These costs are not paid by the fossil fuel industry.

Sure, if the fossil fuel industry had to cover the liability of their products negative consequences, the price of fossil fuel would be higher. Instead, the costs are hidden, even excused by regulatory agencies so that the industry does not have to account for social, environmental, or systemic costs otherwise offloaded onto the public.

Do you know how expensive climate change is today? Do you know how much more expensive climate change will get in a decade, a half-century, a century? Best start that special savings account!

Many Industries Account for the Externalized Costs

Despite the fossil fuel industry having started a century and a half ago, Big Oil is still getting a lot of sweetheart deals. What’s interesting is how few other industries manage to get their own sweetheart deals. The chart below breaks out several major industries where the external costs are part of the cost of business.

The awful part of the story is that other industries have their lobbyists and champions (vassals?) in Congress and the White House, and that with the rise of dark money schemes (well before Citizens United, by the way—read Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, from 2016 if you’re sleeping at night), the trend has been to loosen regulations for many industries. The net effect is to increase these industries’ profits, but the costs associated with the industries don’t go away. These costs simply get passed on, typically indirectly and therefore under the radar, but the costs are still there. The fossil fuel industry remains the reigning queen of significant cost passed on—Shhh!—to everyone else.

Still, the trend in Washington these days would have more and more industries join that club. Reducing regulations is one main tool. Cancelling laws, another; think about the consequence of dropping the Glass-Steagall Act in relation to the 2008 crash.

We’re Paying for Carbon… Unless You’re a Shareholder

How much will fossil fuel pollution and the consequences of climate change cost the world in 2025, 2050, and 2100? You’ll find all sorts and ranges of numbers answering this question, but the thing these numbers have in common is that they’re huge. Here’s an AI Overview for this question:

The global economic cost of climate change and fossil fuel pollution is projected to reach tens of trillions of dollars annually, rapidly compounding over the coming decades. According to major macroeconomic climate studies (such as those by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Network for Greening the Financial System), the estimated damages are broken down as follows:

• • 2025: $2 trillion to $4 trillion in annual damages. By 2025, the world is already experiencing a permanent GDP reduction of roughly 1% to 3% compared to a baseline economy without climate change, driven by intensified extreme weather and health costs from fossil fuel emissions.
  • 2050: $38 trillion in annual damages. Experts project a 19% to 20% reduction in global GDP by mid-century regardless of aggressive future emission cuts, as past emissions have already locked in these near-term economic shocks.
  • 2100: $100 trillion to $150+ trillion in annual damages. If global temperatures rise by 3°C or more, the world faces a staggering 50% or greater permanent drop in global GDP, with certain regions experiencing near-total economic collapse.

Key Economic Impact Drivers

The total cost is a combination of direct climate impacts and the hidden social costs of burning fossil fuels:

• • Agricultural Collapse: Drastic declines in crop yields due to shifting weather patterns, severe droughts, and desertification.
  • Infrastructure Destruction: Trillions required to rebuild or relocate coastal cities due to rising sea levels, alongside damage to roads, grids, and bridges from extreme storms.
  • Health and Pollution Costs: Millions of premature deaths annually from air pollution and heatwaves, leading to lost labor productivity and overwhelmed healthcare systems.
  • Labor Productivity Loss: Extreme heat limits safe working hours, particularly in agriculture, construction, and manufacturing.

When you don’t have to cover all the costs of your product, you increase profit. When you don’t have to cover all the costs of your product, you can sell your product for less. Fossil fuels seem economically competitive with clean energy, but Big Oil is running a cheat. For all the complaining about subsidies for clean energy (much of which has also been crushed by President Big Oil Stooge), that money is a tiny fraction relative to the avoided costs the fossil fuel industry enjoys. You know who doesn’t get to enjoy these avoided costs? The rest of us—indeed, the world—because the costs of pollution sickening and killing people and the costs of high carbon emissions changing our world’s climate for the worse can’t be avoided.

It isn’t a matter of whether we should have a price on carbon. We’re already paying it.

The post The Truth About Carbon Pricing first appeared on David Guenette.

Here’s a quick post about my guest blog entry and long essay appearing in ClimateCultures, where I discuss what should define climate fiction. Big surprise: I also talk about The Steep Climes Quartet, my literary climate fiction series.

What is ClimateCultures?

“Creative Responses to Our Nature & Climate Predicaments”

ClimateCultures is an online space that Mark Goldthorpe launched in 2017 for creative minds to share responses to our ecological and climate predicaments .“We are a growing network of artists, researchers and curators across the UK and around the world working across many practices, disciplines and spaces,” is how he describes the effort.

Who’s involved? ClimateCultures casts widely, including within the community of novelists, short story writers, performers, poets, playwrights, painters, composers, illustrators, photographers, filmmakers, sculptors, designers, digital artists, multimedia artists, gallery owners, online curators, creative producers, cultural activists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, geographers, environmental technologists, and climate researchers. Designed as an online space for creative minds to share responses to our ecological and climate predicaments. ClimateCultures is an approach to building creative conversations between and beyond different appreciations of what these predicaments mean, and of what they offer us as ways forward. It’s also a continuation of some of Goldthorpe’s encounters when working with the charity TippingPoint a few years back, where he helped bring artists and scientists together for creative climate change events.

Here’s more about ClimateCultures and Goldthorpe’s motivation in creating the publication and group, taken from the site’s “Welcome” page:

I’d always been interested in artistic responses to the problems but this was my first deep exposure to such a number and range of perspectives, enquiries and works-in-progress. Those events left a strong impression — with me, and with the artists and scientists who took part. ClimateCultures builds on this legacy, exploring the power of an environmental imagination to help us develop a sense of agency in challenging times, as I discuss in a short article I wrote in February 2019.

The post I’m in ClimateCultures Talking about Climate Fiction first appeared on David Guenette.

Yeah, I know. It is a losing game to push back against one professional or editorial review, especially when there are several others that are glowing, or at least glowing-adjacent. But let’s look at the bigger issue behind my hurt feelings. I can always cry another time.

An editorial review means that the book will get reviewed without foregone conclusions, unlike, in all probability, the Amazon review you extort from your mother. An author knows going into an editorial review that it could come up sevens or snake eyes or somewhere in between. You roll the dice and take your chances. (See the recent post Reviewing Reviews, or The Strange Little Business of Feeding the Marketing of Novels for more on this topic.)

