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This book frames the climate problem in a comprehensive way and cuts through common conceptual confusions that impede rapid action.
The first chapter describes the history, nature, and scope of the climate problem. The second chapter describes how to stabilize the climate by ending fossil fuels, minimizing non-fossil emissions, and creating a climate-positive biosphere.
The authors identify five technical pillars of climate action needed to stabilize the climate, each of which gets its own chapter. These include electrifying (almost) everything, decarbonizing the electricity grid, minimizing non-fossil emissions, promoting efficiency and optimization, and removing carbon from the atmosphere. The book then moves beyond the narrow technical and policy focus of most previous climate solutions work by detailing three more “institutional” pillars that require action: aligning incentives, mobilizing money, and elevating truth.
Key Features:
- Teaches methods for assessing the potential for emissions reductions at the government, company, funder, and individual citizen levels.
- Provides the reader with a quantitative sense of the massive scope and rapid rate of change needed to truly meet the climate challenge while simultaneously providing realistic and actionable solutions.
- Summarizes evidence-based advice from two experts on creating zero emissions and net climate-positive systems and institutions.
- Trains the reader to separate fact from fiction when analysing climate solutions and provides realistic paths towards climate progress for a wide range of decision-makers.
As the title of the volume suggests, Solving Climate Change: A Guide for Learners and Leaders by Jonathan Koomey and Ian Monroe provides a comprehensive yet concise overview of what we know and what needs to be done now to stop climate change. Although the authors indicate that the book is primarily designed for an academic audience (including advanced students), in my view, it is equally suitable for anyone who wants to learn and begin to think about specific actionable items. Koomey and Monroe in many ways reassure us that we have what it takes to stop emissions. The problem is we cannot achieve this with only a subset of us taking action. How to get the majority to uniformly take action across different interest groups seems to be a policy and planning question that requires careful process design – how to get all stakeholders to take concerted action that is jointly motivated and agreed upon. How to organize this collective action based on informed consent (and commitment) across different jurisdictional and geographic contexts seems to be the next topic area that deserves unprecedented attention before it’s too late.
Anthem EnviroExperts, August 2023
Chapter 1: Introduction to the Climate Problem
Chapter 2: Introduction to Climate Solutions
Chapter 3: Tools of the Trade
Chapter 4: Electrify (almost) Everything
Chapter 5: Decarbonize Electricity
Chapter 6: Minimise Non-Fossil Warming Agents
Chapter 7: Efficiency and Optimization
Chapter 8: Remove Carbon
Chapter 9: Align Incentives
Chapter 10: Mobilize Money
Chapter 11: Elevate Truth
Chapter 12: Bringing it all Together
Chapter 13: Our Climate-Positive Future