A long review appears on Goodreads recently and, if I do say so myself, this review is yet another that speaks well for the latest The Steep Climes Quartet title, Over Brooklyn Hills.

Here the Goodreads review, by Katie Meyers, just published and in full:

Over Brooklyn Hills is an ambitious and thought provoking installment in The Steep Climes Quartet, offering readers a vivid vision of a near future world grappling with the ongoing realities of climate change. David Guenette skillfully combines environmental, political, and personal narratives to create a story that is both intimate and expansive.

One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its realism. Rather than depicting climate change as a distant catastrophe, the story explores its gradual but relentless effects on daily life, public policy, migration, housing, infrastructure, and community relationships. This approach makes the future portrayed in the novel feel plausible and deeply relevant.

The character of Davin Caine serves as an effective anchor for the narrative. Through his work, creative pursuits, and evolving personal relationships, readers experience the human side of a changing world. His life reflects both the challenges and adaptations required in a society navigating environmental uncertainty.

The heatwave that drives large numbers of people into the Berkshires creates a particularly compelling conflict. The resulting tensions between residents and newcomers highlight issues of scarcity, housing, social cohesion, and community resilience. These local struggles mirror larger global challenges unfolding throughout the novel.

What makes the book especially engaging is its ability to connect personal stories with global developments. Climate migration, geopolitical instability, energy transitions, and environmental activism all intersect within a narrative that remains focused on individual lives and relationships. The result is a novel that feels both expansive in scope and emotionally grounded.

The worldbuilding is detailed and thoughtful, presenting a future shaped not by sudden collapse but by ongoing adaptation, compromise, and conflict. This nuanced perspective distinguishes the novel from more conventional dystopian narratives.

Over Brooklyn Hills, Book Three of The Steep Climes Quartet, is now available. You can find Over Brooklyn Hills—Kindle and paperback—of The Steep Climes Quartet through Amazon, or order it through your favorite bookstore or in ePub format.

Learn more about Over Brooklyn Hills here.

The post Another Review of Over Brooklyn Hills first appeared on David Guenette.

Here’s a quote from the review that captures, I think, what I’m trying to do with the series The Steep climes Quartet:

I felt less like I was being shown a future world and more like I was being asked to notice the one already forming around us. That’s unsettling. It’s also the book’s strength.

I’ve been writing a lot about climate fiction and what makes a story or novel climate fiction, and the reviews coming in are helpful articulations of this question. Of course, my pending interview with them will force me to articulate my view on this question of what makes fiction climate fiction.

You can buy the latest title in The Steep Climes Quartet from many places, including through your local bookstore using Bookshop.org or by simply asking your favorite bookseller to order Over Brooklyn Hills. Or Amazon, too, Kindle or paperback. Or ePub format.

This review copied below is from Literary Titans, which describes itself as “an organization of professional editors, writers, and professors passionate about the written word. We review fiction and non-fiction books in different genres, conduct author interviews, and recognize talented authors with our monthly Literary Titan Book Award. We are privileged to work with so many creative authors around the world and help them promote their work.” 

With the advent of independent publishing, there’s been a slew of such services, but Literary Titan has managed to be early in and is well regarded. Plus, their review is quite good of my recently published Over Brooklyn Hills, the third book of The Steep climes Quartet, so that speaks well of them, I’d say. Well, of course I would say this, but you can read what they say about my newest book in the four-book series:

Over Brooklyn Hills by David Guenette is a literary climate fiction thriller set in 2035, where climate change is no longer a warning on the horizon but a daily pressure shaping politics, money, migration, housing, violence, and ordinary private life. The story follows Davin Caine, now seventy, as he moves through a Berkshire County strained by rising costs, climate migration, and civic unease, while larger threats involving fossil fuel interests, international tensions, and the climate terrorist group No One is Safe push the novel into darker territory.

Guenette isn’t just interested in disaster as spectacle. He’s interested in the way disaster becomes routine. A hot spell, a housing meeting, a town budget, a person trying to keep a home, a young worker needing air conditioning, a local government trying to respond without losing its soul. These details give the novel its weight. I felt less like I was being shown a future world and more like I was being asked to notice the one already forming around us. That’s unsettling. It’s also the book’s strength.

The writing has a restless, observant quality that I found both engaging and, at times, intentionally uncomfortable. Guenette moves between characters with a wide lens, and his choices make the book feel crowded in the way real life is crowded. Davin’s reflective passages slow the story down in useful ways, giving the thriller elements more moral texture. Then the violence and conspiracy threads cut back in, sharp and ugly, reminding me that this is still a thriller with real stakes. I appreciated that balance. The book doesn’t let anyone stay clean for long, not activists, not politicians, not industries, not regular people trying to get through the week.

I would recommend Over Brooklyn Hills to readers who like climate fiction with a political pulse, especially those who want a thriller that thinks as much as it moves. It will appeal to readers who enjoy near-future stories grounded in realistic social consequences rather than end-of-the-world spectacle. If you like fiction that blends suspense, civic anxiety, personal reflection, and big-picture questions about responsibility, this book has plenty to offer.

Rating: 5

The post Another Editorial Review of Over Brooklyn Hills first appeared on David Guenette.

You can find Over Brooklyn Hills—Kindle and paperback—through Amazon, or order it through your favorite bookstore or in ePub format.

For more information about The Steep Climes Quartet, see “Over Brooklyn Hills, Book Three of The Steep Climes Quartet.”

Booklife Review:

The clear-eyed third entry in Guenette’s near-future series, set in the Berkshires in a 2035 of climate and refugee crises, stands out for Guenette’s singular blend of prognostication, rich characterization, slice-of-life scenecraft, process-oriented thriller elements, and deep interest in activism, journalism, governance, technological shifts, and the surprising ramifications of climate change. Guenette connects horrific global heatwaves to everyday existence around Great Barrington, Mass., which faces an escalating influx of transients, both the usual vacationers and desperate people seeking relief from the heat. In the midst of a housing crisis, the journalists and city administrators in Guenette’s sprawling cast fear—and will face—violence, but much of the novel explores, with keen understanding of interconnected systems, the practical challenges faced by the city, and changemakers on both sides of the law.

The cast, led by now-70-year-old artist/journalist Davin Caine, features a beleaguered town manager in a failing marriage; a freelance VR designer sleeping rough on Monument Mountain after Brooklyn becomes too hot; a climate activist building explosive devices for a domestic terror cell; and many more. Guenette writes convincing accounts of bomb-making, dealings with cartels, sniper assassinations, life on the run, and even the tracking of dark money political contributions, but the heart of the novel is in his detailed forecast of the world (and weather) to come. He builds a plausible 2035 with a light hand—offshore sea walls, news outlets charging micro-payments, drone deliveries on the Appalachian Trail—and welcome focus on people’s lived experience.

The novel is structurally ambitious but also diffusive, with many pages giving to rumination. The strongest narrative momentum comes in chapters about Allen Randolph, the bomb-maker, and town manager Fletch, while Davin’s macular degeneration and attraction to his house sharer, Be, inspires the warmest and funniest writing—“Oh, jeez,” he says, when Be presses into him. Threads converge slowly but with intelligence and power. Newcomers will struggle to keep up, but old-hands will be moved as Guenette balances humanity and tension, hope and warning.

Takeaway: Incisive, humane near-future novel of the Berkshires in the climate crisis.

Great for fans of: Julia Glass’s Vigil Harbor, Lauren Groff’s Florida.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A-

The post Booklife Review of Over Brooklyn Hills first appeared on David Guenette.

Over Brooklyn Hills is my third novel in a four-book series, The Steep Climes Quartet, and it is coming out on June 15.

My interest was piqued by the recent post Neurodivergence as a Blueprint for a Solarpunk Future by N.E. McMorran, on Climate Fiction Writers League, published on June 2, 2026. I’ve been wrestling with the question of what climate fiction is and how climate fiction is different from other forms of fiction. Just a couple of weeks ago, I posted a long piece on my website titled “A Fantastic Essay about Climate Fiction but Still a Lot of Fantasy,” with a shorter Substack version called “Why Fantasy Climate Fiction is Lazy (And Why Realism is Harder), and this is hardly the first such effort on my part. I’ve posted many comments about climate fiction on Substack’s Climate Fiction Writers League, for example. My quick glance back shows I’ve penned a dozen articles about climate fiction, and then there’s even more in the way of reviews of climate fiction.

The guest poster is introduced thusly:

Today we have an essay by N.E. McMorran, the author of the children’s adventure trilogy Moojag, a quirky mystery for readers 10 years and up. When Nema and her friends discover a hidden sugar-hooked society holding lost kids, they find their perfect world in danger.

In the first paragraph of the post, the reader finds out that the author experienced a “late autism diagnosis.” The first sentence of the second paragraph notes that it was this revelation that became “the heartbeat of my cli-fi trilogy.”

So, yeah, the question of what is climate fiction is of interest to me.

What is Climate Fiction?

I’ve long followed Climate Fiction Writers League (CFWL) and I look at most every post. I’ve studied this Substack looking for trends and opinions and theories of climate fiction. Unfortunately for me, all my attention to CFWL has produced greater confusion rather than clarity on the issue of climate fiction.

This recent post by N. E. McMorran is a good example of this confusion-generating effect. I’ve been making the argument that using some reference to climate change as a story premise is not the same thing as climate fiction. A premise is a foundational statement or assumption used as the starting point for a conclusion, argument, or story (yes, I just cribbed this).

A premise is not what the story is about. For example, a good number of apocalypse stories work from a premise that merely set the stage or conditions of the story. Consider the vast majority of post-EMP survival stories that were rampant for a few years. These stories use the event of wide-scale electromagnetic pulses—typically from some sort of attack by enemy countries or terrorists or extreme solar storms that crash the world’s power grids and destroy advanced electronics, overthrowing modern civilization and bringing chaos. These stories don’t have much to do with power grids or the nature of digital devices based on today’s endemic integrated chips that are particularly prone to burnout from EMP. Typically, the stories are survivalist in nature and don’t revolve around larger issues such as fragile supply chains, lack of infrastructure redundancy or resilience, or what happens to the weak or vulnerable in times of crisis—you know, real world questions—but instead concentrate of the hero getting guns and ammo and the girl. Throughout the 1970s and into Reagan’s years of the 1980s, the version of the “guy-gets-gun-and-girl” stories were often post-nuclear holocaust stories. The death of hundreds of millions or even billions of individuals from nuclear weapon exchanges was the premise(!), with the story subject being lone-wolf survival. Most of such stories weren’t concerned with the consequences of the premise, instead treating potential human extinction as a story’s starting point, in what has always struck me as a bit cavalier.

My argument is that climate fiction is fiction that carries useful knowledge of the issue of climate change in the hope that readers will be more conscious of the circumstances of climate change and more thoughtful and engaged toward solutions to ameliorate climate change. This definition reflects one of the trends in climate fiction that is sometimes called “Thrutopia,” where readers not only better realize the climate crisis but also wrestle with how we may get to solutions from where we are today. Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future” is perhaps the prime example of this type of climate fiction.

