What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures

This books informs about so many current solutions to climate change. It inspires and motivates us to continue to take action on climate change and social justice. It has many excellent ideas.

Great book!

This book is amazing.

There were things I liked about this book and things I did not like about this book. One thing that I liked about this book was how it was organized into chapters, which featured an introduction to the topic of the chapter, followed by an interview with an expert on the topic. The interviewer was the author Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, and she interviewed 32 experts. This organization made the book easy to read as well as interesting. For the most part Ayana asked good questions, and the experts provided good answers. Ayana also included a prelude focused on her own experience as a marine biologist, and I loved reading that and learning about the coral reefs. There were also spreads between the sections in the book featuring 10 problems and 10 possibilities related to the section, as well as poems and photos. She frequently asked the interviewees what we should do to get it right. “What if we get it right?”, how would that look like? I loved that theme. Ayana is a very good author, and I loved how she organized the book.My favorite chapters were Earth is the Planet and First, Nature, and The AI Deluge, because I learned a lot from these chapters. I found the interview with Mustafa Suleyman to be interesting and insightful, and I felt he was spot on in a lot of the things he was saying. I may get his book. One thing that Mustafa said that resonated with me was “…it’s harming the climate cause by trying to wrap in too many other fundamental political goals. And it tends to exclude people that aren’t on the anti-capitalist angle”. I also like the Neighborhoods and Landscapes chapter, Corporations, Do Better, and Your Tax Dollars at work. But there were other chapters I enjoyed reading as well.However, there were also a lot of things in this book that I disagreed with. The chapter on the Green New Deal and the interview with Rhiana stood out. The Green New Deal is more of a vision than a policy, but it is in my opinion an unrealistic vision based on false beliefs about the economy and how things work. The Green New Deal advocates want to wrap in too many other political goals in addition to addressing climate change, such as social justice, equality, racism, creating millions of jobs, universal healthcare, etc. Rhiana states that you must solve issues like this if you want to solve climate change, which is an unsubstantiated claim not supported by the data.In this chapter they talk about the “real economy” i.e. manufacturing, while discounting financial services (and software). However, that is what is bringing home the bacon for the United States, our main export, and it is creating tens of millions of jobs, yes real jobs. This economy is also real, and a mostly manufacturing economy is not likely to create as much wealth or good jobs. The Green New Deal advocates just assume that will happen. Ayanna and Rhiana are also discounting approaches to reducing carbon emissions that have been shown to be effective, while promoting an anti-capitalist socialist agenda that not only will not work, Americans don’t want it. The market should organize the economy, not bureaucrats. As Ayanna states, Nancy Pelosi derided the Green New Deal as the “Green Dream, or whatever” but unlike her I think Nancy Pelosi was spot on. In Ayanna’s defense, she did interview Mustafa, who clearly does not think this way. However, because the Green New Deal pipedream was presented so uncritically, I decided not to give the book five stars, despite very much liking otherwise.In conclusion, I think it is a very good book with a lot of interesting information, and it is very well written and organized. But take the Green New Deal advocacy and the identity politics in the book with a grain of salt.

This was encouraging to read, I heard the author speak on NPR so wanted to read her book. She put a ton of research into this.