What do we actually do about climate change?
My own shelf doesn’t agree with itself. That’s the interesting part. Grouped by what each voice says:
How big, and for how long
- The Long Thaw by David Archer: everyone argues about 2100; he models the next 100,000 years. A good chunk of the CO2 we emit stays for millennia.
- The Human Planet by Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin: how humans became a geological force, and when the Anthropocene started (their proposal: 1610).
The data optimists
- El mundo no se acaba (Not the End of the World) by Hannah Ritchie: doom is unearned; the trends show real progress, and we could be the first generation to build a sustainable world.
- Superabundancia (Tupy and Pooley): measured in hours worked to afford them, resources keep getting more abundant. The optimist counterweight to collapse literature.
The limits camp
- Crashoil, the blog of Antonio Turiel: cheap, abundant energy is ending (peak oil, material limits), and that will change how we live whatever we decide.
The contrarian economist
- False Alarm by Bjørn Lomborg: real, not apocalyptic, and current policies cost a lot for little. His numbers get seriously criticised, which is exactly why he’s worth reading next to the others.
Telling it
- Comunicación del cambio climático en España (UNED): a course on how climate change gets communicated in Spain.
A concrete case
- Burning plantations for palm oil: in Indonesia, plantations are burned every year for palm oil. Illegal. Done anyway.
Where they clash: optimists vs limits (can growth go green, or does energy decline set the ceiling?), and Lomborg’s cost-benefit against everybody’s timescales.
No verdict yet. What would change my mind, and what should I read next? Tell me.