Like all categories, Thrutopia tends to broaden toward uselessness. For some authors, Thrutopia can mean more simply a rejection of climate apocalypse stories. For me, I use the old Downeaster joke “You can’t get there from here” and apply it to climate fiction, where paying attention to what we know about climate change and its causes and how we might indeed make our way toward climate progress is the subject of climate fiction. Note that I’m not arguing that climate fiction, in this definition, must be about getting to successful solutions for climate change amelioration, but only that climate change is the pervasive subject of the story, not simply the premise or starting point.

While we are on the subject of climate fiction definitions, a mention of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement must be made. Ghosh argues that all fiction is effectively climate fiction because the defining reality of the Anthropocene shapes every setting, economy, and human experience. He also argues “…that contemporary literary fiction suffers from an imaginative failure. Historically, serious novels have dismissed unpredictable, catastrophic climate events as too “improbable” for realistic fiction. Because our modern literary traditions were built during an era of stable, predictable weather, authors have struggled to conceptualize humans as planetary forces.” Basically, Ghosh believes that any fiction of today must consider climate change when addressing contemporary stories. I like to point to Weather, by Jenny Offill—a product of the MFA Writing-Industrial Complex—as a sold example of a literary climate fiction work, and I recommend her book highly.

Why am I Grumpy about What Gets Called Climate Fiction?

If you’ve noticed the pedagogical use of the Socratic Method in the above heading, you may already understand why I find fiction that uses climate change simply as a premise not to be climate fiction. Take the example of Moojag, as described the author:

The seeds of Moojag were planted during a period of intense climate anxiety…. My manuscript began as an environmentally charged fantasy but quickly transformed into a neurodivergent Solarpunk “dystopia-versus-utopia” that asked: What if we got it right? What if we could live together peacefully as ourselves, accepted and celebrated for who we are?

In the post-climate-catastrophe Surrey Isles, technology is an extension of the ecosystem. Cephalopod-inspired, full-bodied electronic sensory-powered skins allow the “Real World” community to live outdoors, protected from all weathers, danger, and disease. No more buildings, no homelessness, no money, no disease, no refined sugar. The characters live in a state of high-tech harmony with nature….

If you think “Thrutopia” is vague, I see “solarpunk” as being another too-broad category, and one also often used to define a story as climate fiction. Please note that I’m not judging the quality or value of any particular work of “solarpunk” fiction, but I am trying to explore what makes a short story or novel climate fiction.

By the way, N.E. McMorran’s climate anxiety is a perfectly fine reason to write a book, and “Cephalopod-inspired, full-bodied electronic sensory-powered skins” may be a nifty concept and the idea of everyone living in “a state of high-tech harmony with nature” is a good one on general principle. But what does this have to do with climate fiction? It seems to me that climate change is little more than premise, and a bit like writing a book about paradise regained but not mentioning somewhere in the book that once paradise was lost and not referencing all the juicy details of the matter. Moojag is set in a post-climate-catastrophe, so there might be lessons to be learned, but the starting point already literarily distances the readers from the world within which they live, which is the one within which readers are most likely to identify themselves. Please note that I’m not suggesting Moojag is not interesting or will fail to engage readers, or that there cannot be readers who identify with characters or drama in the book.

But what I am wondering is whether Moojag is climate fiction. I am wondering if there’s any practical difference between climate fiction and other kinds of fiction.

Why I Write Climate Fiction

The reason why I’m writing climate fiction is that I’m interested in living in and understanding the world today and exploring how we humans might keep this world from turning more hellish. I could, of course, write a non-fiction book that explains the contributing factors of climate change and the various ways to reduce carbon emissions and slow—even eventually correct—climate change. I do write about this and related topics on my website, in large part because writing about a subject is the best way of learning about a subject, at least short of teaching a subject. There are many excellent books, Substacks, videos, and magazine explainers published about climate change and the methods and strategies and technologies to ameliorate it.

But fiction does something for many people that non-fiction often fails at. Fiction has the greater capacity to make people identify with the subject through narrative—story—and therefore more likely engage readers more directly in actions that might address the subject. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, is a famous example of this potential effect: There were thousands upon thousands of nineteenth century Americans who thought slavery evil, but Uncle Tom’s Cabin, not abolitionist pamphlets, helped more readers feel the insult of slavery and motivated significant political will against it.

I’m not concerned that people—let’s use Americans, even, since I am one—are unaware of climate change. There’s plenty of polling that shows large majorities of people across many countries are concerned about climate change. But what percentage of Americans believe that they can do something about climate change? What do people believe are the actions that they might take? I asked Gemini AI:

According to long-running polling from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) and George Mason University, public sentiment centers around a few core metrics regarding agency and action.

The Percentage: Can We Do Something?

To understand if Americans think they can combat climate change, researchers look at two distinct dimensions of agency: collective efficacy (what we can do together) and individual efficacy (what I can do alone).

• • The Optimistic Majority (Collective Action): Roughly 63% of Americans explicitly reject the idea that “it’s already too late to do anything about global warming.” The vast majority believe that humanity still possesses the window and capability to change the trajectory of the crisis.
  • The Personal Sense of Responsibility: About 59% to 62% of Americans state that they feel a personal sense of responsibility to help reduce global warming.
  • The Individual Skepticism Gap: Despite feeling a personal responsibility, Americans are split right down the middle when it comes to their own impact. 53% disagree with the statement “the actions of a single individual won’t make any difference,” meaning just over half believe their solo choices matter. Conversely, a massive 47% feel paralyzed by individual insignificance, agreeing that one person’s actions ultimately make no difference.

For me, the “paralyzed by individual insignificance” result is the most interesting, and I suspect the 47% figure represents a large undercount (you know, polls and the way they ask questions and all that). The same Yale program also looks at the actions people believe they can take to address climate change, and the AI Summary to the query reports that action categories break into three areas: “personal lifestyle adjustments, consumer behavior, and civic/political action.” Here’s another interesting quote from the Summary: “…there is a massive gap between the actions people support conceptually versus the actions they actually take.”

Is that gap a gap of imagination? Can climate fiction stories help close the gap?

Consumer activism ranks high on the list of actions supporting climate progress, and this includes buying from eco-friendly businesses and boycotting companies that deny or oppose climate change, and then there’s the enthusiasm for political efforts like 2022’s IRA and energy efficiency-related and tax rebates. Still, Trump’s gutting of these programs illustrates, through falling EV sales to name only one example, that the just mentioned enthusiasm may be in large part because of good deals and less about being driven to address climate change. People may still want to be more energy efficient and less carbon polluting, but we’re typically more immediately concerned with today’s bottom line in our household economics.

On the other hand, according to the Yale program, political and civic actions have even lower follow-through. Supporting solar and wind projects ranks high and large majorities believe corporations should do more, but less than half take any targeted consumer activity, and boycotts and favored climate-friendly goods don’t seem all that effective. Of course, Yale also reports that while 64% of those polled report that they are worried about climate change, of this set only 20% discuss climate change with friends and family regularly. “44% of Americans report that they never discuss [climate change] with family or friends” and assume others care less about the subject, “leading to social silence.”

I believe that political action is the best and bigger lever for moving climate progress forward, and the IIJA and IRA of 2021 and 2022 support this belief despite the setbacks. I believe that more talk, more news, and more stories about climate change may relieve people of suppressive social silence, and the more stories about climate change that people can identify with the better. Fiction, with compelling and identifiable characters, builds connections, empathy, relatability.

That’s why I write climate fiction. Moving stories help break such silence and sense of isolation.

Of course, potential effect is not the same as achieved outcome.

Fiction is Fun or Entertaining or Mesmerizing Stories Told, Right?

Another big topic in climate fiction is the dreaded “info-dump” or dragging a story into service of pedagogical goals. “There will be a quiz” presentation undoes reader enthusiasm, I’m pretty sure.

The point is that fiction about climate change is climate fiction that describes the days we’re living and seeing the world heating up and resulting extreme weather events, droughts, fires, and floods, and increasingly, the migration of humans (and fauna, flora, and diseases) due to the changing climate. There are tipping points galore, too, like a horror movie setting up for any number of sequels: Drought!, Fire!, Flood!, Run Amoc!, The Invasion of the Clathrates!, The Rising Seas! We know that there are solutions, including the switch to clean electricity for buildings and transportation. We know there are competing economic interests and clashes of empires. We read about various policy fights and politicians and corporations caught up in political dance. Heck, the Pope weighs in.

Climate change—and what we should do—is confusing, and part of the story is murkier and more confusing, as dark money sloshes about buying regulatory agencies, lawmakers, Trump, and even SCOTUS. And all this time, for most of us in the developed world, mostly all we hear about climate change is in the news. Unless, of course, it is your house that gets washed away in a hurricane or your city that burns in a wildfire.

Climate change is complicated, too, and expensive, and, it goes without saying, we’re still primarily worried about paying next month’s power bill or car payment or rent. For me, this is the climate story to tell today: a snapshot of where we are in regard to climate change, even as we’re mostly thinking about that odd comment the wife made at breakfast, or the kid’s soccer game this afternoon, or whether you can stand your boss for another day, or worrying about your best friend’s recent diagnosis. You know, climate change as subject within the days of our lives.

If we want the challenge of climate change to be real for people—and we do, since that makes it more likely more people vote for the right candidates to fight the mega-wealthy and corporate self-interests—then we need stories that show real people (well, fiction’s substitute of compelling “real” characters) living with the issues of climate change today. The problem with apocalyptic fiction and stories featuring magical creatures or new-and-improved humans in the future is that such stories are escapist. Sure, I was an English Major, and I know about metaphor, allegory, parables, and the Hero’s Journey. I’ve studied Norman Friedman’s 14 types of stories he believed all literary works are shaped by. I know that stories come in all forms and sizes, and that applies to climate fiction, too.

But the premise of climate change—the “what if”—is not the same as the subject of climate change. The subject of climate fiction is climate change and how we got to where we are and how we can do what needs doing to get to where we’d rather be. These days, where we’d rather be is a world where our changing climate is less destructive rather than more destructive.

Isn’t that an interesting story?

The post What is Climate Fiction? first appeared on David Guenette.

The Steep Climes Quartet is a literary climate fiction series.

Why “literary”? Because the emphasis is on deeply drawn characters with which readers can identify across the many aspects of their own lives.

Why “climate fiction?” The series’ local characters live in a world with a changing climate across a two-decade-plus timeframe:

• Kill Well takes place in 2026
• Dear Josephine takes place in 2029
• Over Brooklyn Hills takes place in 2035
• Farm to Me takes place in 2047

Is climate a primary concern for the characters? Like most of us today, many of the characters aren’t thinking all that much about climate change. We know about climate change and see that this is a problem, but we mostly go about our quotidian lives focused on work, family, friends, and paying the next bill. But climate change is happening and affecting the whole world, just in different degrees of vulnerability and challenge. We don’t escape its effects entirely now, even in the relatively resource-rich part of the world in which we live.

Here in the developed world—the series’ through characters live in Berkshire County, Massachusetts—climate change remains more abstract: reports in the news, connection to political issues, and cautionary stories about extreme weather, such as droughts, deluges. storms and hurricanes, diseases, and heat. Climate change is a real problem that is catching up with us all, and actions that combat climate change early on—today!—helps reduce the devastating problems later. Within this infosphere that is today’s pervasive static, unsettling studies on the problems and hope-engendering developing solutions leak through. Of course, working toward progress creates ever-shifting forms of opposition from entrenched interests. 

Each book carries one or more specific themes.

