I will keep the name of this beta-reader to myself, so to avoid an uncomfortable paparazzi-crushing lifestyle change for him, thank you very much. He was talking with me about Dear Josephine, my second book in the literary climate fiction series The Steep Climes Quartet. He was referring to the number of times the term that stands in for all the external costs the use of fossil fuel shifts to the public and not counted among the producers’ costs in fossil fuel production.

Externalities: You know, things like health problems that are attributed to pollution and particulates.

Here’s an AI summary on this particular externality:

Based on studies released in 2025, air pollution from burning fossil fuels causes millions of premature deaths annually worldwide, with a significant portion stemming from fine particulate matter. While total air pollution causes over 4 million to 7.9 million deaths annually, specific studies in 2025 indicated that fossil fuel air pollution alone causes roughly 2.5 million deaths annually. [1, 2, 3]

Key Findings Related to Fossil Fuel Deaths (2025 Context):

• • Global Impact: Air pollution from fossil fuel combustion is responsible for roughly 1 in 5 deaths worldwide.
  • Specific Fuel Impact (US): A 2025 study in Science Advances found that pollution from oil and gas extraction and use causes over 90,000 premature deaths in the US annually.
  • Regional Impact: The highest mortality impacts from fossil fuel-related PM2.5 are observed in China, India, and parts of the US, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
  • Health Burden: These deaths are primarily linked to PM2.5, nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and other toxic pollutants that cause cardiovascular disease, respiratory infections, and cancer.
  • Household Fuels: In addition to ambient (outdoor) pollution, solid fuel use in homes results in millions of additional deaths in countries with low access to clean energy. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

You can nitpick the sources, and it is likely that Clean Air Fund has higher death counts than you’re likely to find in reports from the American Petroleum Institute. The footnote links are live in the above AI summary, if you want to check out sources.

But we all understand that pollution is not good for people’s health, but as an externality the costs accrued from health problems related to air pollution are paid by everybody, not by the producers of the fossil fuel products that create the pollution.

We all understand that the last two centuries’ rush to provide energy to industry, transportation, households, and institutions has dumped enormously more greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. So much so that this has been altering our climate. Like the negative consequences to health, it is increasingly evident that greenhouse gases produce economic costs for the world, costs that all of us pay for, not costs paid for by the producers of the fossil fuel products that significantly contribute to climate change. In this way, climate change is another of fossil fuel’s externalities.

Here’s the AI summary of the recent estimates on the costs of fossil fuel externalities:

Based on the December 2025 IMF [International Monetary Fund] update, global implicit fossil fuel subsidies—representing underpriced environmental costs—totaled $6.7 trillion in 2024 (5.8% of global GDP). These externalities, which primarily include damages from air pollution and climate change, constitute the vast majority of total fossil fuel support, while explicit fiscal subsidies totaled $725 billion. [1, 2, 3]

Key Details on IMF Externalities Estimates (2025 Update)

• • Total Subsidy Value: In 2024, total subsidies (explicit + implicit) exceeded $7 trillion.
  • Implicit Breakdown: The $6.7 trillion in implicit subsidies (undercharged externalities) are primarily driven by:
    • Air Pollution: Responsible for approximately 3/4 of total underpriced environmental costs.
    • Climate Change: A significant, rising component of the total, with costs projected to rise until 2035.
  • Externalities by Fuel: Petroleum accounts for about half of total subsidies, while coal accounts for nearly two-fifths.
  • Regional Impact: 80% of global coal consumption is priced below half of its efficient level. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Impact of Correcting Prices

• • Health Benefits: Full removal of implicit and explicit subsidies could lead to over 1 million fewer premature air pollution deaths per year.
  • Climate Goals: Correcting these prices could reduce global CO2 emissions by 46% below baseline levels by 2035.
  • Fiscal Gain: Implementing efficient pricing would raise government revenues by roughly 0.6% to 3.6% of global GDP. [1, 2, 3]

The IMF defines efficient prices as those covering supply costs, environmental damages, and standard consumer taxes.

