Do we need a nuclear power revival? Is China going to wreck or save the climate? And what’s the most honest way to think about the challenge of global warming? The latest crop of climate books throw up some unexpected answers to these questions.
Dutch environmental journalist, Marco Visscher, once thought nuclear power should be abolished before it could ruin the 21st century. Today he thinks it is a miracle technology, as he explains in The Power of Nuclear: The Rise, Fall and Return of Our Mightiest Energy Source (Bloomsbury £18.99).
His reassessment began when he noticed a growing number of politicians and environmentalists beginning to defend nuclear energy. That prompted him to investigate the meltdowns, toxic waste and many other charges levelled against this powerful source of low carbon power.
“After a while it dawned on me: just about everything we think we know about nuclear power turns out to be wrong,” he writes.
When he looked into the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima he discovered the death tolls from either the accidents themselves or later fallout was far lower than widely assumed.
Likewise, Finland’s pioneering efforts to build Onkalo, a permanent geological repository for spent nuclear fuel, was only one example he found of countries dealing with the industry’s toxic waste.
Fears about the industry are overblown, he argues, not least because the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the second world war cemented the technology’s horrific power to kill in the public’s mind. His argument in favour of nuclear power, not bombs, has gathered force since his book was first published, in Dutch, in 2022. Since then, Google, Microsoft and Amazon have done nuclear deals to supply their energy-thirsty data centres, and fears have grown that global warming may be accelerating faster than scientists expected.
One country expanding its nuclear power capacity is China, the country that is simultaneously the world’s green technology superpower and biggest emitter of planet-warming carbon emissions.
Beijing’s plans to cut those emissions, and grapple with other environmental woes, is a matter of intense interest outside China and environmental campaigner Ma Tianjie offers answers in his book, In Search of Green China (Polity £17.99).
It charts the role played by ordinary citizens and concerned bureaucrats in the decades-long struggle to clean up China’s polluted rivers, tackle its choking air pollution and find a way to boost economic growth while keeping a lid on emissions. Ma’s reporting shows that, as in the west, Chinese government efforts to enforce green policies face an array of political hurdles.
In 2014, when China set a deadline for its carbon emissions to peak by “around 2030”, the powerful National Development and Reform Commission economic planning agency was expected to take a big role meeting the new target. But as Ma writes, “not everyone was on board with the idea”. The agency’s growing power was already upsetting local governments and businesses that complained about excessive red tape. In an effort to cut bureaucratic delays, approval of coal-fired power plants was handed to provincial governments, with sobering consequences for the peaking goal. In the first six months of 2015, more than 23 gigawatts of new coal-fired power plants were brought online, a 55 per cent jump from the same period a year earlier.
The struggle to tackle climate change drove university professor and carbon consultant, Mike Berners-Lee, to write A Climate of Truth: Why We Need It and How to Get It (Cambridge University Press £14.99). This feisty title is something of a departure from How Bad Are Bananas?, Berners-Lee’s entertaining and repeatedly updated 2010 carbon footprint book, which explained the climate impact of everything from a bowl of porridge to a disposable nappy.
Today he is more worried about humanity hurtling into “a deadly Polycrisis” as it fails to deal with climate change, food insecurity, escalating pollution and more. One of the most critical steps towards dealing with this, he argues, is to raise standards of honesty in politics, business and the media. By this he means it is time to call out the politicians, news organisations, companies and think tanks whose behaviour is hampering efforts to tackle the polycrisis effectively.
Among his targets are a “bullshit-infused” museum exhibit sponsored by fossil fuel companies, an “appallingly dishonest” anti-net zero think-tank and the politician with “such a long history of dishonesty that it is difficult to choose which examples to cite”.
He offers a list of reputable alternatives, and several courses of action people can take, including employees of energy companies that claim to be switching to renewables while boosting their fossil fuel production. Unless you protest about this, he writes, you will die knowing you “colluded in humanity’s greatest ever atrocity”.
German sociologist Jens Beckert makes another attempt to honestly analyse the failure to tackle the climate problem in How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change (Polity £25). His bleak but compelling argument is that, despite the commitments that governments and businesses make to tackle climate change, neither will ever act decisively because to do so would jeopardise the corporate profits, tax revenues and GDP growth that both require to prosper.
Individuals are not much better. There is no mass movement calling for people to reject the consumerism that fuels climate change, as Beckert writes, because consumption is so important for our social identity. He insists this is no reason to give up, which it isn’t. But his book, like all those listed here, nonetheless remind us that the barriers to climate action are not always as obvious as they may seem.
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