1. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate
Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It’s not about carbon – it’s about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.
2. No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference
‘Everything needs to change. And it has to start today’
In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day. Her actions ended up sparking a global movement for action against the climate crisis, inspiring millions of pupils to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.
3. This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
It’s time. This is our last chance to do anything about the global climate and ecological emergency. Our last chance to save the world as we know it.
Now or never, we need to be radical. We need to rise up. And we need to rebel.
4. SOS: What you can do to reduce climate change – simple actions that make a difference
Climate Change researcher, Seth Wynes, sets out in the simplest terms how you can make a real and positive impact. Make changes at home, at work, to how you shop, eat, live – start by finding one thing your family can change with this book and do it today.
What you do matters – and the science proves it. How many actions can you tick off the list in this book to help save our planet?
5. There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years
Feeding the world, climate change, biodiversity, antibiotics, plastics – the list of concerns seems endless. But what is most pressing, what are the knock-on effects of our actions, and what should we do first? Do we all need to become vegetarian? How can we fly in a low-carbon world? Should we frack? How can we take control of technology? Does it all come down to population? And, given the global nature of the challenges we now face, what on Earth can any of us do? Fortunately, Mike Berners-Lee has crunched the numbers and plotted a course of action that is practical and even enjoyable.
6. The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future
It is worse, much worse, than you think.
The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.
7. Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change
By 1979, we understood nearly everything we know today about climate change – including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours.
8. The Little Book of Going Green: Ways to Make the World a Better Place
‘The Little Book of Going Green’ aims to shed light on the ways humans are harming the environment, from pollution and deforestation to industrial production and farming methods. Filled with facts, theories and tips on how we can do our bit for the planet, this is your one-stop guide to making every aspect of your life earth-friendly.
9. How Bad are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything
From a text message to a war, from a Valentine’s rose to a flight or even having a child, ‘How Bad are Bananas?’ gives us the carbon answers we need and provides plenty of revelations. By talking through a hundred or so items, Mike Berners-Lee sets out to give us a carbon instinct for the footprint of literally anything we do, buy and think about. He helps us pick our battles by laying out the orders of magnitude. The book ranges from the everyday (foods, books, plastic bags, bikes, flights, baths…) and the global (deforestation, data centres, rice production, the World Cup, volcanoes, …) Be warned, some of the things you thought you knew about green living may be about to be turned on their head. Never preachy but packed full of information and always entertaining
10. The Burning Question: We Can’t Burn Half the World’s Oil, Coal and Gas. So How Do We Quit?
‘The Burning Question’ reveals climate change to be the most fascinating scientific, political and social puzzle in history. It shows that carbon emissions are still accelerating upwards, following an exponential curve that goes back centuries. One reason is that saving energy is like squeezing a balloon: reductions in one place lead to increases elsewhere. Another reason is that clean energy sources don’t in themselves slow the rate of fossil fuel extraction.
Tackling global warming will mean persuading the world to abandon oil, coal and gas reserves worth many trillions of dollars – at least until we have the means to put carbon back in the ground. The burning question is whether that can be done.
Think we missed something? Do you have a different opinion?
Comment below to get your voice heard…
Tthanks! Have been looking for some books about climate change to give as gifts this christmas. so hard to do christmas present shopping and still stay environmentally friendly! climate change books deffo a good thought!
Wondering if you’ve read the work of Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway – all about the politics of climate change. It’s a wonderful climate change book and would mke a great addition to your list!
The earth has gone through many periods of warming and cooling we did not cause them maybe we are too full of our own sense of importance to consider there may be a cause we can do nothing about. Fred Hoyle, eminent scientist wrote a book called Ice in which he advise building factories to produce carbon di oxide to offset the next ice age that may be overdue ;better rising sea level that the northern hemisphere under 3 kilometres of ice? Whatever we do in the UK will have little global effect,Margaret Thatcher said we are conducting an unwise experiment with the climate but she would not impose uneconomic environmental restrictions on UK industry unless the rest of the world did so as well. We should have remained in Europe to pressure for a better environment rather than inevitably being dictated to by the likes of Trump
OK – I’ll enjoy my holidays, my avocados, It’s time humans died out anyway so lets let those alive today have a good time and then pull the rug out and remove humans and their selfish ways. The planet is soon to be dead anyway.
I have read the Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells and would thoroughly recommend. A really enlightening though depressing read…