Losing Earth: A Recent History

by Nathaniel Rich

Overview

By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand 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.

The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich’s groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon—the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight.

Now expanded into book form, Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The book carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves.

Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here, and how we must go forward.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374191337
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/09/2019
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	712,032
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Nathaniel Rich is the author of the novels King Zeno, Odds Against Tomorrow, and The Mayor’s Tongue. He is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books. He lives in New Orleans.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Reckoning 3

Part I Shouts in the Street: 1979-1982

1 The Whole Banana: Spring 1979 13

2 Mirror Worlds: Spring 1979 27

3 Between Clambake and Chaos: July 1979 33

4 Enter Cassandra, Raving: 1979-1980 39

5 A Very Aggressive Defensive Program: 1979-1980 47

6 Tiger on the Road: October 1980 53

7 A Deluge Most Unnatural: November 1980-September 1981 65

8 Heroes and Villains: March 1982 71

9 The Direction of an Impending Catastrophe: 1982 79

Part II Bad Science Fiction: 1983-1988

10 Caution Not Panic: 1983-1984 87

11 The World of Action: 1985 101

12 The Ozone in October: Fall 1985-Summer 1986 107

13 Atmospheric Scientist, New York, N.Y.: Fall 1987-Spriiif 1988 113

Part III You Will See Things That You Shall Believe: 1988-1989

14 Nothing but Bonfires: Summer 1988 125

15 Signal Weather: June 1988 129

16 Woodstock for Climate Change: June 1988-April 1989 135

17 Fragmented World: Fall 1988 143

18 The Great Includer and the Old Engineer: Spring 1989 149

19 Natural Processes: May 1989 155

20 The White House Effect: Spring-Fall 1989 161

21 Skunks at the Garden Party: November 1989 165

Afterword: Glass-Bottomed Boats 175

A Note on the Sources 205

Acknowledgements 207

Editorial Reviews

Nathaniel Rich observes in Losing Earth: A Recent History that "nearly every conversation we have in 2019 about climate change was being held in 1979." His gripping, depressing, revelatory book…is an account of what went wrong—of how it was that a moment of growing awareness of climate change, and an apparent willingness to act on the knowledge, was allowed to dissipate into stasis and inaction…Climate change is a tragedy, but Rich makes clear that it is also a crime—a thing that bad people knowingly made worse, for their personal gain. That, I suspect, is one of the many aspects to the climate change battle that posterity will find it hard to believe, and impossible to forgive.

The New York Times Book Review - John Lanchester

"An eloquent science history, and an urgent eleventh-hour call to save what can be saved." —Barbara Kiser, Nature

“Reading like a Greek tragedy, Losing Earth shows how close we came to making the right choices — if it weren't for our darker angels.” —Adam Frank, NPR.org

"Exceedingly well-written . . . a must-read handbook for everyone concerned about our planet's future . . . Losing Earth is eloquent, devastating, and crucial.” —Booklist (starred review)

"A maddening book full of what-ifs and the haunting suspicion that if treated as a political problem and not as a matter of life and death, climate change will cook everyone’s geese." —Kirkus Reviews

“This deeply researched, deeply felt book is an essential addition to the canon of climate change literature. Others have documented where we are, and speculated about where we might be headed, but the story of how we got here is perhaps the most important one to be told, because it is both a cautionary tale and an unfinished one. Reading this book, I could not help but imagine my children one day reading a future edition, which will include the story of my generation's response to what we knew." —Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“How to explain the mess we’re in? Nathaniel Rich recounts how a crucial decade was squandered. Losing Earth is an important contribution to the record of our heedless age.”
—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

"Combining the dramatic immediacy of a police procedural with the urgency of prophecy, Nathaniel Rich's provocative book chronicles the failure of our scientific and political leaders to act to halt the climate apocalypse when they appeared on the verge of doing so, and casts the triumph of denial as the defining moral crisis for humankind." —Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families

“In this book, Nathaniel Rich demonstrates exquisitely how shallow debate of a deep problem—the planetary scale and civilizational consequences of climate change—exacerbates the problem. We are still a long way from thinking about climate change in the multi-century frame we need to deal with it realistically. Getting there will be a new skill for humanity, if we get there.” —Stewart Brand, author of Whole Earth Discipline

"[Nathaniel] Rich has a talent for translating a complicated issue into a gripping story. And like any effective storyteller, he places compelling characters in the foreground." -LitHub

From the Publisher

2019-01-13

The time to have averted worldwide climate change was long ago—and scientists knew that very fact a long time ago as well.

As New York Times Magazine writer at large Rich (King Zeno, 2017, etc.) notes at the beginning, "nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979." Indeed, that understanding was largely unclouded by oppositional politics in a time when the president was not proud to proclaim that he was too smart to believe in climate change. The scientific consensus, then as now, was that human activities had altered the environment; the question was what could be done about it. Today, Rich notes, the odds of doing anything meaningful to slow climate change to an overall average warming of "only" 2 degrees Celsius are slim—about one in 20, he reckons, and even that will mean the extinction of coral reefs, rising sea levels, coastal flooding, and a host of other woes. Rich charts that 1979 terminus to a government study of coal emissions, which, if allowed to continue unmodified, would result in "significant and damaging" changes in the atmosphere. Other federal reports of the period were just as prescient—e.g., one that "warned that humanity's fossil fuel habit would lead inexorably to a host of ‘intolerable' and ‘irreversible' disasters" while recommending the transition to renewal energy sources. Big money buried these findings, along with a leadership that was reluctant to "change the national model of energy production" and, indeed, the world economy. By Ronald Reagan's time, the reluctance became intransigence. By the time of George W. Bush, business and government leaders had "consolidated behind the position that the benefits of emissions cuts should be weighed against immediate economic costs." By today, Rich warns, "the distant perils of climate change are no longer very distant"—and they grow closer every day.

A maddening book full of what-ifs and the haunting suspicion that if treated as a political problem and not as a matter of life and death, climate change will cook everyone's geese.

Kirkus Reviews

This is an important, infuriating, enlightening, engaging, and engrossing audiobook. The author tells the tragic story of how the world, and the U.S. in particular, could have done something significant about climate change decades ago—but chose not to. Narrator Matt Godfrey sets just the right tone of exasperation and understanding. He delivers Rich’s audiobook in a way that makes it seem like a novel—however, this story is all too real. Anyone wishing to learn how the world has gotten to the point of almost inevitable climate disaster will be well served by listening to Godfrey’s measured but emphatic reading. J.P.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

JULY 2019 - AudioFile

This is an important, infuriating, enlightening, engaging, and engrossing audiobook. The author tells the tragic story of how the world, and the U.S. in particular, could have done something significant about climate change decades ago—but chose not to. Narrator Matt Godfrey sets just the right tone of exasperation and understanding. He delivers Rich’s audiobook in a way that makes it seem like a novel—however, this story is all too real. Anyone wishing to learn how the world has gotten to the point of almost inevitable climate disaster will be well served by listening to Godfrey’s measured but emphatic reading. J.P.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

JULY 2019 - AudioFile