By Ed Meek

This encouraging book highlights the preponderance of positive developments regarding the efforts, worldwide, to deal with climate change.

Climate Capitalism by Akshat Rathi. Greystone Books, London, 272 pages, $28.99.

In 2007, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth warns of melting ice caps, rising seas, flooded cities and other disasters. Although Gore was the object of ridicule for what seemed then to be outlandish predictions, the manifestations of climate change since then have been relentless. In the years since Gore’s film, New Orleans, Miami, Atlantic City, lower Manhattan, and the Seaport of Boston have all been underwater. Oh, and last year was the warmest in 125,000 years.

In 2014, Naomi Klein wrote This Changes Everything, in which she argued that capitalism was leading to climate change catastrophes. In 2019, David Wallace-Wells published Uninhabitable Earth, which sketched out worst-case scenarios: the end of life as we know it. For a few years there, the news was all bad, from UN climate reports to extreme weather events. Many of us were beginning to feel as if we were doomed and that humans, not especially good at playing well together or planning long-term, were not up to the challenge presented by climate change.

But recently, a shift has taken place in the global zeitgeist. There is now a preponderance of encouraging developments regarding the efforts, worldwide, to deal with climate change. This is happening for two major reasons. One is the plunging cost of green energy; in many cases it has now become cheaper to go green than to rely on fossil fuels. At the same time, it is becoming more and more apparent that the costs of not transitioning from burning fossil fuels to green alternatives are rising every year. The increasing number and severity of fires, storms, and floods cause billions of dollars in damage and lost work. And the changes in climate may even be — in large part — responsible for the international refugee crises. Insurance companies are raising rates and, in some cases, refusing to insure coastal regions. And lawsuits against irresponsible companies, like Exxon, are increasing.

Akshat Rathi, a reporter for Bloomberg News with a PhD in organic chemistry from Oxford, has written Climate Capitalism as a testament to the positive changes that are taking place all over the world as a result of actions in “politics, technology and finance” to address climate change. “It is now cheaper to save the world than to destroy it,” he tells us. Rathi traverses the globe to engage with some of the major players in the fight against climate change.

He goes to China to talk to Wan Gang, who was China’s minister of science and technology for many years beginning in 2007. Gang was directly responsible for developing China’s electric car industry “which sells more than 6 million EVs each year.” (That’s three times as many as Tesla, the most valuable car company in the world). Rathi points out that “EVs are a climate solution because … they convert 90% of the energy stored in batteries into motion.” In contrast, gas-powered engines use less than 30% of the energy from burning fuel as they spew carbon into the air. As it does with many other sectors of manufacturing, the Chinese government invested vast amounts of money to help develop their EV market share. Rathi goes from there to talk with the CEO of Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited, the biggest manufacturer in China of batteries. According to Morgan Stanley, “China owns more than 90% of the EV supply chain.” Volkswagen and BMW get their EV batteries from China; Tesla recently switched to Chinese batteries. In addition, if you want solar panels and battery backup for your house, they are probably coming from China.

Rathi travels to India where solar power is particularly suitable to India’s hot climate. Despite the high cost of capital, Indian entrepreneurs such as Sumant Sinha are developing massive solar farms.

The reporter talks to the head of the International Energy Association about the conflict between those who care about climate and those who emphasize energy. You can see this tension in China’s development of green energy while they continue to rely on coal. Rathi then zeroes in on Bill Gates, whose foundation invests in innovative approaches to climate change. Among other things, Gates is investing in methods of manufacturing “clean steel” and cement.

Rathi spends a couple of chapters on a subject I was skeptical about: carbon capture. Removing carbon from factory emissions is actually being done effectively now. It is not a solution to climate change, but the strategy is similar to switching from oil to “natural gas” — it reduces the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere. From that perspective it is an effective tool because it gives us more time to implement enough green energy to support our economies. There are still entire sectors that depend on fossil fuels: trucking, aviation, and the production of steel, cement, and asphalt, to name a few. In Texas, Rathi talks to the CEO of Occidental Oil, Vicki Hollub, whose company is using carbon capture to increase yields and cut carbon by sending captured carbon back underground to oil wells, thus cutting emissions and increasing oil production.

Rathi goes on to green energy standout Denmark, which now gets two thirds of its electricity from wind turbines (why can’t we do that?), and to the UK, which has transitioned from nearly total reliance on coal to a mix of gas, wind, and solar.

Rathi’s refreshing take on the green revolution reinforces Saul Griffith’s book Electrify, which tells us that when cars, appliances, and heating need to be replaced we should go for the electric option. The reporter gives credit to the Paris Accords for jump-starting international efforts and he reminds us of the importance of the Biden Inflation Reduction Act in investing in green energy in the United States.

In her new book Not the End of the World, Hannah Ritchie, deputy editor of Our World in Data, also argues that we are making progress in dealing with climate change (see her Ted Talk). And Wallace-Wells, in his NYT climate newsletter, tells us that he is surprised at how much progress has been made.

There are intriguing areas Rathi doesn’t get into: hydrogen, new batteries developed by the California-based Quantum Scape, artificial meat (and/or vegetarianism), walkable cities, etc. And, while Climate Capitalism is a refreshingly optimistic take on the growing proactive response to climate change by corporations and governments, it doesn’t address serious questions regarding how much we can rely on those sectors to win the war on climate.

As Simon Mundy points out in Race for Tomorrow, fossil fuel interests, and those companies and countries that rely on them, are well aware that the writing is on the wall and a transition to green energy is coming. Before that there’s a lot of money to be made, oil wells to drill, coal to be mined, and roads to be built. In How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil explains just how extensive our reliance on fossil fuels is — how difficult the transition to green energy will be. Resistance to wind turbines, EVs, and getting rid of gas ranges crops up across the ideological spectrum in the US. On top of that, given their focus on quarterly reports, many corporations are reluctant to invest in long-term and expensive projects that may or may not pay off. Some members of the green movement, such as Klein (Capitalism vs Climate), argue that capitalism is a big part of the problem. For them, the bottom line is that we will need to use less energy altogether. Finally, Rathi doesn’t deal with the global political challenges to capitalism. Sir Alfred McCoy tells us in his book To Govern the Globe that establishing a world government will be necessary to assuage the conflicts climate change will inevitably cause. Who will arrange (and pay) for that?

Ed Meek is the author of High Tide (poems) and Luck (short stories).