This article provides an overview of two recent books. The premise of David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth is seen as attempting to really grasp what climate change will bring. The primary tactic of Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich is historical, providing a more focused story of the missed opportunities in the 1970s and ’80s. The reviewer argues that that what people need to know now is not what climate change will do but what we should—that is, how to think about climate change as a political problem. The absence of climate politics from these books is seen by the reviewer to make them feel already somewhat dated. Presently there are various surges of political energy and action, which demonstrate an understanding that tackling climate change requires collective action. The reviewer observes that the point isn’t to arrive at a single solution. Though the next 12 years are crucial for determining how much worse the effects of climate change will get, there needs to be an understanding that the decisions on confronting its myriad challenges will continue long afterward. “We will be living with climate change forever.”
By Alyssa Battistoni. The Nation. May 10, 2019.