In this post, I’m already up to nine “externalities” appearances. Maybe the beta reader had a point? (Here’s a recent post, Writing The Steep Climes Quartet, Part 2: Economics in Climate Fiction, on presenting economic facts and figures within climate fiction, including, I’m sure, the concept of “externalities.”)

By the way, even I could see this was a problem and the revisions in the Dear Josephine manuscript cut the use of the term by more than half.

How—and Why—Do I Talk about Externalities in a Climate Fiction Book?

I wanted to bring in the concept of externalities in Dear Josephine to show some of the real costs of using fossil fuels. My thinking is that as more people understand such costs, the more economically competitive the clean energy transition looks. Keep in mind that at this point in time adding clean energy to our total energy portfolio is already likely cheaper and faster to build than fossil fuel-based energy even before externalities costs are factored in. And the externalities and direct subsidies costs is a very big number. Well, $7 trillion/annually certainly seems a significant sum to me, but I’m not great at math.

How did I incorporate the discussion of fossil fuel externalities in a novel that takes place in 2029? I could have done it by having one or another character read about it in the mainstream media, but I believe the topic is still likely to be the domain of specialists in 2029.

What I did was have two different types of specialists thinking about externalities. The first character, Jeannie Louise Smith, a resident of Great Barrington, is established as a recurring figure within the quartet. She’s an analyst of climate change and policy, making her living writing reports on commission or working with other like-minded analysts, freelancing articles for various professional and general market publications, and through her articles, essays, and editorials on RE:CC, her bitbytes-platformed blog. She’s in her seventies, so she still thinks in terms of blogs, but in the series, bitbytes is a new Substack-like platform with better features, including micropayment support. She’s a go-to for general media editors who want public-facing content that explains things like externalities or climate change policy fights, market consequences, and more.

In Dear Josephine, it is newly post-Trump. The MAGA and special interests-repudiated Congress is back in the business of dealing with America’s real-world problems and energy costs remain a big problem, as does climate-change-related challenges of mitigation, resiliency, and adaptation. There’s a big congressional bill in committee addressing coastal vulnerabilities. Various interests are trying to influence the bill’s scope. The Seawall Act is a big bill that needs significant funding allocated if it passes, and spending offsets will be part of the fight. Some—like Jeannie Louise—think fossil fuel subsidies might be ready for attack.

Enter a villain in the form of Gerald Greene, executive director of a fictitious fossil fuel think tank, the Kehoe Institute. He has anxious clients, plenty of dark money, and various nefarious schemes. He’s also working on a strategy paper aimed at keeping the issue of externalities off the table. Greene wants to keep the whole issue of externalities from seeing the light of day.

Readers get to see Jeannie Louise wrestling with the challenge of communicating the concept of externalities to the general public while Greene hopes some sleight of hand acceding to the cancellation of some explicit fossil fuel subsidies might do the trick of keeping externalities from the debate. By agreeing to terminate explicit, or direct, subsidies—such as accounting exceptions and advantageous tax codes—Big Oil interests can project a cooperative image while surrendering only a few billion dollars. This maneuver serves to protect the far more lucrative advantage of ignored externalities, which effectively provide an annual $600+billion benefit to American fossil fuel corporations through avoided costs. Can Greene redirect the conversation away from externalities, a confusing and hard to explain concept?

Now you’re going to my home page to buy the books, right?

Weaving in Climate Change Information

The series relies on well-drawn characters, some of whom are engaged directly in the climate change fights, but most of the characters are regular people who get information about climate change mostly from the news and not necessarily paying close attention. After all, for most of us the pressures of our daily lives—jobs, relationships, family, bills, and the other topics of our daily existence—take precedence. Davin, for example, who’s caught up doing platform architecture and system administration for a local interactive “shopper” newspaper, and who wishes he had more time in his art studio, is the sort of person who allows distraction and procrastination into his life. Sometimes a news story captures his attention and he falls down any number of rabbit holes chasing links. There’s part of a chapter to Kill Well, the first book, where’s Davin’s reading his news online about a big methane plume and follows links back to earlier, even bigger, methane leak incidents. Why? Well, he’s kind of interested in climate change, but really, he’s more interested in losing himself in the news rather than getting to his work of generating the month’s Ads-to-Sales report.

There are other native mechanisms for slipping in climate content in bits and pieces. TVs are on, or more likely, news alerts or pop-up videos or phone notifications while people go about their business. Sometimes just a stray piece of a news item is noticed. Sometimes characters have specific interests and set up notifications. Google has been applying AI to improve personalized news delivery. Sometimes someone might mention something of interest—maybe about weird weather, or some disaster, or the fate of some local denizen—while standing in line at the post office or coffee shop. Just like in the real world, climate change is part of the digital static background of the characters’ lives.

Can Boosting Climate Change Information be Thrilling?

There’s another mechanism for providing information about climate change, which is to present thriller-like plot lines that involve specific climate change elements. In Kill Well, the book starts with a young fossil fuel divestiture activist witnessing her boss’s murder while they are heading to a divestment pitch. She’s freaked out, she flees, and starts heading to Boston, not quite sure where she might be safe. On the bus bound for Las Vegas, she finds herself wondering if they’ll pass close to some of the wildfires, and to remind herself where the big fires are she checks CNN on the crappy TV embedded into the back of bus seats. She gets to Chicago, but the upper mid-west is socked in a tough and long heatwave, and on the train heading east she meets a young man who’s heading home to the Berkshires to escape the heatwave and his dropping post-layoff bank balance. The plot line gets the action into the Berkshires, where the books’ principal through-characters live and where the series is grounded, and some of the plot drivers are climate change related.

In Dear Josephine, in 2029, there’s a hurricane that devastates Miami, but the reader learns about it through the perspectives of the Berkshire County characters. I didn’t want characters at ground zero. I wanted the readers to encounter the destruction at a remove, since this is the way most of us—remember Helene?—experience such events. The disaster is covered in the news, of course, and it’s a huge story and no one is unaffected and there’s plenty of continuing coverage for a chunk of chapters. The Miami-destroying hurricane in Dear Josephine has the news bring up climate change. As best I remember (What? You want me to keep rereading my own books?!), there’s little that even the resident expert on climate change Jeannie Louise says about the storm and climate change attribution.

In Over Brooklyn Hills, which takes place in 2035, the southern part of Berkshire County is bursting at the seams with hordes of young hipsters up from the heatwave-dominated New York City and the locals have to figure out how to treat them, including all the free-campers out in the woods of Monument Mountain. The theme, if you’re asked in your English class, is climate migration, but the local action is climate migration writ small and presented not pedantically but woven into the actions and scenes. Of course, there are news stories about climate migration and the deadly violence that results along part of the border of Pakistan and India, and there’s the thriller element involving a climate action terrorist group and the cartels that references climate migration on our own southern border. Add in a small dash of local extreme weather and slightly salty climate change politics, and presto!

Or so the theory goes.

What I Fear about Climate Change Information Dissemination in Fiction

In various Substack comments and correspondence with those involved in climate fiction, I’ve considered the issue of efficacy of climate fiction to inform readers. The nature of any particular work of climate fiction is one issue, where, for example, apocalyptic tales remain a big part of the genre. Such tales seem less likely to help readers identify with the world they live in today. I like a good story of future dystopia as much as the next gun-toting fella, but I, along with many others, suspect that how we make progress on climate change is helped by writing stories in which readers can see themselves. I’m guessing here, but I don’t think most of us see ourselves racing around a desert landscape seeking the last drop of water or paddling around on a homemade raft hoping to find land not yet surrendered to the sea.

Does climate fiction, to be effective, need to capture the interest of the reader? That’s what’s called a rhetorical question. If one is trying to give readers some sense of the struggle we have with changing climate, it seems best that the reader wants to read the book, right? Yeah, rhetorical question yet again.

I recently read Habitat Man, by D. A. Baden, because the book aims to supply the reader information about climate change and other challenges to our environment, especially around biodiversity. While I have several complaints about the book, one issue is the mechanism used to deliver the information. The structure of the book includes the title character going to various home gardens and giving the owners guidance on how to make a more productive and welcoming space for creatures great and small, while ruminating about all the anti-biodiversity stuff we do. The larger point is valid, in that every better garden is a step towards climate progress, but the world isn’t going to grow itself out of climate change one garden at a time, even if the penchant for gardens is exported around the world from the green isles of Avalon.

