Read This New Book to Understand Climate Change

If you want to be culturally literate about climate change, there are two books that you must read. The first is Mark Lynas's Six Degrees. The other, which just hit the stands yesterday, is Straight Up, the second book by Joe Romm, who was Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy during the Clinton Administration. It represents the best of his blog Climate Progress, lightly edited and presented so accessibly that even veterans of that site will find it informative. No one in the public eye understands climate change, its solutions and its detractors better than Romm.

Here is what Joe Romm says in Straight Up that is worth repeating over and over again, until everyone with any decision-making power whatsoever knows it:

1. If we want to avert disaster, we must stabilize the earth at 450ppm CO2 by 2050. This means reducing our carbon emissions by 80 percent by that date.

2. On our current trajectory, climate change will lead to much worse than most people suspect. Impacts we can expect by the year 2100 include:

• Temperature increases of 10 degrees Fahrenheit in most of the U.S. (That's as great as the difference between current temperatures and the last ice age)
• Sea level rise of approximately five feet, with continuing increases of several inches or more each decade after
• Permanent dust bowls in many of the food-growing areas of the U.S. and across the globe
• Extinction of half of the land and ocean species on earth
• A whole list of other, unknown or low-probability but incomprehensibly bad outcomes (as if the ones I just listed weren't enough)

3. There is just one solution: we must launch a "World War II-scale" effort to deploy existing low-carbon technologies (wind and solar power, plug-in hybrids, efficiency retrofits, etc.)

4. The idea that technological breakthroughs will, even if they are invented in the next few decades, be deployed in time to reach our 2050 goal is a notion out of touch with the reality of how long it takes a technology to be commercialized and then adopted widely.

5. If the earth turns into a blasted hellscape and the only thing left to eat is spit-roasted babies, blame Republicans.

That last point is either the most damning element of truth-telling in Joe Romm's oeuvre, its Achilles heel or, probably, both.

Romm is correct to points out that, as near as anyone can tell, Republicans simply don't have a plan for dealing with climate change, probably because they don't believe it's a problem. But then again, by Romm's standards, Democrats are little better: No one on either side of the debate has yet proposed the World War II-scale mobilization of industry, capital and labor required to realize a complete retrofit of human civilization required to go carbon-neutral. (To be fair, Romm seems to have moved away from this metaphor in his recent work — favoring, instead, Krugman-esque discussions of the relatively low cost of achieving this goal, when measured as a percent of world GDP.)

All of the solutions and political barriers Romm addresses, he addresses from a single point of view, one that is not just politically progressive but also entirely dismissive of solutions that fall short of the 450ppm by 2050 goal. When combined with his fiery rhetoric, it makes him sound like an ideologue.

However, to butcher one of Steven Colbert's classic bon mots, reality has a well-known Rommian bias. Until someone comes up with something better than Romm's solutions to the climate crisis — green technology — then his is the only game in town. And yet it's undeniable that making Romm's vision a reality would be impossible in the context of a Republican congress or administration, and potentially even under the status quo.

At some point the fractious political debate that dominates public discourse in this country will have to be superseded by collective action toward heading off the greatest threat to human civilization in recorded history. Someone as familiar with the scale of the problem as Romm is knows that the odds are against us – that the future is likely to hold some combination of drought, drowned cities, war, famine, failed states and geoengineering. Despite this, and to his credit, he refuses to give up.

Photo credit: CAP