Lawrence MacDonald has a message for one in particular in Am I Too Old to Save the Planet? A Boomer’s Guide to Climate Action. (Changemakers Books, £13.99, $15.95). MacDonald, a former foreign correspondent and think-tank specialist, says those like him who were born between 1946 and 1964 are the people most responsible for the climate emergency. Having benefited hugely from the postwar fossil-fuelled economic boom, boomers then did “next to nothing” to address the gathering threat of climate change.
Still, it is evident that many of them want to act, and this book aims to show them how, starting with their wealth. MacDonald has advice on moving money out of banks or funds bankrolling fossil fuels, as well as buying an electric car, sticking solar panels on the roof and flying less. There is also information on how to effect more systemic change by joining the growing number of groups encouraging older people to become climate activists. That could mean civil disobedience and getting arrested — or simply joining a faith-based group trying to encourage more climate action. MacDonald may be primarily addressing a US readership, but his message has global appeal.
Finally, the London-based researcher Jay Owens has also roamed the world to report on the planet and what humans have done to it, this time through the lens of the tiniest specks of matter imaginable: dust. About 2,000mn tons of dust enters the atmosphere every year, she writes, darkening skies and polluting air across the world. Natural causes are responsible for a lot of it, but so is bungled land and water management.
Owens’ book, Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles (Hodder & Stoughton, £25), focuses on the dust that humans cause, including the stuff from blazing wildfires — like one the author came across on a 2015 California road trip. Her travels lead her to follow the trail of forest fire dust blown into Greenland, where it settles and creates darker snow that absorbs more heat and melts. There is also toxic dust left on the bottom of Central Asia’s Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest lake in the world but now almost entirely evaporated. There’s even radioactive dust left over from nuclear tests across the world. One of Owens’ chief discoveries might surprise us: dust is, she writes, “fundamentally political”.
Pilita Clark is an FT business columnist
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