I’ve recently posted on the concept of Thrutopian climate fiction, with which D. A. Baden is associated: Let’s Talk About Climate Optimism and Hope That We Can Write About Doing Something About Climate Change

I came away from Habitat Man feeling like a remedial learner, where the classes were all the same and there were plenty of them, and mostly all about worms and insects and what bird eats what and composting and composting toilets. I’m sure that composting toilets are helpful in reclaiming a healthy environment—and hey, I was introduced to composting toilets back in 1989, thank you very much—but transitioning to clean energy and moving away from fossil fuels seems the more dominant requirement today. I’m all for reducing methane and I do give a shit, but letting people be aware of, say, legislative solutions that can pick the biggest low hanging fruit demands our more immediate attention. Or maybe I have gone down the garden path, at least metaphorically.

But the characteristic of Habitat Man that makes my hands sweat is the transparent and rote manner the curriculum is delivered. The repetition of the sequential garden visits is one problem, especially as there are plenty of gardens visited, but the same lessons are also repeated, or so it seems, every time the main character passes a public garden or flower bed or ventures out onto the common or walks along some bit of half nature. From reading D. A. Baden’s essays about climate fiction, I’m confident that relaying climate change-relevant information was one of her goals for this romantic comedy novel.

I am, I’ll have you know, ready for the quiz. In fact, I’m pretty sure I was ready only few chapters in. It’s weird to have an info dump in the middle of a garden, composting toilet or not.

Am I doing a similar thing in The Step Climes Quartet? Too many “externalities” in the text?

I sure hope not, but I’ll need some external validation to put that worry to rest.

The post The Challenge of Conveying Climate Change Information in Climate Fiction first appeared on David Guenette.

As an entrepreneur, writer, and climate change activist, I’ve studied climate change science and policies for two decades and believe that the most effective basis for the discussion of the climate crisis is realism, both in science and the stories. I believe climate fiction can be an effective way for individuals and communities to identify with climate change challenges and that climate fiction can inform an individual’s personal actions and a community’s choices. Stories can offer alternative and surprisingly effective perspectives for understanding the climate crisis and on approaches for dealing with climate change. Climate fiction that focuses on the reader’s familiar sense of social order and circumstances and recognizable experiences may better explain the nature of the crisis and foster a more powerful identification with the problems we face.

The Themes, like Climate Change Itself, Have Shifted Over Time

The main theme of The Steep Climes Quartet is our fractured society and the solidarity climate progress requires of us and our communities. This theme, I hate to admit, still carries true.

Even over the course of writing the series—I started in 2015—other themes have evolved and now include some source of hope in the form of an economically competitive clean energy transition. Don’t think I’ve grown pollyannish, though, since important plotlines involve various misdeeds by Big Oil and take into consideration the element of slow progress that typically marks the efforts of political bodies and society at large. Still, by Book Three, Over Brooklyn Hills, 2035 sees that core court cases against Big Oil are finally starting to break for the climate, but then again, these same corporations and their political allies (or to use a more crass appellation, their “bum boys”) have managed to get too many gas-fired generator plants in place, with the net result of slowing progress in carbon emission reductions.

In the first three books, the residents of the Berkshires—a pleasant bucolic place, by the way—don’t have a lot of direct experience with the immediate consequences of climate change, but like most of us, hear about such negative consequences mostly through the news. Kill Well, in 2026, has a big heatwave in the upper Midwest, and the West is experiencing another plague of wildfires, but the Berkshire-based main character Davin, an economically pressed recent divorcee, may have some talking points about the climate down, kind of, and all the right intentions, kind of, but like most others, he’s mostly caught up in worrying about rising costs and his Airbnb apartment and his work. The worst thing that happens to him, climate-effect wise, is that a heavy rain damages a part of the Airbnb apartment on the first floor of his Housatonic house. The character and the much of the nation are still stunned by Trump’s reelection and all the resulting chaos from that clown show. There’s a plot line of a young woman on the run after witnessing her fossil fuel divestiture boss killed on a business trip, which brings her to Chicago, where Davin’s son is living his first year out of college, and the two meet on the train heading toward Boston, and she ends up at Davin’s house, and there’s a contract killer in play, too. A prevailing sub-theme is the widespread economic stress of rising costs and the recession-like state of the nation’s economy that retards, along with Trump, clean energy work.

