“Hope is the pillar that holds up the world,” Pliny the Elder is supposed to have observed. “Hope is the dream of a waking man.” Go looking for hopeful climate stories and they turn up everywhere.
H is for Hope is like a picture book for adults, with twenty-six essays written by noted science writer Elizabeth Kolbert— accompanied by charming illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook — one for each letter of the alphabet (which sounds like the topics could be cutesy or strained, but they’re really not), and the core message really is about hope. Kolbert makes the case that action is needed on climate change (several of these essays are blunt about the challenges we’re facing), but she also writes about all of the wonderful projects (electrification, “green” concrete, opportunities for large developing economies like India’s to “leapfrog” over fossil fuel use straight to more sustainable energy sources) that are currently taking place, and hopefulness is the point (under N for Narratives, Kolbert stresses that we need to be careful how we discuss climate change: “A diet of bad news leads to paralysis, which yields yet more bad news”, yet, “People who believe in a brighter future are more likely to put in the effort required to achieve it.”) As I read a digital ARC, I’d be very interested to see what a physical copy of this book would look like — it will be shelved in Science and Nature alongside Kolbert’s other books, but will this be more like a graphic novel? A coffee table book? — and as much as I did enjoy reading this, I’m left bemused as to who might buy a copy. (Usual warning that, as I read an ARC, passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Kolbert begins at A for Svante Arrhenius (who first proposed the link between carbon dioxide and climate change in 1894; he imagined that living under “a warmer sky” would be delightful, but probably 3000 years in the future):
It’s easy now to poke fun at Arrhenius for his sunniness. The doubling threshold could be reached within decades, and the results of this are apt to be disastrous. But who among us is really any different? Here we all are, watching things fall apart. And yet, deep down, we don’t believe it.
And ends the essay collection at Z for Zero (with a discussion of the Hoover Dam, ground “zero” for climate change in the US, the construction of which was authorised in 1928, just a year after Svante Arrhenius’ death) and I didn’t previously know that the Colorado River has been experiencing a “megadrought” since 1998:
From the observation deck, the drought’s effects were scarily apparent. An abandoned dock lay, in pieces, high above the lake’s edge. Instead of being submerged, the power plant’s four intake towers stuck up in the air, like lighthouses. The steep walls of the reservoir, which in pre-dam days formed Black Canyon, were lined in an enormous black stripe — a geological oddity known as the bathtub ring. The ring, composed of minerals deposited by the retreating waters, runs as straight as a ruler, mile after mile. At the start of the drought, the stripe was as high as a giraffe. By 2015, it had grown as tall as the Statue of Liberty. In 2022, it reached the height of the Tower of Pisa. The water level was so low that the dam's generators could operate only sporadically.
And along the way, there are many hopeful bits, as here with J for Jobs:
Recently, a Princeton-based team issued a report detailing how the United States could reduce its net emissions to zero by 2050. The researchers considered several possible decarbonization “pathways”. The one labelled “high electrification” would, they projected, eliminate sixty-two thousand jobs in the coal industry and four hundred thousand in the natural-gas sector. But it was expected to produce nearly eight hundred thousand jobs in construction, more than seven hundred thousand in the solar industry, and more than a million in upgrading the grid.
I like the idea of spreading a hopeful message — it can only help to combat paralysing fatalism — so maybe the point is to have books like this, with bite-sized info, laying around for people to flip through and get inspired. It can’t hurt.
