Climate Hope

Through extensive research and reporting, this boundary-crossing and highly readable survey of efforts to tackle climate change aims to replace our paralyzing fears with a restored sense of hope and determination.

Climate change is a problem so enormous and complex—with threats so frightening in their implications—that many of us fend off confusion and hopelessness by simply turning away. There are jobs to do, children to raise, bills to pay. Meanwhile, with delayed action, missed targets and increasingly dire reports at the international level, a notion that the crisis is intractable continues to spread.

And the proposed solutions can be just as daunting. They often involve jargon about gigatons of carbon and kilowatt-hours of electricity. In a deeply polarized political environment, any sense of the common purpose required to make these work seems to dissolve into denial or paralysis. With all this fear and conflict, the question must be asked: How do we find the tools and—equally important—the hope we need to tackle such a wickedly difficult issue?

In Climate Hope, journalist David Geselbracht blends in-depth research, expert interviews and on-the-ground reporting in multiple countries, revealing remarkable efforts to identify the causes and impacts of climate change—and devise crucial ways to address them.

Geselbracht brings the reader to the chaotic 2021 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, as well as to giant heating ducts below the city of Copenhagen and to wildfire-scorched landscapes in Western Canada, to name just a few sites. The scale of the challenge is clear in the range of fields he covers, from glaciology and climate science to law and diplomacy. But in drawing these approaches together, he shares stories of hope, awe and wonder that encourage us to confront this long-term, world-warping phenomenon with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility.