Trump makes for a troubled climate in Baku and beyond
COP29, the UN conference on climate change, which is arguably the world’s most important climate negotiation event, begins roughly a week after the election of climate sceptic Donald Trump. Trump has promised to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement once again, start up massive oil drilling and terminate what he calls the green ‘scam’. Excerpts from This Week, Those Books on how, whatever happens, we are one world…of disasters and climate denial. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and podcast the day it drops
Welcome to This Week, Those Books, your rundown on books new and old that resonate with the week’s big news story.
Please consider supporting this news literacy effort by investing in a paid membership so that we can keep it freely accessible to our community of more than 10,000 subscribers in 114 countries.
If, for whatever reason, it’s not possible for you to upgrade to paid, email [email protected] and we’ll give you full access, no questions asked.
Would you rather listen? We have a human (not AI) read-along.
– Rashmee
The Big Story:
Deadly hurricanes. Catastrophic floods. Raging wildfires. Denialism. From the United States to India, Myanmar to Nigeria, Peru to Portugal, we really do live in one world – of bad news about weather disasters as well as a tornado of denials that climate change is even real.
As our fictional book pick* says: “We had been watching people drown for years, and the only difference was that they had always been a long way off from us…disaster would only come when it had our own face on it”.
…Climate change denialism, especially from the US, risks further polarising the global debate and undermining confidence in green energy solutions.
This Week, Those Books:
A novel that speaks perfectly to our time – of late-stage capitalism and climate-induced despondency.
An acclaimed writer argues for a paradox – more climate realism and more climate fiction.
The Backstory:
Climate change is amplifying extreme weather, according to scientists collaborating on the 10-year-old international effort World Weather Attribution…
This Week’s Books:
* The High House
By: Jessie Greengrass
Publisher: Swift
Year: 2021
This evocative, beautifully written novel follows Caro, 18, and her four-year-old half-brother Pauly as they flee a drowning world for the High House in Suffolk in the east of England. The High House has an orchard, a vegetable garden, a tide pool, a water-powered generator, compostable toilets and a barn full of food, toys, medicine, clothes and shoes that are meant to fit Pauly as he grows. The barn also has a boat, for use when the waters will inevitably rise even higher. It is an incomparable refuge, one that has been carefully prepared for Pauly and Caro by Francesca, climate scientist, activist and truthteller…
This book doesn’t create an alternative reality but shows us our world as it is – burning, drowning – even as misinformation and climate denialism inhibit any real response to climate change.
Choice quotes:
“The whole complicated system of modernity which had held us up, away from the earth, was crumbling, and we were becoming again what we had used to be: cold, and frightened of the weather, and frightened of the dark”.
“…drone footage of torn buildings and flooded streets which showed the water lying still and calm and deep across the places people had thought they owned”.
The Great Derangement: : Climate Change and the Unthinkable
By: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Year: 2016
Jessie Greengrass’s novel is almost a response to Amitav Ghosh’s lament on the paucity of robust storytelling about the “wicked problem” that is climate change. And the post-apocalyptic reality of Greengrass’s characters is what Ghosh has predicted in this book – a “politics of the armed lifeboat”, with only the well-off able to survive…here, he is an analyst, musing on colonialism, corporate greed and climate injustice, and arguing passionately for artists to seize their responsibility to bring the existential problem of climate change into our everyday lexicon, stories and politics. He writes: “…the imagining of possibilities is not after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats”.
Choice quotes:
…“Will our future generations, standing in a rising pool of swirling waters, not beseech us with this question — ‘Why didn’t you do something?’”
I hope you find This Week, Those Books useful, thoughtful, and…a conversation starter. It’s a small operation here at TWTB, and support from readers like you helps keep this news literacy project going.
Email [email protected] to say ‘hi’.
Connect with me on LinkedIn | Twitter | Bluesky | Facebook | Threads | YouTube
Originally published at This Week, Those Books