In Kill Well, that theme is the malfeasance of the fossil fuel industry that infiltrates every aspect of society, even seeping into quiet places and small towns. There’s a thriller subplot, welcome humor, and a wide range of characters, including a killer for hire. In 2026, most people are aware of climate change, but it remains abstract and far off seeming, and household economic concerns get the greater attention. But people, knowing or not, are already experiencing the fact that climate change is expensive and the re-ascension of Trump itself extracts a cost.

Dear Josephine looks at the carry-over consequences of extreme weather in the form of a massively destructive hurricane that hits Florida’s Gold Coast, devastating Miami. This book imagines the emotional effects of such an event even at remove, while also following a nefarious scheme by monied interests trying to shape an act coming up in post-2028 Congress in order gain control of the potentially staggering large budget, even while American society further frays under the carryover effects Trump, Big Oil, and the billionaires who have become the target for one or more people going around the country, murder list in hand.

Over Brooklyn Hills looks at climate migration, and for Berkshire County it is climate migration writ small as young people from New York City seek relief in the relatively cool hills of the Berkshires from a socked-in urban heatwave, even as on the international stage large-scale climate migrations develop. The main through-character Davin, at 70 years of age, has finally become an active supporter of climate change politics and the proud owner of solar panels and batteries and his membership in a VPP. And then there’s a domestic climate terrorist group in the news; No One is Safe, first introduced in Dear Josephine, now playing a far more dangerous game.

Farm to Me, an in-process manuscript of the 2047 story with a target publication date of Spring 2027, sees a world where rising average global temperatures are changing things consequentially, including food yields, with expanding Northeast farms taking on more agricultural production as Western farmers suffer chronic droughts. There’s a local murder mystery, too, in which the main through character Davin, now 82 and fixating on getting older, finds himself in the middle.

You can find the first three books—Kindle and paperback—of The Steep Climes Quartet through Amazon, or order it through your favorite bookstore or in ePub format.

The post Over Brooklyn Hills is Now Available first appeared on David Guenette.

From the very first sentence she had my interest:

There is a reason so many people can imagine ecological collapse more easily than regenerative economies. A reason burnout feels more believable than collective care. A reason dystopian futures dominate films, books, media narratives and political discourse, while genuinely transformative futures are often dismissed as naive, unrealistic or impossible before they are even fully articulated.

I’m the author of The Steep Climes Quartet, what I call a literary climate fiction series. The definition of “climate fiction” obsesses me, understandably.

Vasileva posits that dystopian literature is ascendant in today’s world because of social conditioning that she refers to as “the colonisation of imagination.” She writes that happens when dominant systems become so embedded in everyday life that their logic starts to feel inseparable from reality itself. Economic systems, technological systems, educational systems and cultural narratives do not only organise institutions. They also shape perception. They influence what people expect from the future, what kinds of change feel achievable, and which possibilities appear serious enough to pursue collectively.

She describes herself in her Substack’s “About” information this way: “I guide people and organizations through transitions. By uncovering the stories and patterns shaping them, I help them let go of what no longer serves, imagine alternatives, and design practices that bring their next chapter to life.” Sounds like intriguing and difficult work.

The colonization of imagination is an interesting concept, and she makes a good argument for this as a factor in our difficulty in imagining different collective futures. A look at much of what falls into climate fiction supports her argument, what with the storylines of desert landscapes, or boundless deadly storms, or flooded worlds where suffering, scarcity, and strife abound. But the answer to this question may be answered far more simply: disaster stories—at least the form most common in the climate fiction literature—are easier to write.

The World is Complicated and so are Social and Economic Relationships

One of my pet peeves is climate fiction stories that imagine futures that are so discordant from today’s world and thus prove difficult to relate to.

I’m a big fan of Grist, and for those of you who don’t know, this organization describes itself as:

…a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change. Since 1999, we have used the power of journalism to engage the public about the perils of one of the most existential threats we face. We seek to document the often unequal impacts of climate change on communities in the United States and globally—as well as to show the promise of equitable climate solutions.

Supporting Grist makes a lot of sense.

One of the draws I have toward Grist is their ongoing “Imagine 2200” contest, which publishes climate fiction short stories. The last couple stories recently published were both entertaining and provoking. “Forty-Seven Vacant Floors of Ur,” by T. K. Rex, extrapolates San Francisco a few years ahead, when AI has pushed many people in the former high tech land of opportunity into a universal basic income world of homelessness; no grand climate solutions to the climate crisis are offered here, but what’s on tap is an effective human story that makes one think. The other story, “Sandbag Squid,” by Ashlee Lhamon, offers some similarities, including the near-future setting—a recognizable future—and like “Forty-Seven Vacant Floors of Ur,” this story presents the perspective of a single character: “On a cold, damp beach in Louisiana, Henry Block is counting down the days until his Conservation Corps work ends and he can get back to building his digital world.“ Other stories offer more fantastical premises: an android, a spirit in a field, an urban planning group communicating with mycelium. Still, my sense is that Tory Stephens, Grist’s Climate Fiction Creative & Brand Partnerships Manager, who runs the short story contest, has been growing more inclined to real world near-future stories and away from the allegorical or fantasy stories.

Anyway, why do I mention Grist climate fiction, or the work of many writers  on Substack’s Climate Fiction Writers League, and my disappointment with climate fantasy and apocalypse stories? It’s simple: I want to see, by way of a writer’s imagination, how we get to where we need to be in relation to the climate from where we are. You might be interested in checking out a couple other of my posts about climate fiction: “A Fantastic Essay about Climate Fiction but Still a Lot of Fantasy” and “Climate Fiction and Myth in Climate Fiction.”

Simple Climate Fiction versus Complex Climate Fiction

Just to establish a metric, I think of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as complex climate fiction. First, the scope of the book is worldwide, and second, the book incorporates a wide range of characters and subjects, including the bureaucratic maneuverings of the United Nations, international monetary policy bodies, and major banks. This book also includes factors like politics and elections, technological developments, glaciology, and throws in a major extreme weather event, along with a climate action terrorist group that grows out of it. The novel begins more or less in the present (albeit pre-Trump the Second) and extends for decades beyond. Some readers don’t care for the book, in part because it delves into things like fiscal policies, but the strength of the book—besides Robinson being an excellent writer—is that the story wrestles with real world issues, and wrestles well, entertainingly, and effectively. The Ministry for the Future has been referenced among many climate working groups and policy groups because many of the climate proposals and solutions in the novel are so well thought out that the book provides a starting point for serious people trying to think through real solutions.

Of course I love The Ministry for the Future. That book does what I’m trying to do with The Steep Climes Quartet, although my series focuses on the issues of climate change challenges and solutions from what can be described as the hyper-local and hyper-personal fronts. Kill Well, the first book, takes place in 2026; Dear Josephine in 2029; Over Brooklyn Hills—now on pre-order, with a publication date of June 15, 2026—takes place in 2035; and the final book, Farm to Me, is set in 2047, although at this point in the manuscript’s writing, it is anybody’s guess as to publication date. In this final book of the series, I am exploring regenerative agriculture and its emergence in the Northeast as some of the major agriculture areas in the U.S. and elsewhere suffer productivity losses because of chronic droughts tied to climate change.

While I love bandying about terms like “hyper-local” and hyper-personal,” all I really mean is that the through characters of the series live in Berkshire County in Massachusetts and that readers experience how these characters think or don’t think about the climate crisis. One big shocker is that even those dedicated to fighting climate change more often think about crushes or ponder therapy-valid thoughts, or worry about paying bills or getting a job, or focus on problems of aging. For those not dedicated to the fight, climate mostly appears as a creature of the news and infosphere, unless, of course, a specific character happens to have, for example, his vegetable garden brought down by a big storm. There are a range of themes throughout the series, including the malfeasance of Big Oil and how dark money works behind the scenes. There is a fair amount of climate change information, including on policies and politics, but this is mainly from characters caught up in the fight, but even with such characters, their inner lives and personal challenges are forward.

It would have been easier to write a climate disaster book where the hero gains guns and gals amid the floods or heat, but I don’t find that as interesting as imagining what our society and culture can do to make things better in terms of the climate challenge and how people may come to join such efforts. Hint: joining in is less typically marching under banners and more in the choices—political, economic, and social—we make.

Solutions R Us

We have met the climate crisis solutions and they are us.

Heather Cox Richardson often makes the point that the United States of America doesn’t need new laws to combat Trump and Trumpism (i.e., corruption, racism, anti-democracy), but rather we need to enforce the laws that already exist (one example is the Emoluments Clause, but the Republicans, in their blind obsequious posture toward Trump, continue to shirk their Constitutional Oaths). Likewise, when it comes to climate change there are already laws passed and regulations that help, but, again, with Trump allowed to be lawlessly corrupt, such laws—like IIJA and IRA—have been nullified and climate-positive budgets withheld. And then there are also laws of the marketplace which should tilt our economy toward clean energy because the existing suite of technologies now represent the cheapest and quickest energy sources to build, right along the digital revolutions that can more efficiently harness the existing grid, but, alas, Trump has his thumb on the scale. In the end, the biggest law Americans can uphold right now for the sake of climate progress is the Constitution, and we’ll see where the midterms lead us, but that’s another story.

The fact is that while we’ve been slow to act and have fossil fuel interests combatting our efforts toward progress on climate change, we’ve already entered a time of peril. The story today is not that we can stop climate change and all its many negative consequences, but that we can continue moving forward and keep the very worst of climate change consequences at bay in the decades and centuries ahead. To me, this is the real exciting story about climate change.

Realism Itself Functions as a Political Force

I haven’t forgotten Elena Vasileva’s post. In fact, the title of this section directly quotes her.

Vasileva says, “The word ‘realistic’ is not neutral. It carries hidden assumptions about whose futures deserve legitimacy, which systems are allowed to continue unquestioned, and what forms of life are considered practical, responsible or mature.”

Really? Of course, but I’m writing climate fiction, not taking a seminar on deconstructivism.

She continues:

People start adapting to systems they no longer truly believe in, while struggling to envision coherent alternatives. Exhaustion becomes normalised. Endless growth becomes treated as inevitable. Competition becomes framed as human nature. Hyper-productivity becomes associated with value, morality and worth….

At the same time, radically different ways of organising society often appear emotionally or politically unintelligible, even when current conditions are visibly failing.

Right. Got it. The more interesting point Vasileva makes is that the colonized imagination collapses “collective imagination,” as she writes:

Imagination is often framed as something individual, almost decorative, as though it belongs mainly to artists, writers or children. In reality, imagination is deeply social. Every institution, economy, law, city and technological system first existed as an imagined possibility before it became material reality.

Societies require the capacity to imagine differently in order to evolve.

Or, as we used to say in the Counter-Culture, reality is a shared hallucination, man.

Imagination as Transformation

Vasileva argues that our current culture is aimed at optimization and away from transformation, and so people “become highly informed about collapse while feeling increasingly incapable of imagining transformation.”  She targets algorithms as a mechanism for the optimization slant today, and as a former Facebook user, I know what she’s talking about. She names narrative lock-in that not only supports misinformation but imaginative limitation.

