What do you think?
Rate this book
Climate Hope: Stories of Action in an Age of Global Crisis
Through extensive research and reporting, this boundary-crossing and highly readable survey of efforts to tackle climate change aims to replace our paralyzing fears with a restored sense of hope and determination.
Climate change is a problem so enormous and complex—with threats so frightening in their implications—that many of us fend off confusion and hopelessness by simply turning away. There are jobs to do, children to raise, bills to pay. Meanwhile, with delayed action, missed targets and increasingly dire reports at the international level, a notion that the crisis is intractable continues to spread.
And the proposed solutions can be just as daunting. They often involve jargon about gigatons of carbon and kilowatt-hours of electricity. In a deeply polarized political environment, any sense of the common purpose required to make these work seems to dissolve into denial or paralysis. With all this fear and conflict, the question must be How do we find the tools and—equally important—the hope we need to tackle such a wickedly difficult issue?
In Climate Hope, journalist David Geselbracht blends in-depth research, expert interviews and on-the-ground reporting in multiple countries, revealing remarkable efforts to identify the causes and impacts of climate change—and devise crucial ways to address them.
Geselbracht brings the reader to the chaotic 2021 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, as well as to giant heating ducts below the city of Copenhagen and to wildfire-scorched landscapes in Western Canada, to name just a few sites. The scale of the challenge is clear in the range of fields he covers, from glaciology and climate science to law and diplomacy. But in drawing these approaches together, he shares stories of hope, awe and wonder that encourage us to confront this long-term, world-warping phenomenon with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility.
Climate change is a problem so enormous and complex—with threats so frightening in their implications—that many of us fend off confusion and hopelessness by simply turning away. There are jobs to do, children to raise, bills to pay. Meanwhile, with delayed action, missed targets and increasingly dire reports at the international level, a notion that the crisis is intractable continues to spread.
And the proposed solutions can be just as daunting. They often involve jargon about gigatons of carbon and kilowatt-hours of electricity. In a deeply polarized political environment, any sense of the common purpose required to make these work seems to dissolve into denial or paralysis. With all this fear and conflict, the question must be How do we find the tools and—equally important—the hope we need to tackle such a wickedly difficult issue?
In Climate Hope, journalist David Geselbracht blends in-depth research, expert interviews and on-the-ground reporting in multiple countries, revealing remarkable efforts to identify the causes and impacts of climate change—and devise crucial ways to address them.
Geselbracht brings the reader to the chaotic 2021 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, as well as to giant heating ducts below the city of Copenhagen and to wildfire-scorched landscapes in Western Canada, to name just a few sites. The scale of the challenge is clear in the range of fields he covers, from glaciology and climate science to law and diplomacy. But in drawing these approaches together, he shares stories of hope, awe and wonder that encourage us to confront this long-term, world-warping phenomenon with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility.
256 pages, Paperback
Published April 8, 2025
2 people are currently reading
47 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Read
January 2, 2025It still scares the crap outta me but there were a few hopeful things in this book. CopenHill is pretty amazing and the chapter about the eco group of evangelical Christians was something to ponder. I see Victoria working hard adding biking infrastructure and reducing speed limits (slower speed=lower emissions huh). What can I do? My focus for 2025.
May 10, 2025
While it's important to have hope, and this book did present some ways that certain groups or societies have made changes that can lessen/delay the impact of climate change, I don't think it fully succeeded in its mission. Perhaps it's because all the things that were discussed were relatively small scale (excepting a few countries with national regulations). The climate criminals, the ones doing the bulk of the polluting, the ones truly responsible, have, of course, done nothing, and have no incentive to do something. Although we can all do things to help, the collective impact of individuals will hardly make a dent if companies are still allowed to freely pollute.
November 22, 2025
Not quite a naive rose-colored view of the state of climate science as many might suspect from the title. structured a bit like an anthology, looks at different pieces of the puzzle to tackle our changing climate and expresses a hopeful path is possible.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews