How to Be a Climate Optimist

Blueprints for a Better World

By: Chris Turner

Narrated by: Chris Turner

WINNER OF THE SHAUGHNESSY COHEN PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING

From the National Business Book Award winner and GG finalist, a very different book about facing the climate crisis, and what awaits us on the other side.

Chris Turner has reported from the places where the sustainable future first emerged—from green islands in Denmark and green office parks in southern India, to solar panel factories in California and idealistic intentional communities from Scotland to New Mexico. Here, he condenses the first quarter century of the global energy transition into bite-sized chunks of optimistic reflection and reportage, telling a story of a planet in peril and a global effort already beginning to save it. This is a book that moves past the despair and futile anger over ecological collapse and harnesses that passion toward the project of building a twenty-first century quality of life that surpasses the twentieth-century version in every way. How to Be a Climate Optimist overflows with possibility in a moment of great panic, upheaval and uncertainty over a world on fire.

Critic reviews

WINNER OF THE SHAUGHNESSY COHEN PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING

“The climate debate is inherently pessimistic, and while Chris Turner doesn’t pretend that crafting policy to slow global warming is easy, he presents a compelling argument: gloom and doom is not an effective strategy. How to Be a Climate Optimist is a self-help guide for the planet and a masterclass in brisk, vivid storytelling. Turner gives us a crisp, upbeat tour d’horizon of gee-whiz innovation coupled with a strongly argued case that we—politicians, voters and citizens—just need the will to reach for the solutions taking shape before our eyes.” —2023 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize Jury

Unfortunate misleading solutions

I sincerely am looking for optimism in these uncertain times. I was recommended this book by a friend. However, I think anyone who is well-informed on the subject of climate change easily recognizes that the solutions in this book are selling false hope. I understand why the author is well received by the corporate business world. He’s telling them that the very structures which treated the environment so poorly can simply be tweaked to treat it better, and that we can dial down human produced CO2 and like a thermostat, the temperature should go down. The author does not recognize any of the feedback loops, which I’ve already been engaged. This book simply tells the uninformed that business and continued economic growth can solve global warming, a message to many people are willing to pay for?