But is “imaginative limitation” the cause of so many shallowly fanciful treatments of climate change in fiction? I consider that the scope of story can be responsible for imaginative limitation, because to imagine a whole world, with all its complications and contradictions, rather than a simple subset, is hard work. It is easier to imagine people who develop physic abilities to talk to plants or a class of humans who now have gills than it is to imagine the world with all its complexity moving forward toward climate progress, with all attendant set-backs, disagreements, mixed motives, and other confusing Hobbesian or Lockean beliefs about mankind.

Vasileva talks about “transformative futures” that ask more of people emotionally and culturally, and politics—as one example—is an important element in our culture, so perhaps we might say that political forces function as a shaper of reality.

In fact, we agree on a lot, although not on the use of the Oxford comma. She goes on in her post about Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler as examples of storytellers of speculative fiction that holds transformative potential:

Stories do far more than entertain. They shape emotional possibility. They influence what people perceive as imaginable, desirable, ethical and attainable. Stories rehearse worlds before societies build them materially.

Speculative storytelling creates enough distance from dominant assumptions for people to question systems that previously appeared fixed and permanent. Science fiction, speculative fiction and futures storytelling all expand perception by revealing that social structures are constructed rather than inevitable.

I agree, but her statement that “Reclaiming imagination requires more than individual creativity. It requires rebuilding cultural spaces where experimentation, uncertainty and alternative futures can be explored collectively,” seems like a restatement of what art and imagination does. It seems to me that this doesn’t have to get more complicated than that.

What is rightly complicated are stories that deal with the complex challenges, barriers, and human shortcomings that keep us from building our Eden.

But then again, living in Eden? What’s the fun, the challenge, the interest in that? I can’t imagine.

The post Climate Fiction Featuring Far Futures, Dystopia, Fantasies, and Other Simplified Worlds, is Simply Much Easier to Write first appeared on David Guenette.

The subtitle to Ted Gioia’s recent post, “Anti-AI Laws Now Get Unanimous Support from Left & Right,” in his Substack, The Honest Broker, pretty much says it all in his subtitle: “In just three years, Silicon Valley has destroyed its entire support network. It’s still in denial—but that won’t last.” The major AI companies that have become synonymous with Silicon Valley have indeed managed to frighten and/or annoy huge swaths of the public both here and abroad.

As Gioia writes:

AI backlash is a huge national issue, but it’s also the hottest local issue right now. Across the US, more than 300 bills restricting data centers have been introduced in states and communities. At least 14 states are considering total moratoriums. And in places where politicians hesitate, the public is stepping in—putting voter initiatives on the ballot.

Silicon Valley has totally lost public support, and now will get punished brutally with legislation. But litigation will be just as painful. Tech companies are now routinely losing jury trials—they are so disliked by the public that going to trial almost always ensures a loss.

Any AI babies being thrown out with the bath water can be blamed on the AI would-be tech lords, but let’s also admit there’s a level of Anti-AI hysteria running through the populace that is, as hysteria tends to be, more triggered response than substantive understanding.

First, a Moment of Housekeeping

Ted Gioia’s The Honest Broker is a refreshing Substack, partly because of the quality of the writing and partly because of his wide-ranging purview focused, as it were, on the environments and practices of human creativity. How much do I like this Substack? Well, here in America we say “I love you” with money, and I’m a paying subscriber.

There’s another The Honest Broker Substack, written by Roger Pielke Jr. and I’d guess this one is better known in the climate change circles that I closely follow. Pielke is smart, but he sometimes irks me in his criticisms of climate science, where—spoiler alert!—sometimes someone gets something wrong. Pielke is especially on a crusade about imperfections in climate research, and this sometimes gives aid and succor to climate deniers and doubters, even though Pielke is not trying to do this; he’s trying to correct the record of what we actually know about climate change and how we know it. He’s also easily upset with the efforts and assumptions of many about climate change attribution, and he has a point that extreme weather happens and any specific instance of extreme weather cannot be definitively attributed to changes in climate. But in the grand scheme this is a minor point, since the evidence, to raise just one example, of the tie between climate change and worsening extreme weather and rates of extreme weather is in aggregate undeniable. Tomorrow’s massive deluge? Maybe, maybe not, but that warmer air holds more moisture and thus, with rising global temperature averages, more moisture means more deluges, that’s not a “maybe.” That’s simple enough to grasp even without a PhD in oceanic and atmospheric sciences. I wish he’d spend less time proving that he’s right and others are wrong, especially on particular points that the larger perspectives make moot. I’ve written about Roger Pielke Jr. a number of times. The following posts will be more than enough to satisfy your curiosity: “Let’s Not Worry So Much About ‘Climate Thought Police’,” from November 19, 2025, and “Statistics, Damned Statistics, and Common Sense, from July 3, 2024.

Now, back to my regularly scheduled programing.

Hubris, Tone-Deafness, Secrecy Dreams, and How to Foster Hysteria

You gotta admire the AI tech overlords, and the public electricity and gas utilities, and the fossil fuel industry: their intense focus on short-term gains blinds them to achieving their long-term success—or in the case of Big Oil, the long-term success of the Earth as a lovely place for human habitation.

The AI Tech Overlords

In the case of the AI tech overlords, their lust for massive and plentiful data centers has driven a market message that AI needs more and more and faster and faster. It doesn’t take a genius to see gaping holes in their wishes. For one thing, the general AI platforms of today still do not demonstrate successful business models. The primary argument is that AI can theoretically (or may someday) replace many humans who require salaries and paychecks, thus fulfilling the wet dreams of capitalists with huge cost savings. No one should be surprised that the vast majority of those who work aren’t thrilled by this vision. The AI dream, and especially the human-replacement part, is so fervid that AI corporations pursue staggering market valuations, while running huge development costs mentioned over and over again by the very same AI corporations as they seek to raise more and more capital. The sums chased are so large that they are regularly in the news and to such an extent that economic bubbles are also regularly in the news. Also in the news? The question of when such a bubble may burst and bring down the economy due to the huge sums of money being tossed at AI.

It is argued by some impressive people—I’d point to Tony Fadell in a recent Podbean podcast episode, “Breakthrough Technology  Dialogues with Tony Fadell,” appearing on Wednesday, April 15, 2026—that the current fixation on massive data centers is a problem. If you don’t know Fadell, look him up, but here’s the CliffsNotes: Godfather of Apple’s iPod; Co-creator of the iPhone; Co-Founder of Nest (The Learning Thermostat), which sold to Google for $3.2 billion, give or take some millions; perennial possible Apple CEO candidate (although never the bride); and as of 2017, Fadell has been running a venture fund originally called Future Shape, now called Build Collective. [Full disclosure: I worked for Tony at Fuse, a 1998 start-up aimed at network-connected consumer electronics that went away when the venture capitalists vanished during Dot.Com, when shortly he was off to Apple and the iPod. Years later, my daughter started with Tony at Nest as Assistant to the Founders, leaving the company sometime post-Google purchase, having become a product manager for the Nest thermostat.]

Podbean has Fadell talking about AI “on the edge,” by which he means, as best I can follow, that with powerful processing in our own devices, much of what we want from AI will be handled less in data centers and more in what is in your pocket or your corporate server. This may be related to the I/O challenge of data center AI, or I may be conflating the podcast here with some article or other read recently, but if you’re coming to me for analysis of computing technology and practice, stop reading now. The main point I’m making is that there are some very real questions about how AI will present in the world, but you wouldn’t know this if all you go by is the current AI corporations’ frenzy to establish huge fleets of data centers.

The Public Power Utilities

While the news from the kingdom of AI is all about fierce expansion of data centers to run all those servers stacked with  Nvidia chips so that the AI companies can charge for usage, all the while requiring significant electricity supply and water supply for cooling. For public utilities—both electricity and natural gas—all this represents gobsmacking opportunities. Not that power utilities can deliver the power in a sufficient or timely way, at least not with the way utilities have been deliveing electricity  for decades upon decades. Today, power utilities face grids constraints, electricity capacity hard limits, interconnect planning delays, and supply chain problems, but that doesn’t stop the utilities from dreaming. Of course, what the utilities really want is to build more generators, more distribution and transmission lines, and more other capital-intensive infrastructure to meet the new demand, because the capital spending they undertake gets them a guaranteed return on investment. This model is still today’s bread-and-butter profit mechanism for these public monopolies, especially investor-owned utilities.

By the way, there are plenty of well-understood and “shovel-ready” ways to increase actual electricity capacity that are less capital intensive, mainly through grid and supply digital management to extract huge gains in efficiency and flexibility. These include smart meters, smart panels, smart appliances, or the various ways to gradually incorporate distributed energy recourses (e.g., community and utility-scale solar, wind, and batteries systems, electric vehicles as batteries, etc.). There are also better ways to manage grid responsiveness and stability via grid-facing inverters, digital transformers, utility-level real-time sensors, and approaches like virtual power plants, where home solar/batteries are aggregated to serve as electricity generation for the grid for the benefit of contributing households and for improved overall grid supply. If you really want to learn about all this stuff and the lion’s share I haven’t mentioned, check out David Roberts’s Volts.

The point here is that there are lots of ways we can improve and expand the grid without huge spending, but the current hype about AI fits nicely into the way utilities prefer to make money today.

Big Oil is Hoping AI Goes as Big as Possible and to Hell with the Climate

Back on January 29, 2026, I posted “AI is Giving Me Gas.” The subtitle: “Behold the wonder of climate denial in the planned expansion of new gas generation plants.” The opening paragraph follows:

I’ve been saying that AI’s projected electricity demand is celebrated by fossil fuel companies because this growth in electricity demand provides an anchor for Big Oil to keep selling natural gas for decades to come.

Big AI is in bed with Big Oil and a glance at the headlines just about any day shows this clearly. Well, “clearly” may not be the best descriptor, since Musk and Zuckerberg and who knows who else seem happy enough to get their data centers rolling without waiting for the grid to supply the needed juice. There are lawsuits and entirely reasonable climate justice fights about data centers polluting neighborhoods through the use of fleets of big diesel-fueled generators and natural gas generators, whether for primary electricity source or for backup.

