Why does it feel like the world has made so much progress on addressing global warming, but also none at all?
In H Is for Hope: Climate Change from A to Z, Elizabeth Kolbert, a longtime environmental journalist, considers hard questions like this one. Using simple language, she explains that governments are passing climate-friendly laws, clean energy is expanding, companies are creating green technologies, and yet fossil fuel emissions are still, after all these years, rising.
Kolbertâs latest book, a primer brightened by Wesley Allsbrookâs colorful illustrations, is a quick, entertaining read. A is for Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist who wanted to figure out what caused ice ages, landed on the idea of carbon dioxide, and built the worldâs first climate model in 1894. Arrhenius imagined that a warmer world would be a happier one for humanity. B is for âblah, blah, blah,â the climate activist Greta Thunbergâs mocking summary of what three decades of global climate conferences have accomplished. C is for capitalism, one convincing explanation for why those conferences didnât accomplish much.
Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has written several books, most notably The Sixth Extinction, a Pulitzer-Prize winning account of Homo sapiensâ asteroid-level power to wipe out other species. In H Is for Hope, she grounds the abstract problem of climate change in concrete experiences. Kolbert ends up riding an exercise bike in a humid, 106-degree-Fahrenheit vault, monitored for an experiment. (âWhat is the future weâre creating actually going to feel like?â) She stares up at the blades of a 600-foot wind turbine off the coast of Rhode Island, and, after visiting a âgreen concreteâ company in Montreal, takes a cinder block of the substance home as a souvenir.
In an interview with Grist, Kolbert explained why she thinks climate change resists traditional narratives around hope and progress and how she attempted to tell a more complex, down-to-earth story in her new book. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q. I want to start by talking about hope, which is usually how people end interviews. Iâve heard climate scientists and activists say theyâre tired of being asked what gives them hope, I think because it can feel naive. How can we talk about hope in a way thatâs more realistic and useful?
A. Well, many people, as you say, have pointed out that thatâs not really the opposition that we should be focusing on, hope versus not hope. I think we should be focusing on action versus non-action. How we feel about it â it really doesnât make much difference to the climate. What we do is what makes a difference. Now, that being said, having written this book called H Is for Hope, I am very interested in how we think about hope, and thatâs one of the motivating ideas behind the book.
Q. How did you end up choosing that title? I think thereâs something kind of delightful about a title that emphasizes optimism but also plays off Sue Grafton detective novels â you know, her book was H Is for Homicide.
A. Right. Thereâs also a really wonderful book by Helen Macdonald called H Is for Hawk. So I knew I wanted to name the book after one of the letters; thatâs the whole point, itâs an abecedarian. And that one just popped out as the obvious candidate.
Q. I thought that approach was interesting. What inspired you to write an alphabetic primer on climate change?
A. I was trying to sort of re-animate this story, which can be very overwhelming and has so many different aspects. Itâs really everything, everywhere, all at once, and on one level, I was trying to break it down for people so that it was understandable and comprehensible in all its complexity. On the other hand, I was also trying to suggest that any simple narrative probably was not complete.
Q. You started off the book by saying that climate change resists narrative. What did you mean by that?
A. Itâs not personified. It doesnât have a fate. You know, weâre all participating in causing it. Weâre all participating in suffering from it. Obviously, some are participating in causing it much more than others, and some are suffering from it much more than others. Itâs this creeping, perpetual problem that will be with us forever now. And when itâs acute, when thereâs a crisis, a wildfire or a hurricane that was made worse by climate change, it still wasnât exactly caused by climate change. You have that agency problem, and stories demand agency.
Q. One of the themes in the book is the difficulty of reckoning with climate change on a deeper level, the sense that weâre watching things fall apart, but we donât really internalize that, or that weâre waiting for someone or some miracle technology to rescue us. Why do you think people have that response?
A. On the one hand, itâs a global problem. Itâs been described as the ultimate âtragedy of the commonsâ problem. It has to be addressed on a global scale. So it is very easy to feel overwhelmed. âWhat does it matter what I do?â On the other hand, I do think that what we are seeing, in the U.S. in particular â you know, I include myself in this â is that weâre very stuck in our ways, and theyâre very carbon-intensive ways. So I think we would like every solution that keeps being proposed to be something that allows us to continue to do exactly what weâre doing, just differently. And thatâs what we want to hear.
Q. Thatâs true. Itâs really hard to picture how we would live different lives, or what exactly those lives would look like. And I feel like that is part of the problem.
A. Yes, and our whole economy is based on doing things a certain way. You know, thereâs a big argument in climate circles, which is one of the points in the book: Can you have whatâs called âgreen growth?â Can you just keep growing, but do that in a, quote unquote, âgreenâ way, or can you not? That is an unanswered question.
Q. How do you think we need to change the narratives that get told about climate change?
A. Well, this book is my attempt to do that. I canât give you the poster child for climate change thatâs going to change everyoneâs perceptions of it, or the story thatâs going to finally cut through all the BS. Many approaches have been taken, some are more successful than others, but we still seem stuck. And I was really trying in this book to get around that problem, or fool around with that problem, that the traditional narratives donât seem to work.
Q. Was there anything else that you wanted to say about the book?
A. I think whatâs important about climate change coverage is that it has some element of pleasure, which seems odd to say for such a grim subject. But I think that what we â and I include the artist, Wesley Allsbrook, whose amazing illustrations are a big part of the book â tried to do was make it both a pleasurable reading experience and a super visual experience. I do think the unrelenting grimness does get to people, and this book, while it definitely has a very serious message, is trying to offer something up in a way that is kind of fun, I hope.