A fourth editorial review of Over Brooklyn Hills came from IndieReader, and that review was ambivalent about the book. The problem was that Over Brooklyn Hills got reviewed as an Action/Adventure title because “Literary Climate Fiction” was not a category option when submitting the book for a review. I guess I should have chosen the “literary fiction” category, but maybe I was too nervous imagining the legions of writing program MFAs overwhelming that category. Unfortunately for the reviewer, who seemed eager to review an Action/Adventure novel, Over Brooklyn Hills is not an action/adventure genre title, even if it has some snappy plotlines. The book also has a lot of characters who are deeply drawn, which the reviewer found distracting as she looked for the action and the adventure. Well, live and learn, right?

Categorically, “Literary Fiction” is Left in the Cold

Sometimes a book gets put into an inappropriate category—an error that can be, in the case above, attributed to the author. Sometimes a book ends up in front of the wrong reviewer because the categories available during the review submission process don’t include the right categories and the book is thought to be one type of book by the reviewer, while intended to be a different type of book by the author.

The lesson to learn here is to be careful to select the right category for the book submitted for review. Unfortunately, there’s no such category for “literary climate fiction,” and that applies not only to book review platforms, but to basic BISAC:

BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) is the US publishing industry standard used to categorize books by topic and genre. These alphanumeric codes determine where books are physically shelved in stores and how they are indexed in online retailer databases like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The BISAC system is maintained by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and encompasses over 50 major categories and nearly 6,000 individual subject codes.

Honest, I looked. Between “FIC004000 FICTION/Classics” and “FIC043000 FICTION/Coming of Age,” there’s no “FICTION/Climate.”

480 Sub-categories Under “Fiction” and “Literary” Stands Alone

I’d also point out the BISAC has about 480 sub-categories under “Fiction” and many of these have sub-categories that have their own sub-categories and sometime sub-sub categories; one example: “FIC027440 FICTION/Romance/Paranormal(See a/Witches”). “Fiction/Science Fiction” has eighteen sub-categories; “Fiction/Thrillers” has sixteen; “Fiction/Mystery & Detective has twenty, with seven sub (sub) categories under “Fiction/Mysteries & Detective/Cozy.” You can have a mystery & detective novel that is “Cozy” generally or focused on animals; books, bookstores & libraries; crafts; culinary; holidays & vacation; and paranormal.

There is one “literary” subcategory under “Fiction.” One stinking top-level category for “Fiction/Literary.” No subcategories, no sub-sub categories.

Someone once mentioned to me that life was unfair. Now I know what they were talking about.

The post There Can Be a Tax on Taxonomical Confusion first appeared on David Guenette.

Over Brooklyn Hills has been garnering pretty good reviews, as I’ve written here, here, and here. I describe this book as “Literary Climate Fiction,” which may be of little utility in the ongoing development of fiction taxonomies, but it should suggest the book is not a hyper-genre formula of action and plot but rather a work of “storytelling that prioritizes character development, psychological depth, and thematic exploration over plot-driven action.” Feel free to look up your own definition of “literary fiction” on the web and see if I’m wrong.

One of the aims of The Steep Climes Quartet is to write away from the easy tropes of apocalypse and instead attempt to imagine people’s reactions to the odd and pressing conditions collectively known as climate change. But how do you get your book reviewed—or, even, found—if there’s not widely applied category for it?

The Editorial Review Biz

An author wants to have the world say something about a published book. Reviews can help a book but a lack of reviews will hurt a book. Self-publishers know it. Big trade publishers know it. Even the neophyte struggling with a first book on KDP knows it.

Basically, the trade book business is largely sold through social media these days, and that’s true even for the big boys. If a book shows up on Amazon and there are no Amazon reviews of it, the chances of getting the browser to buy the book when it looks like no one else has is slim to none. If you have editorial reviews such as Publishers’ Weekly, The New York Times, or Kirkus, that’s a big help. Even book blurbs help, that odd practice of saying far too little about a book by someone who carries reputational value or relevant association, encouraging people to believe the book being considered for purchase may, in fact, be a worthwhile bet. But a book will need the best editorial accolades to escape the black spot of no or few customer reviews. Frankly, a book without reviews—editorial and customer—looks downright naked, just sitting there shivering, waiting to get picked up for Christmas Holiday with all the luggage packed, but no one is coming, boo-hoo.

Remember crowd-sourcing? That’s what Amazon customer reviews are, and Goodread’s, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and BookBub, to name only some. In theory, such customer reviews help the would-be book buyer lessen the anxiety of being played the fool. Such reviews provide the affirmation of the crowd, but as many readers discover, customer reviews are written by all sorts of readers and one reader’s literary treasure is another reader’s genre trash. You might also keep in mind that “crowd-sourcing,” like the social media platforms that engender it, is falling into enshittification, and these days typically in the form of grade inflation where most books or products seem to have close high scores that can, with infuriating frequency, not match your actual experience with the book or product. These days, the crowds may be saying less than you think, and the sourcing more the result of algorithms and platform customer management, but let’s leave that for another day.

Still, it’s a weird number game. The necessary numbers of customer reviews vary across opinions, and the presence of other types of affirmations factor in too. You have the coveted The New York Times Best-Seller flag? Terrific. Pulitzer, Booker, Calidcott, or any of the other big literature awards? Hurray! Publishers Weekly tells the world that your book is brilliant? Wonderful. The problem is that the main stream validators of books like Publishers Weekly can only review so many books and the chances of your book getting a slot is slim to none, especially if you lack the backing of one of the major trade publishers. What’s rising to meet the needs of the vast majority of books left standing in the cold is the editorial review business.

The landscape of editorial reviews is confusing. Publishers Weekly can also review your book for a fee, but even here the magazine’s bandwidth remains small, so Booklife, a part of the Publisher Weekly enterprise, was created and is designed to provide editorial reviews for a fee—somewhere, typically, in the $400-$500 range—and the volume of reviews—the bandwith—is much larger than the original Publishers Weekly pipeline. Kirkus is another such service, on par, some say, with Publisher Weekly reviews, but with a bigger pipeline for fee-based reviews. Some similar traditional review services focus on other segments of book publishing, such as Foreword Reviews, for indie and university presses; Library Journal, which is sometimes described as essential for getting your book in front of library acquisition buyers; and Booklist, which is published by the American Library Association and, not surprisingly, aimed at library collection development librarians and educators.

There’s been something of a complementary explosion in the number of these services as self-publishing has exploded. There’s Independent Book Review, Self-Publishing Review, Book Sirens, IndieAuthors, Booksprout, NetGalley, BlueInk, Book Raid, BookBub, Books Go Social, and the list goes on. Many of these review services not only provide reviews but also marketing and promotion addenda including awards and badge displays, social media promotion packages, ARC (advanced reader copy) distribution management, and interview and podcast features. Many of these organizations have feeder mechanisms to editorial and book production services, too. And an author can always look up on Reedsy for any and all such services from independent contractors.

About Those Amazon Reviews

As mentioned earlier, many online potential book buyers look to online reviews whatever the sales channel. What I didn’t mention before—mostly because it’s an indisputable fact—is that Amazon is the largest online bookseller, and actually the largest bookseller online or off, which is why I’m talking about Amazon customer reviews.

One reason why customer reviews are important for online sales is that the informational feedback is thin online, unlike the experience in a physical bookstore where the potential book buyer has the book in hand. Ironically, online bookstores often have far more information about the book than a would-be buyer would see in the real-life experience standing among the shelves, but how many people even know about Amazon’s Author-Plus pages that a publisher or author can provide about any particular book, and Amazon also provides the infrastructure for what they call A+ Content, another specific book-related pile of all kinds of information about the book in question. Heck, it looks like a lot of publishers and authors remain ignorant about these additional information features, but then no one ever said Amazon makes marketing books easy.

On the other hand, the visceral experience of holding a physical book goes a long way for informing potential buyers about the book being held. Heft, graphics, book cover copy, frontmatter, and, of course, the ability to thumb through the pages and take a gander at the actual writing. Sure, you can virtually do much of this online too, although the available “Read Me” sample is constrained to publisher-selected spots through the book, and, often, simply the frontmatter and first chapter. Besides, in the physical world there’s that new book smell and that bookstore employee you can’t help thinking will conclude you’re a bum if you don’t buy something.

But on Amazon a book can look awfully lonesome without an army of customer reviews. There are some services that provide customer reviews for fee, and what proud papa of a brand new novel doesn’t want to advantage his or her new book? There’s a company called Book Award Pro that has recently added such a service, along with its bread-and-butter offerings of access to book award databases and the ability—for a fee—to submit your new darling novel to such award opportunities, and let me tell you, there are many, many such opportunities, for good or ill.

Their Amazon review program is tempting, especially if you don’t have a big publisher with a solid PR and promotion department behind you, or if you don’t come from a particularly large family or hold solid blackmail threats against the whole church choir.

And, hey, I didn’t want to see Over Brooklyn Hills looking naked, right?

So I tried the Book Award Pro Amazon customer review service out. I wasn’t optimistic, plus I hate spending money. The service is relatively inexpensive and part of the fee goes toward the reviewer buying the ebook version, a nice little sales pop, although one that makes no economic sense in and of itself. But, indeed, the Amazon customer reviews are “verified purchase” reviews, and thus kosher. In fact, this is one of the attractive elements of this specific service—it  won’t run you foul of Amazon’s review policies that can end up getting you kicked off the platform if you get caught gaming the customer reviews, such as by creating a bot to crank them out. The all-knowing algorithm, well, knows all, so I wouldn’t be surprised that the Book Award Pro customer review service ends up triggering a negative reviews review, especially if the company doesn’t up its standards.

My review of the Book Award Pro Amazon customer review service is that it is awful. In order to check it out I spent $199 for three such reviews and all three reviews focused on the same one character in the identically long two-sentence reviews. Mind you, the character they all focus on is a great character, but only one storyline of many, and so the reviews don’t give a good sense of the book overall. And then there is the problem of the reviewers all pretty much saying the same thing, making me wonder if the short reviews may very well have been AI-generated by the very same AI, and I can’t get the image out of my mind of a printer in a dark room somewhere cranking them out in sequence. I don’t know if the three reviews are AI generated, and my suspicion that one person did all three reviews has no evidence, but let me repeat, Book Award Pro’s Amazon customer reviews service is awful.

I’m sticking with the old-fashioned organic customer reviews, thanks.

To Publish is to Suffer

As with so many other tempting shortcuts to fame and fortune, the truth is that selling copies of a novel these days is hard. The signal-to-noise problem is excruciatingly difficult to overcome, there being all the noise of some three-to-four million trade books published each year. There’s some talk these days that print fiction reading may be in an all-time slump, or maybe it is book reading overall that happens less and less. Sure, I’ll produce audiobook versions of The Steep Climes Quartet series, since everyone tells me that this is the thing to do, but the production will be touched by resentment from this pro-text guy. I’ll try my best to hide my true feelings about audiobooks.

What purportedly sells are romances, thrillers, and horror, and most of such books are what I call hyper-genre that share the common traits of low character-to-action ratio. Or is that a shallow character-to bodice-ripping ratio? It’s all a matter of taste, said the lady as she kissed the cow (I’m still in search of the source of the second half of this cliché, but maybe my father came up with this addendum.)

As it so happens, sales of Over Brooklyn Hills are picking up despite not being a hyper genre work, but I’ll be hundreds of book sales short of making expenses back for a while and as likely as not, ever. After all, putting out a novel takes money—sure, not on the scale of producing an album or movie—but editors and proofreaders need paying and editorial reviews are rarely for free, especially for someone occupying my level of Dante’s book authorship Inferno.

It turns out that Over Brooklyn Hills has already won an award:

We are proud to present you with the Literary Titan Book Award. Following the recent review of your book through our Book Review Service, it was automatically entered into our Literary Book Award competition. Your book deserves extraordinary praise, and we are proud to acknowledge your hard work, dedication, and writing talent. Start telling the world that you’re an award-winning author because we will be!

You will find the book award image attached to this email. Display it proudly on your book’s cover or anywhere else that you want to display it.

Well, thanks, and better than a sharp stick in the eye, that’s for sure, and if this helps more people read my work, that’s great. One of the hellish aspects of writing is the author’s desire to see the work out and about in the world and the typical frustration of that desire and don’t let anyone tell you different. Sure, the driving force of writing must be the pleasure derived through the act of writing, but a writer having readers is kind of crucial too.

At least that’s what those hundreds of editing and publishing and marketing service companies, including reviewer and awards services, tell me they can help me with, for a price.

The post Reviewing Reviews, or The Strange Little Business of Feeding the Marketing of Novels 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 solid 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 crisis. Likewise, I’m not a big fan of far-future stories that show mankind changed in response to the climate crisis, while the stories don’t bother to do the work of showing how the change comes about.

Let’s Set the Stage

Climate change is an astonishing event in our human culture. We have altered the climate of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and have already locked in more changes to the climate over the next many centuries. The reasons for our alteration of fundamental Earth systems make sense in that the fossil fuel-based energy provided to societies and their economies has pushed human development forward even as, supported by the energy abundance, the population numbers have exploded. The combination of huge energy use and ever-larger population numbers over the last two hundred years is the mechanism behind climate change.

It is an impressive achievement, really.

The problem is that the resulting change in the Earth’s climate is itself impressive, but darkly so, since we’re altering the stable climate of the last 10,000 years that supported the dominance of humans. The benefits of such a stable climate are now disappearing, increasingly being replaced by significant disadvantages. We’ve exhausted our species’ advantage from burning fossil fuels to power growth and population. In fact, we find ourselves facing a future that presents growing disadvantages for us in the form of horrendous heat waves, devastating deluges, deadly droughts, surging seas, damning diseases, and massive meteorological disasters.

Another important point to keep in mind is that we’ve known of these consequences for many decades. There’s a report titled The Greenhouse Effect, produced by J.F. Black, Scientific Advisor, Products Research Division, Exxon Research and Engineering Company, dated June 6, 1978. This report closely matches—scarily so—the rises in average global temperatures we’re now seeing and expect to see going forward. This is hardly the first such understanding of the greenhouse gas/global warming effect concluded by the fossil fuel corporations themselves in studies starting back nearly three-quarters of a century ago.

In fact, there are a shocking number of earlier studies on greenhouse gases and warming that began in the 1820s with Joseph Fourier identifying the atmosphere’s heat-trapping “greenhouse effect.” This was followed by Eunice Foote’s (1850s) experiments showing CO2’s powerful heat absorption, and John Tyndall’s (1859) confirmation of gases like CO2 and water vapor absorbing infrared heat. In 1896, Svante Arrhenius first calculated that human CO2 emissions could significantly raise Earth’s temperature, linking industrial activity to climate change, a concept later refined by Charles Keeling’s (1950s-60s) precise CO2 measurements.

Look up “Early 20th century newspaper stories about burning coal and the greenhouse effect.” Here’s the AI Search Summary you’ll find (I’ve left the links live):

Early 20th-century newspapers, notably in 1912, published short, syndicated articles linking coal combustion to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and future global warming. These reports, such as a famous August 1912 piece, accurately predicted that burning coal would act as a “blanket” to raise Earth’s temperature within a few centuries. [1, 2, 3]

Key Historical Clippings

• • 1912 Climate Change Article: Originally published in March 1912 in Popular Mechanics, and later in Australian/New Zealand newspapers (e.g., The Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal and Rodney and Otamatea Times) in August 1912, this report was titled “Coal Consumption Affecting Climate” or similar.
  • What it Stated: The 67-word article noted that furnaces were burning 2 billion tons of coal annually, adding roughly 7 million tons of CO2 to the atmosphere yearly. It explained that this CO2 acts as a “blanket” that raises temperature, predicting, “This effect may be considerable in a few centuries”.
  • Scientific Context: This was not the first instance of such reporting. It followed pioneering work by scientists like Svante Arrhenius, who predicted this effect in 1896, and earlier studies by H.A. Phillips in 1882. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

Keep in mind that a number of the big fossil fuel corporations had commissioned their own studies in the 1970s and 1980s, although we don’t know the exact count, and probably won’t until the discovery phases of liability cases against the fossil fuel corporations take place and are made public. Unless, of course, SCOTUS rules that fossil fuel companies are protected against liability lawsuits, and remember, SCOTUS has done this for the gun companies.

Climate Change is a Fantastic Story in the Real World

A recent Substack post in Climate Fiction Writers League, “Imagination, Mythology, and the Return to Earth, by Steve Stine, author of I, Enoch, May 05, 2026, is unfortunately typical of what is found in this Substack. The intro to the post is as follows:

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 first thing that set me off is Stine’s use of the manned moon mission as an example of the age of science, setting Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon in opposition to mythic storytelling. “And yet, what we gained that day in the annals of space exploration, we lost in the age-old story-telling traditions that bestowed upon the moon a mythic quality. For countless generations and throughout the world, the moon played a lead role in shaping cultures, aligning belief systems, and influencing human behavior.”

Good to know, I guess. It turns out that the moon is made of straw, not cheese, and that it’s the old straw man in the moon. Stine waxes nostalgic on the role the moon once played in human imagination, and bemoans that now, somehow, we’ve lost what for the ancients was the understanding that “…not knowing [is] fertile ground for story-telling.” There’s mention of the Age of Reason, and Voltaire, David Hume, and Thomas Paine come up, along with their complaints about myths. Stine comments, “…[T]he substance and purpose of mythology suffered a full-frontal assault by those bent on placing science at the centre of our cultural transformation.” The straw man argument here is that “not knowing” and science are oppositional, and if not knowing” is essential for story-telling, then somehow, amid all the test tubes and data sets, we’ve lost the ability to tell a story. “Today, the word ‘myth’ is synonymous with a falsehood,” Stine then claims. Well, it can be, but myth has other meanings and hewing only to the falsehood definition is itself false. Let’s turn to a product of science (and imagination!) to test definitions. Here is the Google AI summary of the definition of myth:

A myth is a traditional, often sacred narrative explaining a culture’s worldview, beliefs, or natural phenomena, typically featuring gods or heroes in a remote era. While commonly misconstrued as a “false story,” a myth acts as a symbolic, foundational truth for a community, rather than a literal historical account. [1, 2, 3]

Key Definitions of Myth:

• • Sacred Narrative: A story of ostensibly historical events that explains a culture’s practices, beliefs, or natural phenomena (e.g., creation myths).
  • Cultural Worldview: A story that defines a group’s identity, often involving divine or supernatural beings, which is revered as true and authoritative within that culture.
  • Common Usage (False Belief): A popular but unsubstantiated belief or false notion (e.g., “the myth of racial superiority”). [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Key Characteristics:

• • Anonymous Origin: Usually told without a known author, passed down through generations.
  • Symbolic Truth: Myths are often metaphorically or symbolically true, even if factually false.
  • Functions: They serve to answer fundamental questions (creation, death) and justify social systems and rites. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Myth vs. Related Terms:

• • Myth vs. Legend: Legends are usually based on historical figures or events, though often exaggerated, whereas myths operate in a, “primordial,” or non-specific time involving gods.
  • Myth vs. Folktale: Folktales are told for entertainment or moral instruction rather than being considered sacred or strictly true. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Myths, Storytelling, and the Modern Age of Climate Fiction

I understand Stine’s interest in supporting the concept of myth—his book, I, Enoch, presents the following description on Amazon:

I, Enoch is an enthralling journey into a world where ancient secrets and modern ambitions collide. Enoch, the protagonist, stands as a guardian of lost truths and protector of the marginalized, battling against forces that hold dominion over the planet. In 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. As he delves deeper, Enoch confronts not only external adversaries but also internal dilemmas about justice, knowledge, and power. This tale weaves together mysticism with gritty realism, creating a tapestry rich with philosophical questions and the perennial quest for understanding one’s purpose. As Enoch wrestles with his responsibilities and the consequences of his actions, the reader is invited into a vividly crafted universe that challenges the conventional boundaries between history and myth, between what is known and what is imaginable. This book promises to leave readers pondering their own place in the history of humankind and the universe.

To be fair, I’ve not read the entire book, just samples from the book as well as descriptive copy, so maybe I’m using I, Enoch as my own straw man.

Storytelling exists across many modalities, where myth, in the word’s various connotations, is but one. I happen to like Carl Jung’s sense of archetypes within the human mind and Joseph Campbell does a great job tying the history of myths into literature. Heck, I took a course as an undergraduate called “Myth in Literature,” where I got to read Eric Neumann’s The History of Consciousness, for pete’s sake, so I’m no anti-myth guy, honest. I also don’t see myth and science as opposites, not when it comes to human imagination and storytelling. 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?

To be clear, there are many excellent climate fiction works. Think Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future; Nicky Singer’s The Survival Game; Richard Powers’s The Overstory; Jenny Offill’s Weather; Omar El Akkad’s American War; Arthur Jeon’s Snowflake; Nick Fuller Goggin’s The Great Transition; Paul E. Hardisty’s The Forcing; Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife; Stephen Markely’s The Deluge; Chuck Colin’s Altar to an Erupting Sun; and J. Underwood’s The Bell Lap, to name some. But out of the 160-plus “climate fiction” novels I’d noted in building a Goodreads list (an effort I abandoned in late 2024 due to the sheer volume and size of the task), the sort of climate fiction I prefer remains a small minority.

And sure, it is a matter of taste, in part. But what sets climate fiction apart from other categories? Might it not be the topic and focus on where we are now and how we address climate change? Any category that is too inclusive ends up losing value as a category. Novels that turn to deus ex machina may be fun, but there’s not much of a real climate change solution being investigated in such stories. Fantasy can be a fun read and teach the reader about the human condition, but unless it is actively focused on climate change, does it fit into the category of climate fiction? Myths and allegories and social criticism can be edifying, and romances and thrillers and crime novels can be entertaining, but maybe climate fiction should directly address climate change and what we might imagine doing about the problem.

There’s this idea of “thrutopia” in climate fiction which I define as climate fiction that shows where we are in the world of changing climate and how we get to where we’re going. I like to quote the old Down Easter joke, “You can’t get there from here,” but getting from where we are today to the world we are heading to—solutions successful or not—seems likely the real focus for climate fiction.

The post Climate Fiction and Myth in Climate Fiction first appeared on David Guenette.

There’s a lot to do and we need a lot of people to do it. Most of all, at the least we need people active in the electoral process and candidates who are worth voting for when it comes to democracy and climate action.

We’ve run out of time for climate action and are now at the stage of now-or-never. We’ve not yet managed to reduce carbon emissions. We have slowed the rate of emissions, but more carbon is still being added into the atmosphere and temperatures keep climbing. I sure as hell hope that the recent studies suggesting the rate of temperature rise is faster than previously thought turns out to be wrong, although science has grown more sophisticated in its understanding of large Earth systems, and with more understanding comes, typically, more accuracy. With higher temperatures comes the greater likelihood of various tipping points happening sooner rather than later, and that’s another piece of bad news.

The good news is that we have economically viable technological developments in solar/wind/batteries and digital grid and demand management to meet not only the growing demand for electricity but replace some of the existing fossil fuel-based electricity generation and much of the gasoline-driven transport so dear to the American culture. If we keep from adding new gas-fired gas plants and retire existing coal plants and gas plants, we can cut back on greenhouse gas emissions that stem from the electricity generation we need.

We can win.

There’s a great EMBER report I covered in “The Electrotech Manifesto,” posted last June that does a great job spelling it all out. If you need a pick-me-up in the face of all the dirty tricks Big Oil has been pulling, check it out. 

Cutting back on carbon emissions instead of adding to emissions must be our goal for the next few years, never mind any decades time scales. We need to manifest this reduction of emissions as soon as possible. 2030 is right around the corner and even if we do manage to reduce emissions from the electricity generation sector, we’ll still be dealing with a world at least 1.5 Celsius hotter, in annual global average, and it looks likely that 2.0 Celsius is now the new minimum rise. I’ll take 2.0 Celsius by 2100 over 3.0, 4.0, or even higher Celsius increases, but whatever the actual number of Celsius warmer annual global average temperature, the lower the number, the better for one and all.

So, chop chop, people.

First, Restore Democracy

The first objective in the fight for faster clean energy transition, at least here in America, is to revive our democracy. While polls strongly suggest there will be a Republican rout in the midterms, the polls assume there will be midterms that aren’t abused by the Trump Administration to its advantage. And what is the basis for Trump’s advantage? Basically, to stay in power and out of jail.

Trump’s corruption is historic, and that’s keeping in mind that there have been periods in American history where corruption was strife. Still, when it comes to corruption and self-dealing, Trump truly deserves the gold medal in that event. A crucial aspect of this corruption is the favors bought by Big Oil that has President Big Oil Stooge leaning the economy heavily toward fossil fuels, despite clean power technology being more costly both in direct cost and, of course, in health and environmental impact.

For the 2026 midterms, the fight will be on two fronts. The first is to make sure the elections take place in fair and legal conditions. The second is to vote for the right candidates in record numbers.

Second, Stress the Positive

We have the means to transition our energy systems toward clean energy, including solar, wind, battery storage, geothermal, and nuclear. Solar and wind and batteries are cheapest and fastest to implement, while also freeing countries from having to continuously spend and spend on more fossil fuels to replace that which has been burned.

The reduction in carbon emissions from the clean energy transition can slow down carbon emissions and even start to reverse the high levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The net effect will be to keep climate change from worsening, and thus reduce the amount of money, time, and effort to build resilience for the warming climate and decrease the adaptation efforts that higher temperatures will demand. We must diminish the threat of economic and societal collapse posited by many should we experience 2 Celsius or higher global average temperature rises.

Sounds like a bargain, right?

How about cheaper and cleaner electricity fairly shared, and not just among Americans, but to address the Global South’s energy poverty? Here, in many countries, clean energy is countering the fossil fuel-based systems that contribute to overall poverty, including high mortality, hunger, famine, disease, and whatever other horsemen of the apocalypse you can think of. Oppressive living standards occur by keeping such countries’ own energy and economic development hostage to the costs of fossil fuel energy generation.

Third, Go Big on Clean Energy Build Out Nationally, State-wide, and Locally

The United States faces big energy infrastructure build out regardless of energy source. There’s the need for more electricity, not only for the panicked requirements of AI and data centers, and clean electricity is far more efficient an energy source than fossil fuels, whether in terms of generation itself, or for the heating and cooling of the built environment, or transportation. Electrical grids need better digital management for load balancing, efficient use of distributed energy resources such as virtual power plants, and controlling demand load capacity and distribution. Overall power capacity needs expansion and old distribution lines require repair and updating.

This may seem overwhelming, but keep in mind that America has undertaken this sort of infrastructure work before–think the Federal Rural Electrification program or Tennessee Valley Authority, or for that matter, the Interstate Highways buildout. Keep in mind that just one administration back, two major bills for big energy infrastructure passed, only to be illegally curtailed by the Trump Administration’s violations of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

The clean energy transition may seem too expensive, but longer-term considerations prove out that the clean energy transition to be the less expensive path. Why are large clean energy infrastructure programs less expensive, especially if one doesn’t get caught up in the “next-quarter” thinking? First, solar/wind/and battery systems are cost comparable to fossil fuel-based generators, but the cost of operation for fossil fuel-based generation is never-ending with ongoing purchases of price-volatile fossil fuels. This contrasts to clean energy generation that has only its upfront cost but very low cost of operations that does not include any ongoing fuel purchases for thirty or forty years. There’s an old argument still being made that the levelized cost of energy (LCOE, or the overall costs over the life of the energy generation) is lower with natural gas than with renewables. Yes, once upon a time this was true, but only by cherry picking old data from back when solar, for example, was costly, do the numbers work out that way. In reality, costs for solar, wind, and battery storage have fallen so low that renewable energy’s LCOE is cheaper than fossil fuels and that that’s not even counting the negative externalities of health and climate cost inseparable from fossil fuels.  Another way to look at this issue is as energy return on investment (EROI), and if you want more on this, check out my post “My Report About EROI, Written by AI,” published last April.

Today, the thumb on the scale for fossil fuels is even worse, with 100-plus year old tax code advantages and $billions in direct subsidies still being handed to the fossil fuel corporations each and every year, including several $billion extra added in by Trump through the OBBBA. Big Oil has been gaming the system for its own business benefit, cost, inefficiencies, and damages from the business of fossil fuels be damned. We need to act at every level, from federal, to state, to local.

Fourth, Take a Breath

The energy transition may look better and be moving forward faster in many other parts of the world outside the U.S. China has been full steam ahead (old metaphors never die, they just become ironic), and while China’s large economy and huge population make carbon emissions reduction difficult, that country is on its way toward becoming the first “Electrotech” country. Usually, advantage goes to first place winners, but as an American considering this advantage, I’ll merely sigh.

There are good signs that many Global South countries are leapfrogging older energy systems and often this may mean that the expensive infrastructure outlays that the West’s traditional energy grid systems represent can be ignored for a more quickly built and less expensive micro-grids and local energy capacity based on renewables. One of the great fears has long been that the developing countries, as they approach parity in energy wealth to the developed countries, would contribute to huge further spikes in carbon emissions. What we’re seeing instead are countries putting in place clean energy systems early on. This trend has the potential for a significant win/win, where countries develop energy wealth parity while no further carbon emissions are added.

Fifth, Eat the Billionaires

Any neutral economic assessment of the past forty or fifty years shows a staggeringly huge shift in wealth to the top 10%, and even worse, the top fraction of one percent. By most analyses, our wealth inequality today exceeds the excess of the late nineteenth century Gilded Age, and any reader of history knows that the Gilded Age was an awful time of corruption, worker oppression, and wide-scale poverty. Today, America is captured by oligarchs. Billionaires avoid taxes in myriad ways. The accretion of power to the top one-percent is so significant as to be nearly incomprehensive. Dé·jà vu, all over again.

Shifts in distributed wealth have many examples in American history. Within our lifetimes—well, decreasingly few of us still living these days—the Depression era New Deal corrections provided economic support to desperate citizens. The post WWII American productivity growth created a growing middle class because productivity gains were shared more equitably. The top income tax bracket was 92 percent during Eisenhower’s administration, and while the top bracket fluctuated, the 1960 and 1970s saw top rates at 70 percent or higher. Only with the election of Ronald Reagan did the top rate crash down to 50 percent in 1982 and fell further to 28% in 1988. Further tax cuts in the George W. Bush administration happened and then the Trump tax cuts in his first term went into law, then were extended again in 2025 with OBBBA.

The current level of wealth inequality is absurd and absurdly dangerous: The top 1% (approx. $55 trillion in assets) holds roughly as much wealth as the entire bottom 90% of Americans. As of early 2026, the top three richest Americans are Elon Musk (approx. $839B), Larry Page ($257B), and Sergey Brin ($237B). Together, they represent a significant portion of the roughly 31.7% of U.S. wealth held by the top 1% of households.

Let’s tax the rich and get the wealth distribution back into fair territory. Let’s have a more fairly shared burden contribute to the crucial work on the energy transition ahead of us.

By the way, should billionaires even exist?

