The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What's Possible in the Age of Warming

You're better off reading "The Future We Choose" by Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac, which is both realistic and inspiring. Honestly, even as someone with dreams for an eco-friendly future, I was not sure I could finish this book. Roughly halfway, he stops talking about the problems we face and pivots to future actions. And he's not wrong about any of what needs to happen to correct joint social and ecological issues, or about the fact that we do need to talk about solutions with a positive approach to making those happen. But from that point forward until the epilogue, he seems to use almost exclusively the narration style of a history lesson, talking about what happened in 2021 forward to 2050 as if it's the past, when the book was published in mid-2020. It's not even clear if some of his prose about 2020 is fact or fiction, and given the contentious election, it's a bit problematic.

I happen to like alt histories as fiction or futurism, but what he predicts for 2021-22 is just so immediately wildly pie-in-sky optimistic compared to what actually occurred, it feels fanciful or ridiculous as I read it in late 2022. Verging on foolish, given where things stood as he wrote. It does not make me feel happy or empowered to think about what he predicted for after that, because the ability to accomplish those goals would no doubt rest on previous societal achievements. Instead, I felt frustrated and sad at how little was improved, the opposite of his stated goal. I seriously hope that future readers don't take his wishful thinking about those 2 years as actual history, or they'll have a hard time understanding why their world is the way it is - maybe it requires an editors note or a new edition...

It's a lovely daydream. But since that is all it is at this time, even as a fellow daydreamer I have a hard time taking him seriously as a journalist or futurist after just a few pages of it. I remained skeptical and more than a little bitter for the remainder of the book. I did like his epilogue and the chapter on imagining at the end, but that's pretty much it.

I loved it. Very real and navigable. A real perspective and a lot of ideas.

"The basics of climate science are easy. We know it is entirely human-caused." A big giant lie.