“Let’s start at the very beginning / A very good place to start,” sings Julie Andrews as she instructs the von Trapp children in the 1965 film The Sound of Music. Two new books on climate change take up this call in a powerful and useful way, providing some “big picture” insights not often gleaned from the wealth of current writing on the topic.
Eugene Linden is an author and journalist who has written on climate issues for more than three decades. His new book, Fire and Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present, takes a deep dive into the history of how we got to this point, and where we could go from here.
He notes that the issue of increased carbon dioxide causing a rise in global temperatures was first really brought to the attention of the U.S. government under President Jimmy Carter in 1979, with the publication of the Charney Report from an ad hoc committee of the National Academy of Sciences. “Now, a real dawn of climate action finally seems at hand,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “[T]hings are changing fast. Not as fast, alas, as the climate itself.”
“While technology must play a role in how we confront climate change, it’s not enough to just incorporate new technologies and new regulations into existing economic models that are based on the plunder of the planet’s resources.”
Linden views the climate crisis with four parallel clocks, all starting in 1979 but each running at different speeds, and sometimes even in reverse. These clocks represent “the interaction of four different realms: reality, the scientific world, public opinion, and the world of business and finance.” He notes that the last three are “all lagging the reality of climate change, but to different degrees.”
Using this lens, Linden leads us through the decades up to the present, highlighting the many times when “nations dithered on any actions to avert the threat.” While some of this failure is related to science needing to develop the tools to measure, monitor, and model the systems, some of it has been malicious. He recalls the efforts of the chemical company DuPont to delay the regulation of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, refrigerant chemicals that created a hole in the ozone layer in the 1970s and 1980s.
"Fire and Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present" By Eugene Linden, Penguin Press, 336 pages, Publication date: April 5, 2022
“As it turned out,” Linden reflects, “a threat to life on Earth was less of a concern for DuPont’s C-suite than a threat to quarterly profits.” The corporate efforts to block or delay the regulation of these chemicals in the 1980s were instrumental in the 1990s and early 2000s in building the tools and tactics for blocking action on climate change.
Linden, speaking of the years under President George W. Bush, says, “Incalculable damage was done by having the administration of the world’s largest economy and greenhouse gas emitter spend eight years actively sabotaging efforts to combat global warming.”
His most withering criticism is for the years under Donald Trump, characterized by “the mockery of expertise, an infantile trend to ‘owning the libs,’ and a general trivialization of political discourse.” He says the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic under Trump’s watch “propelled the climate change story in unexpected ways.”
For one thing, it “gave citizens of the world’s most polluted megacities a glimpse of what life could be like” in a world with clean skies, as the economic shutdown gave the atmosphere a temporary decrease in pollutants.
Linden is open-eyed about the underlying causes of our current climate crisis, that it is “deeply ingrained in capitalism to disregard any action that might interrupt the existing flow of money.” He is guardedly hopeful: “We know where we’re going, we know what the likely consequences are, and we have the tools to temper, if not avert, a coming catastrophe.
The existential question: Will we?”
Most of Aviva Chomsky’s writing has focused on Latin America and on immigration and labor issues. But in her new book, Is Science Enough?: Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice, the professor of history and the coordinator of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts—and daughter of world-renowned linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky—turns her analytical skills on what is very probably the key question of our times.
“Literature on climate change has proliferated over the past decade,” Chomsky writes in the book’s introduction. “Yet there is no single, short, accessible book that breaks down the complexities, terminology, disagreements, and issues in the debates for activists, students, and the general interested public.”
"Is Science Enough?: Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice" By Aviva Chomsky, Beacon Press, 240 pages, Publication date: April 5, 2022
That is what she sets out to do in Is Science Enough?. The book delves into “some of the biggest questions that the climate debate frequently evades”—including population growth, immigration, and, of course, capitalism itself. “Confronting climate change,” she explains, “means understanding how we got to this point, and challenging some of the basic ways our society and economy are organized.”
In each very readable section, Chomsky dissects the root questions behind current conversations. She asks whether technology can save us. Her answer: “Here I join critics who take a more radical, ecological, and systemic view. While technology must play a role in how we confront climate change, it’s not enough to just incorporate new technologies and new regulations into existing economic models that are based on the plunder of the planet’s resources.”
Many readers will be drawn to the chapter on individual actions. “Given the paralysis of our institutions in confronting the climate emergency,” Chomsky writes, “it’s natural to think about what kinds of actions we can take individually to change things.” But, as she notes, “in order for our individual actions to be politically meaningful, we have to go beyond thinking of our actions as personal lifestyle and consumption adjustments. We can’t buy our way out of the problems our economic system has created. It’s through organized social movements and political action that we can create the kind of pressure necessary for real structural change.”
Chomsky deftly navigates the questions that muddle people’s thinking on the issue, like those having to do with food, air travel, and whether or not to buy a Prius. (Her answer: no.)
“We need to change our economy and our politics if we want to shift to a new low-emissions society,” she writes. “[T]o make this change, we need to take control from a corporate system that has every interest in perpetuating itself.”
Chomsky also devotes part of the book to climate justice, looking at “climate-related expressions of racism and inequality and calls for changes in the structures that cause these problems.” She asks “how the social and economic divisions that characterize our world relate to the causes of climate change and its impacts.”
In conclusion, Chomsky, like Linden, is guardedly hopeful. “Despite this rather dreary history and the domestic and global structural obstacles, there are reasons for optimism,” she writes. “[T]oday, people are recognizing the urgency and showing willingness to act.”
This book will give them some ideas on what to do and how to do it.