Sixth, Shift America’s Money to the Real Conflict

In 2026, the budget for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) was $839.2 billion in discretionary funding, but The FY2026 DOD budget request also contains approximately $113.3 billion in mandatory (non-discretionary) funding, including the following:

• Resources designated for the Navy’s shipbuilding plan and to revitalize the nation’s shipbuilding industrial base
• Over $5 billion is allocated specifically for the submarine industrial base
• Investments include $321.9 million for DPA purchases and $2.6 billion for Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment (IBAS) programs
• Strategic capital to the tune of $300 million directed toward the Office of Strategic Capital for loans and loan guarantees
• The Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) budget, which is part of the broader, non-discretionary personnel-related costs, accounting for 84% ($1,216.8 million) of the specific budget request
• While not mandatory funding, the enacted NDAA/appropriations provided significant budget additions in specific, targeted “non-discretionary” areas (items that Congress authorizes) such as $1.5 billion for the maritime industrial base and various, targeted, weapon systems enhancements

Well, what’s another $113 billion, right?

And then, of course, there are the additional costs associated with specific military adventures in 2026, including:

• Iran-related operations incurring roughly $10.35 billion in costs in just the first 10 days of the conflict, with the initial 100 hours of operations costing an estimated $3.3 billion, with costs rising rapidly due to munitions, flight hours, and damaged equipment. A two-month engagement is estimated to cost between $40 billion and $95 billion
• Venezuela adventure/Caribbean operations will incur costs above the initial FY2026 budget, including increased personnel benefits (e.g., family separation allowances) and higher operational tempo (e.g., more flying/steaming hours). These are estimated to cost an extra $3 million per day
• The FY2026 defense budget includes expanded missions for the DoD to support the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes deploying U.S. forces to border areas

Due to the high intensity of operations, the Pentagon has informed Congress they need an additional $50 billion beyond the original budget request. Additionally, the administration has anticipated at least $150 billion in further, separate, or reconciliation funding for defense activities.

Well, what’s another $150 billion, right?

So, yeah, well over $1trillion is going to the DOD. One core factor in the current war efforts is fossil fuels, whether to address the threats against oil markets or for “strategic” geo-political considerations. And then there are the costs stemming for the protection of maritime shipping and the negative production capacity among both U.S. allies and enemies.

Keep in mind that the Pentagon has never passed a clean financial audit since they began audits in 2018, failing its eighth consecutive annual audit in late 2025. Despite conducting yearly audits, the Department of Defense (DOD) remains the only federal agency unable to achieve an unmodified, or “clean,” audit opinion. That 1960 warning by Eisenhower about a military-industrial complex? It turns out, I Like Ike.

Keep in mind, too, the negative revenue consequences of OBBBA. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is estimated to reduce federal tax revenue by approximately $4.5 trillion to $5.5 trillion over the ten-year period from 2025–2034. These revenue losses primarily stem from extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) policies, implementing new business tax reforms, and raising the SALT deduction cap to $40,000.

You’ve heard this before, but the U.S. military budget in 2026 is $839.2 billion (but actually over $1 trillion). China (People’s Republic of) is in second place, at $303 billion, well less than a third of the U.S. military budget. Here are the next top eight military budgets, in $billions: Russia, $212.6; Germany, $127.4; India, $88.4; Saudi Arabia, $67.2; United Kingdom, $64; France, $57.4; Japan, $57.4; South Korea, $45.8.

So, yeah, what you’ve heard is right: the budget for the U.S. military is as much as the next nine nations’ military budgets combined. Half of these are allies.

The money for the clean energy transition is there, but it is being spent on the wrong things.

Let’s fund the Electrotech Revolution, save most people money, and save the planet’s hospitable climate. That’s the battle we need to join.

The post How to Win the Electrotech Revolution first appeared on David Guenette.

Still, I’m tempted to call baloney when it comes to balcony solar, but another part of me knows that any step forward with solar power is a good thing. But I still grumble that this under-powered piecemeal addition for adding solar is far less important than all the proposals being considered across—at last count—28 states and DC might suggest.

What’s being considered in legislatures across the land is allowing small plug-and-play photovoltaic (PV) kits that connect directly to a standard wall outlet, allowing users to reduce electricity bills without complex installation. Balcony solar panel systems typically have a maximum output capacity of 600W to 800W for standard plug-in microinverter kits, which is the legal limit in many European countries. While some systems allow for up to 1,200W or slightly higher, 800W is the common, safe, and regulatory-approved threshold for small apartment-focused solar energy. Basically, we talking a balcony solar kit generating an amount of power that falls short for most microwaves or hairdryers. Forget about refrigerators that may only need 150–300 watts to run, but can require 1,000–2,000-plus watts to start the compressor.

Keep in mind that balcony solar powers only the circuit it is plugged into, not the whole house. Under best conditions a balcony solar set-up might generate 300-1,200k kWh annually. Here in Massachusetts, the typical household annual electricity consumption is approximately 7,150-7,250 kWh, which means, best case, balcony solar might supply 16% of your annual usage, but of course there’s no such thing as best case, especially here in New England.

But whatever. In my book, any reduction in fossil fuel-derived electricity is a win, even if my enthusiasm for balcony solar is, like its output potential, weak.

What is clearly not a win at all is adding more regulations and local authority over rooftop and community-scale solar and battery projects.

Good Intentions Can Have Bad Consequences

In fact, I find myself grumbling about a lot of solar-related issues these days and balcony solar isn’t top of the list. Some people within one of my local climate groups sends around to the members information from Responsible Solar MA asking that members consider submitting testimony to the state Energy Facilities Siting Board to support changes in the regulations on siting of solar projects be adopted for “Safe Solar Siting.” Responsible Solar MA was asking for the public written testimony in support of many new restrictions on solar siting, and when I read the template testimony provided, I ended up editing it to oppose most provisions included.

Here’s what I wrote (slightly further edited for this post):

To the Energy Facilities Siting Board,

Please accept my comments relating to the energy siting regulations and guidelines that are in development. My guiding principle below is that liberal permission should be allowed in the siting of solar and solar/batteries facilities in the vast majority of cases, but perhaps with a few exceptions, such as setback and fencing and aesthetic border requirements as described in local zoning codes. 

The country and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are in a race to develop solar and tie clean energy into existing or newly needed transmission grids renewable energy sources. Indeed, the transition to renewable energy-based electricity production is among the highest priorities for the world at large, as progress in the reduction of greenhouse gases has to date underperformed, with consequential increases in climate change. As few restrictions to solar or battery or solar/battery facility siting as possible will be necessary to encourage and accelerate the renewable energy transition.

1) Do NOT exclude “small” energy projects and all ESS battery systems by only allowing such projects on the built or disturbed environment. This is an unnecessary restriction that will only serve to delay, complicate, and raise the costs of solar and battery facilities.

