With the corona lockdown in full swing and the spring and summer sun upon us you’ll surely be keen for an escape through literature! Here is a selection of recent energy related books that will keep you informed and up to date with the latest developments in the energy transition.
On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein
Twenty years after No Logo, and five years after This Changes Everything, On Fire explains how the bold ideas and action within the Green New Deal could avert climate catastrophe and be a blueprint for a just and thriving society.
Naomi Klein’s seventh book, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal gathers for the first time Naomi’s impassioned reporting from the frontlines of climate breakdown, and pairs it with new material on the high stakes of what we choose to do next.
Superpower: One Man’s Quest to Transform American Energy by Russell Gold
This is the never-before-told story of an epic attempt to build the largest renewable energy project in the United States. Superpower offers a fascinating look at business in the time of climate change. The story follows wind and transmission pioneer Michael Skelly as the renewable energy industry grows up and takes on the incumbent fossil fuel companies. It offers looks at Minnesota farmers who revolted against an energy project, a rock visionary turned energy financier, a group of students in the 1970s who erected a wind turbine on New York’s East Village to take on Con Edison and many more people who helped turn the wind and solar industry into a reality.
Empowering the Great Energy Transition: Policy for a Low-Carbon Future by Scott Victor Valentine, Marilyn A. Brown, and Benjamin K. Sovacool
At a time when climate-change deniers hold the reins of power in the United States and international greenhouse gas negotiations continue at a slow crawl, what options are available to cities, companies, and consumers around the world who seek a cleaner future? Scott Victor Valentine, Marilyn A. Brown, and Benjamin K. Sovacool explore developments and strategies that will help fast-track the transition to renewable energy. They provide an expert analysis of the achievable steps that citizens, organizational leaders, and policy makers can take to put their commitments to sustainability into practice.
Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change by George Marshall
With engaging stories and drawing on years of his own research, Marshall argues that the answers do not lie in the things that make us different and drive us apart, but rather in what we all share: how our human brains are wired, our evolutionary origins, our perceptions of threats, our cognitive blindspots, our love of storytelling, our fear of death, and our deepest instincts to defend our family and tribe. Once we understand what excites, threatens, and motivates us, we can rethink and reimagine climate change, for it is not an impossible problem. Rather, it is one we can halt if we can make it our common purpose and common ground. Silence and inaction are the most persuasive of narratives, so we need to change the story. In the end, Don’t Even Think About It is both about climate change and about the qualities that make us human and how we can grow as we deal with the greatest challenge we have ever faced.
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