100 books like Five Times Faster

What if we get it wrong? What if the scale and pace of our collective measures to address climate destabilisation and the biodiversity crisis remain insufficient?

Oreskes and Conway provide the imagined view of a historian of the “Second People's Republic of China” from 2393. His account describes how the political and economic elites of the early decades of the twenty-first century ignored or dismissed the clear warnings of climate catastrophe.

Soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, drought, and mass migrations resulted in “The Great Collapse of 2093”. Three centuries later as the world emerges from the “Penumbral Age’ it is a more subdued and thoughtful place. 

By dramatizing an all-too-plausible ‘ghastly’ outcome, the authors seek to galvanise the energies of readers to rise from their armchairs and act. We should all strive to ensure that the book remains firmly on the shelves of fiction.

This book has always inspired me and one of the reasons I wrote my own books on climate change. 

What Mike does so brilliantly is take all the problems we are worried about such as climate change, world hunger, biodiversity, antibiotics, plastics, pandemics and provide solutions. These solutions are ones that make us all safer, healthier, and wealthier – and are so obvious you will ask yourself why are we not doping them already.

Mike never preaches, instead he shares his insights with humour and warmth. But underneath all of this is a very clear message we only have one precious Earth and there really is ‘No Planet B’ (even if Elon finally makes it to Mars).

I’m not a fan of either Doomsday or Pollyanna-ish books, especially in relation to climate change. I’ve read lots of books on this subject, and this is my favorite.

It doesn’t shy away from explaining what’s at stake and what is likely to happen if we don’t stop the escalation of climate-heating gases in our atmosphere, but it offers us a path toward solving this potential catastrophe that we can and must take together.  

When we think of climate change many of us feel despair. But this is where Katherine Hayhoe is so important as the book is all about hope – hope in people and hope in the future.

Katherine is a wonderful colleague she is a Canadian climate scientist living and working in Texas. She has one golden rule talk about climate change to anyone and everyone. Because as her book shows when we actively engage with people and realise we all have shared values then we can move forward with collective action to look after our amazing planet.

This is not another doomsday book about the end of the world but one about the power of people to change the world.

Let us be realistic, we all know that our economic system is broken. We cannot go on making stuff and throwing it away on a finite planet.

There are now 8 billion people on Earth all wanting to have a good life. So what is the alternative to economic growth? Well, Tim wonderfully shows us how the economy of tomorrow could protect employment, facilitate social investment, reduce inequality, and deliver both ecological and financial stability.

When this book was first published it was seen as a radical and dangerous text. Now with the rise of environmental and ecological economics it is the fundamental book that kicked off the revolution in the way we see the future.

I met Clive Hamilton at an event in London in 2011 shortly after the book’s launch. At the time the climate science community was still reeling from the disaster of the 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit.

As rationalists, we were asking the question: “Why is the scientific evidence not being listened to?” Hamilton provided answers – about humanity’s free market consumerist fetish, the insidious role of mainstream economics, and our denialist tendencies, alienation from nature, and hubris.

He explained that “Awakening to the prospect of climate disruption compels us to abandon most of the comfortable beliefs that have sustained our sense of the world as a stable and civilising place.”

Dismissing techno-solutions such as Carbon Capture and Storage and ‘Clean Coal’ as diversionary tactics by powerful interests, the book offers an ethical and moral basis for reconstructing the future. Rereading it 13 years after its publication, I am… show more.

I love this book. Rowan asks a very simple question, if you had a trillion dollars how could you make the world a better place? And the trillion dollars is not really that much money. It is the amount of taxpayers' money that Governments give to fossil fuel companies each year in the form of subsidies.

It is one-hundredth of what the world makes every single year. So with a trillion dollars could you cure all diseases, go carbon zero, save life on Earth, set up on new planets, find aliens, or even create artificial life with the intelligence and creativity of a human? 

Well I could tell you the answers but that would spoil your fun of reading this excellent thought-provoking book.

Mary Robinson is the former President of Ireland, an advocate for a people-centred and rights-based approach to climate action and my former boss.

In her book she tells the story of her own journey to climate justice and allows many of the people who influenced and informed her to tell their own stories.

Their experiences of the injustice of climate impacts on small islands, farmers, women, and workers make a compelling case for urgent, rights-based climate action.

I was thrilled to read this book, with its moving environmental tales (one for a letter of the alphabet), beautifully illustrated by Wesley Allsbrook.

Here, Kolbert – an author who usually dives into science stories focusing on alarming cases – adopts an even more engaging style, still telling good stories but aiming for a broader readership. It seems to me that works of this kind are vital for the current age, providing accessible and authentic accounts of where humanity stands.

While the twenty-six pieces provide a bleak picture of a planet on the brink of collapse, possibly within the lifetime of a generation, I was captivated by the humanitarian tone and the emphasis on hope. For me, the narrative is gripping. I repeatedly get back to it, wishing I had more stories. 

The dramatic growth in human populations and the extraordinary increase in human capacities to affect the environment has led to a transformation of the setting in which issues of environmental governance arise.

The result is the onset of a new era commonly described as the Anthropocene and the rise of the idea of Earth system governance. The biophysical conditions that control the Earth’s climate system or the diversity of life on the planet play critical roles as determinants of human well-being.

But human actions also are now critical forces in determining the character of the climate system and the future of biological diversity on the planet. There is still a need for regimes dealing with specific environmental concerns, such as transboundary air pollution, persistent organic pollutants, or the spread of plastic debris.

At the same time, there is a critical need to focus on arrangements designed to sustain key planetary… show more.