Google’s AI Overview for the query “Court cases involving diesel fueled generators for data centers” answers this:

Court cases and legal battles involving diesel generators at data centers primarily revolve around federal environmental xAI violations, local permitting disputes over emissions, and litigation brought by residents and environmental groups regarding public health. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Notable Cases and Legal Disputes

• • xAI Colossus 2 Power Plant Lawsuit (Southaven, Mississippi): The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and Earthjustice filed a major lawsuit against xAI, challenging the company’s use of unpermitted gas-turbine power plants to run its data center. The coalition (representing the NAACP) argued xAI bypassed federal Clean Air Act requirements and created a de facto power plant that emits smog, soot, and formaldehyde without proper public notice or health mitigation.
  • Markley Data Center Expansion Lawsuits (Lowell, Massachusetts): Residents and environmental justice advocates launched the first data center lawsuit in Massachusetts, challenging a state permit that allows a data center expansion to operate backup diesel generators. Filed with the help of the Yale Law School Environmental Justice Clinic, the suit charges the state with ignoring carcinogenic diesel exhaust and failing to conduct cumulative health impact analyses in an Environmental Justice population.
  • Independence AI Data Center Contract Battles (Independence, Missouri): A sprawling legal battle involves a $6.6 billion AI data center proposed on a 400-acre site. Neighbors and local groups are opposing the development—which is slated to rely on extensive diesel generation—bringing zoning, environmental, and development contract battles into circuit and county courts.
  • Quantum Loophole / Aligned Data Center Exemption Denials (Maryland): State regulators and local councils denied Aligned Data Centers an exemption that would have allowed them to operate 168 diesel backup generators at a massive data center campus in Frederick County, Maryland, prompting significant development and zoning pushback. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Regulatory Pushback and State Precedents

Beyond direct litigation, communities are actively fighting permitting processes and appealing to environmental boards regarding diesel use:

• • Port Washington (Wisconsin): Residents petitioned the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to deny air quality permits for 45 backup diesel generators, citing concerns about localized particulate matter and nitrogen oxide emissions.
  • Hilliard (Ohio): The Ohio EPA faced pushback and held hearings over draft air permits allowing an Amazon data center to run 158 Tier 2 diesel generators. Residents and local officials have called for cleaner Tier 4 standards to limit carcinogenic emissions.
  • Bay Area (California): Environmental groups petitioned the Bay Area Air Quality Management District to tighten regulations, arguing that decades-old emergency rules for diesel generators are inadequate for the massive scale of modern hyperscale data center operations. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Resources for Tracking Ongoing Cases

You can follow these developments and access case documents through environmental advocacy and legal tracking sites: [1]

• • Southern Environmental Law Center: Provides ongoing litigation updates, news releases, and filings regarding the xAI turbine case in Mississippi.
  • Yale Law School News: Offers details and court documents concerning the Lowell, Massachusetts environmental justice lawsuit.

There’s also a trend toward behind-the-meter AI data centers that aren’t connected to the grid at all, like some of the examples listed above. One worry is that gas-fired generators will get built to support the data centers by producing private electricity without having to wait for the public grid to develop the means to supply the power and/or without raising the utility’s rate for existing customers. The issue of “affordability” is also as a big play for behind-the-meter approaches. The affordability issue, however, doesn’t really get addressed by the behind-the-meter approach, although it sure sounds good, doesn’t it?

Keep in mind that while behind-the-meter power supply doesn’t have to be gas-fired and could be solar, wind, and/or batteries, there are a hell of a lot more plans in the works today for fossil fuel-based behind-the-meter generation. Here’s the AI Overview to the query “With behind the meter data center electricity, how many being planned use fossil fuels and how many use renewable energy?”:

Recent analysis of behind-the-meter (off-grid) data center developments indicates a heavy dominance of fossil fuel generation in immediate construction plans, despite widespread corporate sustainability pledges. [1]

Fossil Fuels vs. Renewables in Behind-the-Meter Plans

• • Fossil Fuel Dominance (~75%): An analysis of permit documents and equipment deals for upcoming behind-the-meter projects identified approximately 23 gigawatts (GW) of generation capacity. Of this identified equipment, nearly 75% is powered by natural gas.
  • Renewable “Exceptions”: Genuine renewables-first behind-the-meter projects are currently rare exceptions rather than the rule. The most prominent example is Switch’s Citadel Campus in Nevada, which utilizes 127 MW of solar paired with 240 MWh of battery storage.
  • “Gas Now, Clean Later” Strategy: While many developers publicize “all-of-the-above” strategies involving nuclear or renewables, the actual infrastructure being installed for 2025 and 2026 operations is almost entirely gas-fired. Commitments for renewable capacity are typically scheduled for 2028 or later, with nuclear options often projected as being a decade away. [1, 2]

Specific Behind-the-Meter Fossil Fuel Projects

Several massive gas-powered projects have been announced or are in development to bypass grid connection delays:

• • Texas (Permian Basin): FO Permian Partners and Hivolt Energy announced a 5 GW off-grid natural gas power solution for data centers.
  • Wyoming: Prometheus Hyperscale and Engie are planning a 2 GW facility with onsite gas-fired generation.
  • New Mexico: Oracle and OpenAI are developing the “Stargate” project, which is expected to rely on massive natural gas systems for off-grid power.
  • Pennsylvania: International Electric Power is planning a 944 MW gas plant specifically to power a data center while avoiding the PJM grid interconnection but not convenient for the rest of us, though. queue. [1, 2]

    

Well, isn’t that convenient? And do you think such fossil fuel-based generation won’t run on for decades, even if in the long run renewables will prove far cheaper? But then, of course, these data centers will have built the gas generators and won’t likely wish to build a whole new renewable generation plant. The whole data center power supply scheme seems custom built for Big Oil to sell more and more fossil fuel for more and more decades.

Maybe Public Hysteria about Data Centers Has a Point

People are right to worry. I was on a Zoom call with others in a climate action group and the prospect of adding a new project to organize a statewide AI ban was on the agenda. Not only are increased pollution and higher greenhouse gas emissions and global warming likely consequences if most of the planned the behind-the-meter electricity supply for data centers go forward, but there are real concerns for water resources becoming compromised and communities made worse, including with noise pollution.

But there are other economic costs for the public that put lie to the behind-the-meter “affordability” issue. Our current grid—in most places, anyway—is under-used. By adding digital intelligence (oh, the seeming irony!) and distributed energy resources to the grid, there are more users of the public grid when data centers get their electricity from it. More users mean more widely distributed costs carried over more parties, which lowers each user’s own bill.

Weird, huh?

The more data centers opt out of participating in the grid, the less efficiently the grid is used, bringing higher grid and generation costs to be paid by fewer customers. If there is a legislative program, perhaps banning data centers outright would miss an opportunity to have them located fairly and properly, accounting for projected water use by developing additional water resources, or even tying data center cooling demands to thermal heating and storage networks to reduce heating loads in cold climates. Data centers could also be part of establishing more clean energy, which is cheaper to build these days and far cheaper to run over its expected lifecycle compared to a fossil fuel generation plant. Data centers can also contribute to advances in and implementation of grid efficiency and digital management of loads and demands, reliability, and grid balance and voltage regulation.

Of course, the AI tech lords will tell you that data centers must be built today and up and running tomorrow. Since AI is racking up tremendous investment liabilities with every new dollar added to the cause, I can see why they’re impatient to shake a leg. I’m less clear about why we need to put ourselves on their schedule, especially with all the existentially negative aspects of rushing.

Weird, huh?

Jerks R Us Interuptus

What may be the biggest prod to the widespread public AI backlash, as Gioia writes, is the AI tech leaders’ tone-deafness and astounding isolation from the real world. “These folks are living in an echo chamber—and they reveal their disconnect with the public almost every time they open their mouths,” he says. Commencement speakers mentioning AI are literally getting laughed out of the room.

Gioia continues:

In an odd twist, it’s actually getting harder for politicians to run on this issue—because their opponents are running on the same issue. In 2026, only oblivious tech bros are willing to stand up and praise AI. And when that happens, the booing begins instantly.

Let me put this in economic terms. Tech companies have spent more than a trillion dollars on AI and have only succeeded in becoming the most hated businesses in the world. Spending another trillion dollars—or (most likely) more—will only intensify the public’s antipathy.

It’s easy to see where this is leading.

History teaches us that you can only push people so far. Most of the time, they let things slide. But there are limits—and Silicon Valley has just slammed into them. People aren’t going to sit by silently while tech companies eliminate their jobs, hurt their kids, slopify the culture, and use up scarce resources.

They will fight back—and that’s the phase we’ve just entered in 2026.

Sooner or later, even the most clueless tech CEOs will realize that they need to slow down and address public concerns. My best guess is that we’re still 12-18 months away from that. But that’s only because Silicon Valley is so out-of-touch with the rest of world—they block out the boos and live in their own fantasy world.

Amen, brother.

Of course, it may turn out that in 12-18 months our understanding of AI and how best to platform it may present another world the tech bros can ignore for a while more. Or perhaps in 12-18 months’ time, today’s staggeringly large AI investments will be past due and the dear AI tech lords will be busy dealing with market corrections of their own making.

Meanwhile, and from here on out, let’s give a hoot and don’t pollute, and I don’t just mean the carbon emissions factor but also our very culture with AI slop threatening to become a self-reinforcing GI/GO problem, but don’t worry: the Tech AI lords are paying some people $20 an hour to keep this from happening, so relax.

Or maybe stay tense. The obtuseness of AI tech lords, the old lazy habits of power utilities, and the never-ceasing greed of Big Oil needs to be countered less with hysteria and more with a clearer and cleaner sense of how to build our world’s better future.

Can I have an Amen?

The post Let’s Do Anti-AI Backlash Right first appeared on David Guenette.

Austin and Clare Aslan, the authors of the post “Climate Fiction Writing as the ‘Slow Blade that Penetrates the Shield’,” published on  Climate Fiction Writers League Substack on May 19, 2026,  raise some good questions about climate fiction. They are co-authors of The Crystal Halo, which is described as “an epic high fantasy series opener with a non-European setting that turns the ‘Chosen One’ myth on its head amidst a disintegrating nature.” One of the authors is the director of the School of Earth and Sustainability at Northern Arizona University; the other serves on the Flagstaff City Council, “first winning a seat and then re-elected on a carbon-zero-by-2030 platform.”

So, serious people. They describe how their professional roles rely on “clarity and directness…[where] every action is directly and tangibly tied to evidence and outcomes. Our arsenal is our professional knowledge and our armor is facts.” They then go on to make the safe claim that storytelling is different than their day jobs… “not the same as policy, white papers, or climate action plans.”

Well, yes.

The two Aslans argue that “Fundamentally, fiction is about entertainment; there is a contract between writer and reader that the latter will enjoy themselves through the former’s work. When we invent stories that pontificate or proselytize, that sense of enjoyment is dulled or lost. No one wants to feel coerced by a novel.”

Well, right. So far, so good. This may be an overly stark distinction, though, especially thinking of Horace, the 19 BC poet famous for his Ars Poetica and many still lively phrases, including aut prodesse aut delectare, typically put as “Poetry should either entertain or edify.” The modern consensus is that literature can do both.

Hey, really, I just wanted to quote Horace in a post.

Their argument continues, basically claiming that people connect with “…stories [that] have a unique power to speak directly to hearts and souls, to get under the skin and to topple defensive front lines. People have long understood the world through myth, parable, and narrative—not climate models and temperature graphs.”

So we’re still in safe territory. We all understand, one hopes, that there is a big difference between fiction and policy statements, white papers, or climate action plans.

“Stories teach us to envision new possibilities, to sympathize with others, and to experience new or emerging obstacles. They ignite our imagination and allow us to conceptualize alternative futures and to consider their ramifications and anticipate our own responses,” the Aslans state, but here’s where the question about climate fiction gets interesting. The authors of the post go on to describe The Crystal Halo, the first novel in their Prophecies of Fathom series, where they “grappled with the seduction of trying too hard to make a case—to convey a moral lesson… There is no exposition presenting the problem and how to fix it. There is no straightforward lesson.”

Is Dune Climate Fiction?

While their phrasing shows their rejection of didactic or pedantic reporting on climate change in climate fiction, I question how this fantasy series becomes climate fiction rather than simply a fantasy series, albeit one where issues of “environmental collapse is present as background pressure, a deviation from normal, something characters plan around rather than solve. In this way, the disruption to climate in the world of Fathom is much like we experience it today, on Earth.”

But is it? The answer, of course, will be found in the reading of this work.

