Changing Minds for a Changing Climate? On the Limits of How-To Projects for Saving the World

Abstract

There is no shortage of popular-press books about climate change — by academics, public intellectuals, activists, novelists. Their target audience tends to be informed, interested, and concerned people, but not specialists. This includes most students in my first-year seminar on humanities and social science approaches to the climate emergency. Part of what we do is looking at how climate change is discussed in public discourse and popular culture. The works I look at here are books students are likely to encounter if they read on beyond my course, and that offer important insights into how conversations about climate change take shape. The first two books, Bill Gates’ How To Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (2021) and Jason Hickel’s Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2021), more-or-less offer solutions, though their solutions are radically different from each other and are not ready-to-apply toolkits. Gates focuses on technological solutions, while Hickel asserts the need to overcome our obsession with constant economic growth. Naomi Klein’s On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal (2019) provides no single solution, except for fighting many struggles, but does offer glimpses of where progress may emerge. In her frank assessment of the difficulties of the struggles ahead, including taking the prospects of exclusion and climate apartheid seriously, it is Klein who offers not only the more convincing argument but also the more responsible approach.