2) Do NOT exclude the following areas from large and small energy generation and transmission projects:

• • Article 97 protected open space [Note: the proposed additions do already recognized that some Article 97 land could hold exceptions such as solar canopies over a DCR beach parking lot]  
  • Wetland resource areas (310 CMR 10.04) and with setbacks of 1,000 feet to identified wetlands resources. However, a shorter distance setback, perhaps up to 40 feet, might be considered with the addition of construction barrier placements near such set back lines.
  • Properties included in the State Register (950 CMR 71.03), except as authorized by regulatory bodies
  • BioMap 2 Critical Natural Landscape, Core Habitat, Important Habitat, or Priority Habitat
  • Flood plains and flood prone areas 
  • Land that provides public drinking water, especially with adequate set-backs and construction barriers, given that solar facilities are not significant sources of water table toxicity contamination, although battery facilities may be restricted because of the (low) potential for toxicity dissemination.
  • On prime farmland (as defined by the state), where private land owners should be the decision source as to whether solar or solar/battery facilities are placed within the bounds of the private land

Flood plains and flood-prone areas actually make excellent siting choices for solar and/or solar and battery facilities, if sufficiently robustly platformed and at a height safely above flood plain high-water flood potential.

As for land that provides public drinking water, solar facility siting should be allowed, especially with adequate set-backs and construction barriers, given that solar facilities are not significant sources of water table toxicity contamination. Restrictions on land that provides public drinking water should not be considered, because of the (low) potential for toxicity dissemination.

3) Do NOT exclude ground-mounted solar projects on newly deforested land, defined as cleared less than 5 years ago. This is an unnecessary restriction that will only serve to delay, complicate, and raise the costs of solar and battery facilities.

 4) Marginal farmland should have NO restrictions on solar siting.  Any private land use for solar or battery or solar/battery facilities should yield decisions only by the property owner, with adequate setbacks and fencing and aesthetic borders, as defined by state and local zoning regulations.

 5) Language should NOT be included that ensures no negative impacts on:

• • Biodiversity including plants and animals listed under the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act
  • Protected open space
  • Native American cultural areas as determined by Massachusetts’ Indigenous people

The facts are clear that the consequences of climate change pose the greatest threat to biodiversity. The irony of arresting or slowing the reduction of greenhouse gases through overly-restrictive renewable energy production siting is clear.

6) Please keep decision making on solar power generation facilities within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts authority, so that NIMBY pushback to solar facility siting may be discouraged. Consider allowing the discretion and authority provided to the towns to enforce adequate setbacks and fencing and aesthetic borders, as defined by state and local zoning regulations and in keeping with public safety concerns, especially for battery facility siting (e.g., adequate access for emergency responders). Therefore, language should NOT be included that ensures the following:

• • Locally generated enforceable safety standards for battery storage
  • Town-specific capacity and siting goals, with local control of siting
  • Authority for municipalities to reject any proposal for minimization and/or mitigation that are deemed a threat to the towns’ health safety and welfare, and natural and cultural resource protections, as determined by local boards and commissions

Please note that threats to the towns’ health safety and welfare and natural and cultural resource protections should be directed by state-level policies, rather than be left to local boards and commissions, and largely because local NIMBY reactions can too easily be driven by a minority of voters within any locality who may not represent majority views. The state-level policies should be adequate for defining  threats to the towns’ health, safety, and welfare, and natural and cultural resource protections.

I don’t think Responsible Solar MA, the local effort to improve solar siting rules, has nefarious intent, nor do I believe this is some sort of astroturf conspiracy but rather a sincere contribution to the public process. But I think that too many of us who have long been active in the environmental movement are stuck on old goals such as protecting specific species or to keep land pristine. While I’m all in favor of good stewardship, the dangers from rising global average temperatures put the vast majority of environments and their fauna and flora at risk, and our best opportunity to reduce such acute danger and damage is to reduce carbon emissions. Solar power has the present and ready capacity to take a big chuck out of carbon from fossil fuel-driven electricity generation and internal combustion-based transportation and gas- or oil-based heating and cooling of buildings.

The Best Approach: Reduce Barriers to New Solar and Solar/Battery Facilities

The best solution is fewer rules and regulations about siting and permitting solar, wind, and battery projects. We already have too many rules and regulations and too many Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ), or town-based permitting and inspection, that slows such projects down or keeps them from getting built, even while significantly contributing to the cost of such projects that go forward. The fact is that clean energy project permitting is too arcane and slow and complicated by AHJ inspection requirements., and slow and difficult permitting and inspection processes add costs. Common estimates are that over one-third of the cost of rooftop solar is tied to permitting and inspection and the time delays these processes cause. I did an analysis last year about the source of high costs for rooftop solar/batteries systems, if you want more detail. The report is titled “The American Solar Cost Paradox: Analyzing the Soft Cost Drivers and Policy Barriers to Affordable Residential PV in the U.S.”

I’d much rather have the climate movement pay more attention to permitting reform that has fewer restrictions and an fast and automated permitting process such as SolarAPP+. I wrote a post titled “What is the State of States’ Efforts to Make Home Solar and BESS Easier and Cheaper? Red Tape, Not Technology, Is the Biggest Threat,” if you want to find actual efforts underway to improve solar/battery project costs.

What’s the Real Threat to Clean Energy?

Big Oil recognizes the threat of the transition to clean energy, which is why, in addition to their lying and greenwashing, they’ve been buying up more and more of our government, and getting results. Trump has severely repressed clean energy projects, up to and including cancelling the East Coast wind farms, although recent court cases may have solved this to some degree (although, of course, then there’s an appeal possible). Removing the IIJA and IRA incentives for solar, wind, and EVs and other clean energy projects, have dealt a major blow to the energy transition in the U.S. And Big Oil is on the rampage to get 100+ new gas generator built and expand their natural gas market for another thirty or forty years, citing the need to meet growing electricity for AI and data centers, even while actively and unfairly suppressing clean energy alternatives needs, fighting for climate court case pre-emptive dismissals, and continuing to manipulate the public’s perception aboutclean energy and the danger of climate change.

Climate activists need to focus on bigger solutions, even if balcony solar is okie-dokie. We need to reform the permitting processes, the mis-match in interconnection queue schedules , and otherwise return our country to a more equal market environment, where the faster speed and lower cost of clean energy production can kick Big Oil’s can.

Oh yeah, this work also includes getting democracy healthy in the U.S., but no one ever said saving the world was going to be easy.

The post Let’s Get Serious About Solar first appeared on David Guenette.