By the way, the “slow blade that penetrates the shield” is a story element in Frank Herbert’s Dune, where firearms and other fast kinetic weaponry are annulled by personal force fields, making knife fights based on slow(ish) movement the main form of close combat. Because the story revolves around the planet Arrakis, a virtually waterless place defined by vast stretches of bone-dry desert, severe windstorms, and extreme temperatures, the series is often cited as an early or proto-climate fiction series. A nifty enough if a bit bloody metaphor for how climate fiction must tread.

But let’s get back to the Aslans’ post and the question of “What is climate fiction?”

Unlike white papers and scientific lectures, they argue that “fiction can show us how people live during a crisis, but should be set before the complex problem has been resolved. To remain authentic, it ought to dwell in the long middle, where adaptation is uneven and life stubbornly continues…. Most human experience does not take place at the edge of extinction. It takes place in the in-between, charting a winding path through daycares and deadlines, bills and bedtime. When climate fiction doesn’t account for this real life, it risks becoming spectacle—harrowing, yes, but disconnected from how change actually unfolds.”

I think their view here is spot on. The problem with most apocalyptic or fantasy climate fiction is that these stories do not represent real life. Readers may very much enjoy such stories, but close identification between the reader’s life and the settings and characters in such stories, set as they are in alien worlds—whether post-apocalyptic here or on some distant planet or an entirely fantastical world—makes it less likely for us to identify the books closely with our own situation. Even if the setting is Earth, the situation is alien.

Today, we may be heading toward an apocalypse, but we ain’t there yet, although we might be setting up an unavoidable conclusion of disaster locked in, albeit slow motion. Of course, we’re getting ever closer to such disasters in some places more than others. Bill McKibben writes a particularly sobering post in his Substack, The Crucial Years,” titled “A Question of Margin: And there’s so very little,” about the Somali humanitarian crisis, with some Ebola and India and Pakistan heatwaves thrown in, and a sound ass-kicking of Elon Musk, to boot.

Finally, a Solid, Working Definition of Climate Change

But let’s get back to the Aslans’ post:

In The Crystal Halo, the stakes are real, but they are often unspoken. The moment of disaster passes without drama, and challenge emerges from how characters negotiate meaning in a world that no longer behaves as expected. What do you hold onto when the future crumbles? What counts as success when progress is redefined as nothing more than survival?

These are not questions with tidy answers, and fiction should resist providing them. Advocacy, in story, does not come from instruction but from proximity. Readers must be allowed to inhabit uncertainty without being rescued by didactic answers. They need room to wrestle, to disagree, and perhaps to come to a different conclusion from the one the writer would reach. This is where storytelling enters a realm that policy cannot.

Amen, I say. The above quote may be one of the best definitions of climate fiction I’ve seen.

Still, there seems to be something of an allergy to stories set in the real world of today and the near-future, which is the most important time when climate amelioration will or won’t happen. The Fathom series’ description is “an epic high fantasy series,” but I haven’t read the first book in the series, so I can’t fully judge the series alignment with our reality. As author of my own series, The Steep Climes Quartet, the first book is set in 2026, the second in 2029, the third in 2035 (this one, Over Brooklyn Hills, is on pre-order, with a publishing date of June 15, if I may so report!), and the last book is set in 2047. I want to tell the story of our contemporaries in the developed world, where resources to cope with climate consequences are plentiful—certainly in contrast to today’s Somalia, for example—and where political actions hold the best hope for climate progress.

The main point in my series is that while we live in a time of significant climate crisis we are human and that even in a climate crisis, our daily lives typically trump (sorry) our attention. Such lives are filled with many priorities, and mostly of the personal and immediate sorts, but one question to be asked is how climate change subtly intrudes into our lives. Here in the developed world, climate change is mainly in the static of news and the noise of weather around us and in our daily home economies, too. Unless you happen to live in the wrong spot at the wrong time, of course, such as with Helene and Asheville, North Carolina, back in September 26, 2024, and there are many more examples of acute crises by the minute.

Climate fiction makes readers witnesses, as the Aslans say, and bring into greater relief the experiences within “the consequences of our collective decisions [and] granted the authority to decide for themselves how their new experiences within this world will impact their perspective.” With fantasy books, are we reading of a world where our collective decisions are manifest? If only there was an AI called Gandalf the White we could query.

The Aslans’ also rightly state that “Fiction… can hold and expose contradictions without resolving them. It can show characters who make imperfect choices for understandable reasons. It can honor the reality that people care about climate change and still drive, fly, consume, and contradict themselves daily.”

They continue:

That contradiction is human. It captures all the daily complexity we must each balance, the easy and the difficult, the joy and the pain, and the tiny decisions that add up to a real life.

Too often, climate narratives reduce people into caricatures: villains of extraction, heroes of resistance, victims of circumstance. But real people are much more complex and also much more relatable. They resist change not because they are evil or because they deny science, but because change threatens identity, memory, and belonging. Stories that ignore this complexity may feel righteous, but they rarely feel true.

A climate story that refuses to simplify, that aims to show its characters as whole people with tangled and contradictory values, can reveal that truth. Characters can be complicit and caring, fearful and hopeful, informed and overwhelmed all at once. Characters can want to do the right thing, but can face many axes of rightness, constrained by the challenges of social ties, health, finances, and dreams.

When readers recognize themselves in a story, they are more likely to carry that story with them. Stories that linger shape perception. This is why narrative must come before message. A reader who would instinctively reject a manifesto or moral may be captivated by a character, haunted by a choice, or quietly changed by a narrative conflict.

Okay, maybe this is the best description of climate fiction.

Giving Austin and Clare Aslan the Final Word… Well, Until My Final Word, Anyway

If The Crystal Halo succeeds at all, we hope it succeeds in this way—immersing readers in a world where climate change is neither abstract nor theatrical, but intimate—a world where environmental collapse is a force that shapes relationships, ambition, hopes, and dreams. This is a world where climate change is a presence that cannot be ignored, but also cannot be reduced to a slogan.

The future will not be saved by stories alone. Policy matters. Infrastructure matters. Science matters. Our day jobs allow us to tackle environmental problems directly. But stories can shape the cultural ground on which society stands. Our shared artistic passion allows us to play a role in shifting the landscape under people’s feet. Storytelling prepares us—not by telling us what to do, but by helping us imagine who we might be and the world we might shape.

The Aslan post is impressive overall, as are the concluding paragraphs quoted above, in what I see as the continuation of a useful definition for climate fiction. I’ve been struggling with what the intrinsic elements of stories called “climate fiction” are, and it’s not easy. In fact, when I read this post, I was in the early stages of writing a post titled “What is Climate Fiction? As a Genre, It’s a Fiction,” so I was pleased to see that the Aslan post goes far in defining key concepts of what I think are the necessary elements of fiction to be “climate fiction.” Debates, no doubt, will ensue.

There’s an odd tension, however, between what the Aslans’ post says about climate fiction and the climate fiction they write. When I saw that the series is described as “an epic high fantasy series opener with a non-European setting that turns the ‘Chosen One’ myth on its head amidst a disintegrating nature,” I thought The Crystal Halo was going to be yet another post-climate change future or alternate world when what we are facing today is ancient history or worse yet, the real world supplanted by allegory. One of my critiques of many books that get labelled as climate fiction is that such books are fantasies or stories beyond our time or otherwise some sort of dystopian tale. There are also books that incorporate magic and special beings or evolved humans, but that sure as heck isn’t the world I see around me.

First though,  I haven’t read the first book, The Crystal Halo, so there nothing like a review or critique of the novel itself here. I know well enough that writing quality is as important as anything else in terms of a book’s value, as are the vividness of characters and compelling scenes and intriguing actions and situations. I well know that I can’t critique the book, not having read it. What I’ve done is studied The Crystal Halo’s Amazon page and the book’s descriptive copy. I’ve also read through the start of the book that’s provided through the book’s Amazon page, and I’ve gained a sense of the book. What is clear is that the book is fantasy, the locale and people quite different from today, at least in the developed world. It reads, at the start, like a scene from the Middle Ages, although as previously confessed, I haven’t read any further than the first six pages of Chapter One as provided by the “Read Sample” and that’s not even the full chapter that is, according to the Table of Contents, eight pages.

Why a fantasy series as climate fiction? This is a question I think a lot about. For example, I wrote “Climate Fiction and Myth in Climate Fiction” a week or two ago, and the subtitle is “Why are so many novels about climate change pursuing myth and fantasy instead of actual solutions?” Here’s the first paragraph of this post:

I am a student of climate fiction, and not surprisingly so, since I write climate fiction. I’ve long rejected the easy story of apocalypse, and not because such stories are uninteresting or a failure as a fun read, but because such stories most often have little to do with the subject of climate other than as a premise for the story. Likewise, I’m not a big fan of far-future climate fiction stories that show mankind changed in response to the climate crisis, even while the stories don’t bother to do the work of showing how the change comes about.

Yes, I’ve been researching the differences between the words snarky, snide, and sardonic, and you might see why when you read a paragraph that comes later in the “Climate Fiction and Myth in Climate Fiction” post:

What sticks in my craw is the propensity of novels calling themselves climate fiction that focus on fantasy, and that includes altered species or fairies or demi-gods, or far-future distant or dystopian worlds, or radical changes in human nature often focused on gender issues or BIPOC, all the while too often fitting into hyper-genre writing markets instead of having climate change the central focus. There are many fantasy, romance, thriller, or science fiction novels that have some “climate” orientation or other, but that clearly don’t address the clear issues of climate change, either in cause or solution. We’re burning fossil fuels and heating the planet. Isn’t this time and place of crucial threat to the world an interesting enough story? Who needs allegory when the menace and what needs doing to address it is staring us right in the face?

If you look at at recent posts on Climate Fiction Writers League, you’ll note that at least six out of the most recent eight posts on there involve climate fiction with fantasy or fantastic characteristics (book descriptions below from the posts), as follows:

Climate Fiction Writing as the “Slow Blade that Penetrates the Shield,” by high fantasy co-authors Austin and Clare Aslan, May 19, 2026

Today we have an essay by Austin and Clare Aslan, authors of The Crystal Halo, an epic high fantasy series opener with a non-European setting that turns the “Chosen One” myth on its head amidst a disintegrating nature

Magick & High-Tech Augmentations in YA Fiction, a discussion between Kenechi Udogu and Ray Star, Mar 10, 2026

Today’s discussion explores climate fiction dystopian concepts in YA Sci-fi and Fantasy novels, by up-and-coming authors Kenechi Udogu and Ray Star.

Kenechi Udogu’s debut novel Augmented is set in a future where humans are enhanced to ensure the survival of society. Akaego fights to prevent her power to grow plants from being weaponized by a corrupt regime.

Earthlings by Ray Star is set on a remote island where the magick-born have the ability to control earth, air, fire, water and spirit. But elsewhere, humanity is enslaved, a cruel dictator rules the land, and an uprising is on the horizon.

Imagination, Mythology, and the Return to Earth, by Steve Stine, author of I, Enoch, May 5, 2026

Steve Stine talks about mythology in fiction. His sci-fi novel I, Enoch is about a race to save the world from the prospect of a sixth mass extinction. Enoch embarks on a dangerous mission with the help of ancient patrons and in the company of those with special knowledge of Earth’s hidden secrets.

The Balance Between Immersion and Believability, A conversation between authors Denise Robbins and Amy Lilwall, April 7, 2026

This year, Denise Robbins and Amy Lilwall published novels that address climate change sidelong. Through depictions of public reactions to pending disaster—and the turmoil that ensues—both novels seek to capture the panic of a world in the midst of wide-scale disruption.

Robbins’ novel, The Unmapping, bends the laws of physics in a city—New York—that ‘unmaps’, causing world-famous buildings and streets to move and displace overnight. Amy Lilwall’s The Water That May Come imagines UK citizens in the face of a megatsunami that threatens to engulf their homeland.

Mermaids & Sea Salvage in two oceanic sci-fi novels, A discussion between Timothy Chawanga and Susan Fletcher, February 24, 2026 [Note: this post seems to split between a near-future mystery and a fantasy YA book]

Today, we have a conversation with Timothy Chawanga, author of SALVAGIA, in which a diver searching for nostalgic salvage discovers the body of the most infamous man in flooded Florida and must avoid suspicion from both feds and corporate mafias.

Timothy is talking to Susan Fletcher, author of Sea Change, a YA retelling of The Little Mermaid set in a near-future where rogue gene editing has changed humanity.

Stop the World, I want to Get Off, Adam Connors interviews Alex Foster, Feb 10, 2026

Alex Foster’s debut novel, Circular Motion, explores how a new, high-speed travel network causes the Earth’s rotation to accelerate, not just by a few seconds, but by a minute, an hour, and more.

That’s a lot of fantasy and science fiction, but I’m not sure how many of these books are fictional works addressing or focused on climate change. And, no, I’m not talking about graphs and charts, but focus.

This question of what is climate fiction, I believe, also applies to the planned The Prophesies of Fathom series. I love how Austin and Clare Aslan talk about effective climate fiction, but their talk of climate fiction and their series seem to be opposite each other.

I guess I have a lot of would-be climate fiction reading ahead of me, but at this point I’m confused about the whole domain.

Learn more about The Prophesies of Fathom Book One: The Crystal Halo.

Learn more about The Steep Climes Quartet.

The post A Fantastic Essay about Climate Fiction but Still a Lot of Fantasy first appeared on David Guenette.

For the writer/production editor/publisher, the advent of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) back in November 2007 changed the landscape of trade publishing for good and bad. Keep in mind that we are two decades into the real start of ebooks, even though, as an editor of digital publishing professional periodicals, I’d attended two earlier cycles of ebook conferences starting sometime in the late 1980s, and the idea of ebooks had been around for an even longer time. Ted Nelson and his book Hypertext, anyone?

As it turned out, it took Amazon’s commitment to this emerging marketplace to provide momentum out of the starting gate. Keep in mind that Amazon was still in early stages of its world domination and was a generally well-regarded corporation doing what many people thought were helpful things. Things like online shopping, fast shipping, competitive prices, and other sorts of attractive retail behavior. The common view of Amazon these days is negative, and for many good reasons. I won’t go into details here—they’re well-known. In fact, I’ve done my share of critiquing, including writing essays titled “Horsewhip Jeff Bezos, Part One” and “Horsewhip Jeff Bezos, Part Two.” If you want an excellent description of what’s going on with online platforms, read Cory Doctorow’s essays on “enshittification.”

What It Takes for Books to Gain “The Channels”

The third book of The Steep Climes Quartet, Over Brooklyn Hills, is on pre-order, with a publication date of June 15, 2026, but in order to make the book and the others in the series as widely available as possible, hoops must be jumped through.

Amazon is the single largest bookseller in the known universe, and the platform makes buying books easy (unlike the search function for most other goods available through Amazon), so there’s that. Get the book on Amazon and Bob‘s your uncle, that’s the thinking. But there’s also significant opposition to Amazon these days and, understandably, especially so from other booksellers and book buyers loyal to independent bookstores and those all-around anti-Amazon folks. Bookshop.org has done a decent job providing an Amazon alternative for online book-buying and has the anti-Amazon public’s support mainly because it directs the sales to independent bookstores.

If I want to sell my books in independent bookstores in addition to Amazon, I can. Well, I can if my book has a real ISBN and doesn’t use the one Amazon freely offers publishers, which isn’t a real ISBN, but an ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) that is independent of the ISBN usage by other bookstores. The practical consequence is that other bookstores simply won’t sell ASIN-only books, and it is not merely pique on their part, but also logistical: the rest of the trade book selling world uses ISBN inventory and pricing for their stock, something Amazon has known to be the case for decades upon decades. I also need to make sure that my books are available through a book distributor so that independent bookstores can order them, which for the trade market in the U.S. means Ingram, and don’t you know they own Lightning Source, an online platform for publishing both print and ebooks.

So now I’m using two publishing platforms, both of which produce the books as print-on-demand.

Of course, there also is the issue of ebook production, format, and distribution. For KDP, that’s easy enough and the ingestion interface has gotten better over time, so there are fewer publishers now having strokes when trying to get an ebook—a Kindle—out into the world. Of course, when you publish through KDP you’re limited to selling the Kindle ebook through Amazon, unless, that is, you use an additional ebook publishing platform, where the real value is in its distribution, ebook production being relatively easy. Alternate ebook distribution makes the ebook—ePub—available through Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and many other channels, including into libraries. I’ve found Draft2Digital effective in this way.

So now I’m using three publishing platforms.

The Signal-to-Noise Challenge Loudly Continues

Of course, so are millions of other self-publishers, or whatever the actual number is, using publishing platforms. There are 3-4 million such books reportedly getting published annually these days, at least according to people who wish to break my spirit, as the sheer volume of new books creates a signal-to-noise problem for those searching for a particular book or ebook. I’m jumping through hoops making sure that my books are available through many channels, all in the hope that people will seek the books out and buy them. There’s the needle-in-a-haystack problem, something metadata and the right keywords were supposed to solve, but now there’s a humongous haystack that keeps discoverability difficult. AI search that adds context derived from the actual content of the book instead of relying just on metadata is the next great hope, but really, the search engines and social platforms want to sell ads, promising discoverability for a price.

Who knew that I wasn’t going to become rich by writing fiction?!

Well, as things stand today, my goal is to sell enough books to more or less cover my costs, so that my modest retirement funds don’t too rapidly disappear. And I haven’t yet included audiobooks to the equation, not because audiobooks are a bad idea, but because the main platform, Audible, is now owned by Amazon, and the whole royalty setup is downright terrible for authors. Also, I’m still annoyed that most people seem to like audiobooks more than print or ebooks, and, yes, I’m still sulking.

The post The World of Amazon Publishing and the Hoops a Publisher Jumps Through to Participate in the World of Amazon Publishing first appeared on David Guenette.

There are many Americans who are retired or approaching retirement who have been fortunate enough to have accrued healthy retirement savings. Unfortunately, there are many more Americans who have only very meager retirement savings or none at all, but that is another story; these are not the people being discussed in this post.

I’m talking about the group of people who understand that the world needs to radically reduce carbon emissions as quickly as possible in order to keep climate change consequences from being worse. I’m talking about people who have retirement funds in investment instruments beyond their Social Security or pension. In other words, I’m talking about the “money-where-the-mouth-is” group. I’ve gotten curious about what’s out there financial-instrument-wise for such a person, mythological or otherwise.

Yes, god help me, I’ve decided to look into this.

The “Date of Death” Metric

I’m at that stage of life where retirement fund amounts and performance stand in as the “date of death” metric, where one adds up all assets and subtracts liabilities to determine how many years a person can live at their previously fixed level of annual spending. For example, if a person has $500,000 in retirement funds and $21,000 is Social Security, and has an annual budget of $42,000, then one would have 23.8 years to afford to live, as follows:

• $42,000 (overall annual spending budget) minus $21,000 (annual income through Social Security) equals $21,000, which is the annual addition annual income needed beyond Social Security to meet the living budget.
• $500,000 (retirement assets) divided by $21,000 (annual income needed beyond Social Security to meet the spending budget) equals 23.8.
• Add 23.8 to your current age (example, 70) and 93.8 years of age is when you’ll no longer be able to afford to live, hence “date of death.”

I’m not a financial planner, but I know how to make a budget that subtracts expenses from income (e.g., Social Security), which then tells me how much supplemental money I require from my retirement assets. I’m not a financial planner, and I know that some people have more complicated sources of income than just Social Security (e.g., pensions and annuities); I also know that most common retirement funds are based in markets that have returns that rise and drop, whether equity stocks or mutual funds or other investment arrangements (I’m leaving the issue of bonds out of this because, well, I’m not a financial planner). If, in the above example, the $500,000 in retirement mutual funds drops by half–because, say, of an alien invasion or AI bubble collapse—then the “date of death” for the proverbial 70-year-old would be 81.9 years of age. Eighty-two years of age doesn’t feel all that old to me or my peers. I’m reminded of the “Bring out your Dead” scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “I’m not dead yet.”

Of course, if markets drop precipitously and significantly, there are larger problems afoot, so the example above is less a real-world scare tactic than an effort to keep the example’s math easy. I’m not a financial planner, but even I know that the simple math above doesn’t take into account various complicating factors such as taxes. The example above also assumes little rise in the cost of living (ha!) or whether the market will see neutral growth, negative growth, or positive investment growth. Obviously, market performance or alternative financial instruments for retirement funds that better buffer the retiree from market volatility, and a whole bunch more considerations exist, which is why one pays for a financial planner’s service and doesn’t consult me. Nevertheless, none of this is exactly rocket science, and the general argument outlined in this post holds.

How Many Well-off Retirees Are There?

Who are well-off retirees? I am talking about the modest chunk of American retirees who have $500,000 or $250,000 or $1,000,000. Here’s what Google’s AI Overview reports:

Approximately 7% to 9% of Americans have saved $500,000 or more for retirement. While this figure is higher among older age groups, it remains relatively rare, as 58.4% of Americans have less than $10,000 saved, and the median retirement savings for those aged 55–64 is only $185,000. 

Retirement Savings Breakdown

• • $500,000+ Range:About 4% of Americans have $500,000–$999,999, while roughly 3% to 4.6% have $1 million or more.
  • Households with Savings:Among U.S. households with any retirement account assets, roughly 9% have hit the $500,000 mark.
  • Median vs. Average:While average balances might look higher, the median (middle) value is much lower, indicating many people have far less
  • Age Factor:According to this Federal Reserve data analysis from NerdWallet, median savings for ages 65–74 is $200,000, while the average savings is over $600,000, highlighting that a large portion of the wealth is held by a minority of savers. 

While $500,000 is a significant milestone, it falls below the estimated $1.28 million to $1.46 million many Americans believe they need for a comfortable retirement. 

More specifically, I’m talking about the subset of retirees with such resources who might consider doing something with those retirement funds to support, speed up, and otherwise make it more likely that the transition to clean energy happens sooner and better. If I use the more modest 7% of Americans with median retirement savings of $500,000 or more, the number is 23.9 million people. Is there a percentage of this percentage who are interested in shifting their savings into investment instruments that support the clean energy transition? I’m not talking donations, but putting their retirement savings to work in financial instruments (e.g., IRA mutual funds) doing the important work of combatting climate change and building a smarter world of energy.

What kind of money are we talking about? Google AI does what it is good at (although not infallible), which is finding and aggregating information it’s prompted to collect. Here’s the Google Search AI Summary for the query “What is the size of investment instruments of Americans in 2025?”

As of late 2025, U.S. retirement assets totaled $49.1 trillion, with $19.2 trillion in IRAs and $14.2 trillion in defined contribution plans (like 401(k)s). Households favored stocks (25%), mutual funds (13%), crypto (10%), and bonds (8%), with 64% of Americans likely to invest and 56.4% owning mutual funds/ETFs.

Size and Composition of Investment Instruments (2025)

• • Retirement Assets: Totaled $49.1 trillion in Q4 2025.
  • Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs): $19.2 trillion.
  • Defined Contribution Plans (401k/403b/457/TSP): $14.2 trillion.
  • Mutual Funds: Represent $14.7 trillion in IRAs and DC plans (44% of total).
  • Average Portfolio Composition: Stocks (25%), Mutual Funds (13%), Cryptocurrencies (10%), Bonds (8%), and alternatives like private equity/hedge funds.]

Key Findings on 2025 Investment Landscape

• • Robust Growth: Assets under management for advisors grew to $144.6 trillion in 2024, with continued strong market conditions leading into 2025.
  • Capital Gains: Average net capital gains for applicable tax returns varied by state, with investors seeking high returns in 2025.
  • Commercial Real Estate: 70% of investors planned to buy more assets in 2025, with multifamily and industrial being preferred sectors.

How Much Retirement Money Could Be Invested in Clean Tech?

Here’s the thought experiment (a phrase I love, because it is a pretentious way of saying “thinking”): Let’s say that of these 23.9 million Americans half have no interest in shifting their retirement funds to fossil-fuels-free or clean-tech-focused funds, keeping in mind the highly polarized society we’re living in. That leaves 12 million people. If each of the 12 million people transfer $1000 into non-fossil fuels/clean energy funds, that is $12 billion. Now let’s say these 12 million people shift half of their retirement portfolio ($500,000 medium amount divided by 2=$250,000), that’s $2.75 trillion shifted over to non-fossil-fuels-free clean tech portfolios.

And then there’s the answer, according to Google replying to “How much money got invested in clean tech in 2025?” which resulted in a total of $2.3 trillion:

Global investment in clean energy technology reached a record high of $2.3 trillion in 2025, marking an 8% increase over the previous year despite policy and trade challenges. Key investments included $893 billion in electrified transport, $690 billion in renewable energy, and $483 billion in power grids, according to BloombergNEF.

Key 2025 Investment Highlights:

• • Top Markets: China remained the largest market with $800 billion invested (despite a 4% dip), followed by the U.S. at $738 billion (up 3.5%), and the EU with $455 billion.
  • Growth Leaders: India experienced rapid growth, with a 46% increase to $101 billion.
  • Sector Breakdown: Electrified transport led total investment, while investment in stationary battery storage grew significantly to $66 billion.
  • Manufacturing Slowdown: Global manufacturing investment in clean tech dropped as a result of domestic overcapacity, particularly in China.

While BloombergNEF reported $2.3 trillion, the Clean Investment Monitor indicated a figure of $1.96 trillion, covering manufacturing and deployment, highlighting a shift toward more moderate growth compared to prior years.

So, if half the retirees with good retirement funds put those funds into clean energy financial investment instruments, there could be a doubling or more of money focused on clean energy. In theory, this cohort could retire themselves into a doubling of market efforts to make clean energy happen. Of course, some number of the 11 million retirement investing Americans may already be involved in non-fossil fuel/clean tech investments. Again, let’s stress that we’re not talking donations, but shifting the retirement savings already in investment instruments to non-fossil fuel/clean tech investment instruments doing the important work of combatting climate change and building a smarter world of energy.

Has the clean tech and climate change world been talking enough about what many of us can be doing to hurry along the better world? Well, I’m not a financial advisor, but I’ll say “No.”

Fossil Free Funds and Clean Tech Funds

How does one go about discovering in a confident manner, what investment funds are likely more effective for encouraging the dual outcomes of investing in clean energy and keeping one’s “date of death” from dwindling close?

Well, you can always ask Google to “Identify the best performing non-fossil fuel mutual funds. Identify the best performing clean tech mutual funds. Base this on returns over the last five years. Include the evaluation of how strict the fossil fuel exclusion is, including with funds that may include financial institutions that fund fossil fuel.” Here’s the answer I got recently (by the way, you’re likely to get different results depending on when you ask, or, possibly, the mood of Google; remember, I am not a financial advisor, nor is Google):

The following funds are identified as the best performers over the last five years (as of May 2026), categorized by strategy.

TOP PERFORMING BROAD MARKET NON-FOSSIL FUEL FUNDS [1]

These funds invest in the broader market (tech, healthcare, finance) while excluding fossil fuel producers. They have generally outperformed pure “clean energy” sector funds over the last five years due to the strength of the broader market. [1, 2, 3, 4]

1. 1. Vanguard FTSE Social Index Fund (VFTAX) [1]

• • 5-Year Annualized Return: ~13.2% (Cumulative ~86%)
  • Performance: This is likely the highest-performing “sustainable” fund accessible to most investors, driven by heavy weightings in large-cap tech stocks like NVIDIA, Apple, and Microsoft.
  • Strictness & Financial Exposure: Low Strictness on Finance. While this fund strictly excludes companies with fossil fuel reserves (like Exxon or Chevron), it does not exclude financial institutions that fund the fossil fuel industry.
    • Evidence: As of 2026, it holds significant stakes in JPMorgan Chase (1.65%) and Bank of America (0.68%), both of which are top funders of fossil fuel expansion. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

1. 2. Green Century Equity Fund (GCEQX)

• • 5-Year Annualized Return: +11.07%
  • Performance: This fund has delivered strong double-digit returns, significantly outperforming its “Balanced” counterpart. It tracks a customized index of sustainable companies.
  • Strictness & Financial Exposure: Highest Strictness. This fund is marketed as a “truly fossil-fuel-free” option. It excludes exploration, extraction, processing, and utilities that burn coal.
    • Differentiation: Unlike Vanguard, Green Century uses shareholder advocacy to pressure companies (including banks) to stop funding climate change. It is the primary option for investors seeking to minimize all association with the industry. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

1. 3. Parnassus Core Equity Fund (PRBLX)

• • 5-Year Annualized Return: +9.66%
  • Performance: A long-time leader in ESG investing, though it has slightly lagged the S&P 500 and Vanguard’s passive index over the last 5 years.
  • Strictness & Financial Exposure: Parnassus excludes companies generating >10% of revenue from fossil fuel extraction. However, it may invest in companies that use fossil fuel energy and does not have a blanket exclusion on diversified banks. [1, 2, 3, 4]

TOP PERFORMING CLEAN TECH/CLEAN ENERGY MUTUAL FUNDS

These funds focus specifically on the energy transition (wind, solar, batteries, efficiency). The sector has faced significant volatility recently, making the top performer an outlier. [1, 2, 3, 4]

1. 1. Fidelity Environment and Alternative Energy Fund (FSLEX)

• • 5-Year Annualized Return: +11.65%
  • Performance: This is the best-performing clean energy fund It has significantly outperformed popular ETFs like ICLN.
  • Why it Won: It is actively managed and takes a broader view of “environmental solutions.”
  • Strictness: While focused on clean energy, it is not a “purist” fund. It has recently held companies like Siemens Energy and GE Vernova (gas turbine manufacturers) because they are critical to grid efficiency and the energy transition, even though they service natural gas infrastructure. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

1. 2. Calvert Global Energy Solutions Fund (CAEIX)

• • 5-Year Annualized Return: +4.05%
  • Performance: Positive but modest returns. It holds a “Gold” medalist rating from Morningstar for its process but has lagged behind the broader market. [1, 2, 3]

1. 3. Popular ETFs (Underperformers)

Note: These passive funds suffered from the post-2021 deflation in clean tech valuations, whereas the actively managed Fidelity fund avoided the worst of the drawdown. [1, 2]

• • iShares Global Clean Energy ETF (ICLN): +1.92%
  • First Trust Nasdaq Clean Edge Green Energy (QCLN): -1.57% annualized (Negative return).

• • For the highest raw return, Vanguard (VFTAX) is the winner, but you will own shares in the world’s largest fossil fuel financiers.
  • For the best performing strict option, Green Century Equity (GCEQX) offers the strongest combination of a ~11% return and a “fossil free” mandate that actively addresses the banking sector’s role in climate change.
  • For clean technology exposure, Fidelity (FSLEX) is the only fund in this category that has delivered double-digit annualized returns over this period. [1]

Or, of course, you can always do the work yourself or use a financial planner (which I am not). Useful green investment funds information resources include Fossil Free Funds for analyzing carbon exposure, Morningstar for sustainable fund ratings, and Green America for curated lists of environmental mutual funds and ETFs. These platforms help identify options that avoid fossil fuels and focus on clean energy, sustainability, and ESG criteria.

Key Information Resources for Green Investing

• Fossil Free Funds: A premier tool for searching mutual funds and ETFs to analyze fossil fuel exposure and check the carbon footprint of portfolios.
• Morningstar: Provides comprehensive analysis, performance rankings, and lists of the best sustainable funds and ETFs to buy.
• Green America: Offers a guide to green mutual funds and ETFs that specifically avoid fossil fuels and focus on environmental solutions.
• Green Century Funds: Provides resources on fossil fuel-free investing, shareholder advocacy, and sustainable investment strategies.
• S. News & World Report: Regularly publishes lists of top-performing socially responsible funds and green stocks.

Top-Rated Green Funds and ETFs (As of 2025-2026)

• Fossil-Free Focused: Etho Capital Climate Leadership U.S. ETF, Green Century Funds.
• Clean Energy & Environmental: iShares Global Clean Energy ETF (ICLN), Invesco Solar ETF (TAN), Impax Global Environmental Markets Fund.
• Sustainable Broad Market: Vanguard ESG U.S. Stock ETF, Sphere 500 Climate Fund, Fidelity U.S. Sustainability Index Fund.

Key Considerations

• Shareholder Advocacy: Some funds (e.g., Green Century) actively urge companies to improve environmental policies.
• Expense Ratios: Look for competitive fees; the Fidelity U.S. Sustainability Index Fund (FITLX) has a low expense ratio of 0.11%.
• Performance: Sustainable funds can outperform traditional funds, with some specialized funds providing high returns in 2025 and 2026.

I See Your Confusion and I Raise Your Awareness

So, you want to help push the transition to clean energy forward. You want to do your part to reduce the consequences of climate change. One way is to put your retirement savings to work within financial instruments like mutual fund IRAs. Personally, having to pay attention to this sort of thing makes me want to pull my own head off, but then I’m not a financial planner, remember?

On the other hand, I do want to encourage clean energy in order to help reduce the present and future challenges of climate change, so I’m making the effort. I’m also one of those 11 million Americans with a chunk of savings for retirement, and while my accounts are modest compared to many, it’s unseemly to think that I’m less fortunate than them, with the far better way to think is that I’m more fortunate than a big majority of Americans to have such resources. An even better way to think of these retirement resources is that I can put my money where my mouth is, and that means putting what retirement resources I have into the market in such a way as to encourage the direction I want to see the world take.

This seems like a good bet to me.

The post Clean Tech/Fossil-Free Funds Can Make A Difference first appeared on David Guenette.