Dear Josephine is different in that the climate consequence focus is Miami’s destruction by the combination of a powerful hurricane hitting in sync with high ocean surges, and the residents of Berkshires are unaffected directly, of course, although taken up among the multitude shocked by the event, with many trying to figure out how to help. Oh yeah, there’s a guy running around trying to kill billionaires and a guy using Kill the Rich as cover for his own assassinations for fossil fuels think tanks in order to ease some newly inconvenient political ex-allies off the board. And yeah, in Dear Josephine there’s a fair amount of conversation and thinking about externalities, which sounds as exciting to you as a reader and it does to me as the author, right? I think I pulled it off. Does the appearance of a climate action terrorist group make the medicine go down? The sub-theme here is the evil intents of those who run fossil fuel empires and the growing anxiety that their golden egg is hatching trouble. Will Big Oil turn even more savage as the clean energy transition starts to take a bite out of the energy market? I’m pretty sure I nailed this; read the headlines and tell me I’m wrong about Big Oil.

Over Brooklyn Hills, now back from the editor and in the midst of review and then to formatting (and then to proofreading, and then…) is six years after the second book and nine years after the first. MAGA, repudiated in the 2026 mid-term and 2028 elections, has given way to economic reforms and climate policies and America has rejoined much of the rest of the world in making climate progress. The sub-themes include the consequences of choosing violence, as the climate terrorist group now finds itself involved with Mexican cartels and three-quarters of the way toward becoming a criminal organization. The primary theme, though, is about climate migration, and because of a long heatwave hovering over the New York metropolitan area, the Berkshires finds itself with very many more young people (i.e., typically less economically advantaged) escaping the heat and the energy bills demanded for safety, and the towns of South County and the second-homers aren’t enjoying the change in the character of their summer. Of course, the migrant movement at the southern border is a bigger problem, and the violence between parts of Pakistan and India and the portions of their populations on the move from devastating heatwaves is seeing tens of thousands of deaths, largely through paramilitary violence. But up here in the relatively cool green hills, we can be put out by the waves of body odor from those free camping in the woods as we line up at So-Co Creamery to get the kids some ice cream.

Farm to Me, which is mostly a mess of notes and line items for further research, sees 2047 with climate change reducing, due to chronic drought, the yields of some of the once highly productive agricultural areas in the U.S. New England has been experiencing a resurgence of its once dominant industry, agriculture. There’s been some real progress with carbon emission reduction, but climate change is locked in place, albeit at levels that could be worse without modest progress. Resiliency and adaptation programs are the rage, but climate change continues to exert a downward pressure on the economy. It turns out that poisoning the Earth’s atmosphere for centuries has some negative consequences. Who knew?

The fourth book’s themes will include that human nature remains a good news/bad news puzzle, with a murder mystery that may be tied to one ambitious New England food distribution company trying to take over other food distributors. There will be the sub-theme of the angst and agony of the young about the future, where the cumulative effects of climate change pile on. Tipping points, for instance, are getting more attention, but, yeah, a lot less love, that’s for sure.

What It Takes (to Write the Series)

I’d be happy enough to put down my long-running autodidact effort on climate change, but alas, climate models keep getting tweaked and plentiful research continues. Science never sleeps, and all too often, I feel that I need to be on the growing edge of climate change knowledge 24/7, which I can’t be, of course. Currently, for instance, there are new findings and expanded concepts about faster rising temperatures than previous conventional understanding has posited, and I’ve had to make my best guess that 2035 will see the rise of 1.7-1.8 Celsius in the global annual average. By the time I have the fourth book’s manuscript well in hand, I’ll have to best guess about further global annual average temperature rise in 2047, by being as well-informed as I can be to determine that guess.

One objective of the series is to present climate change as accurately as possible and with the best scientific grounding. In this way, readers who may not be similarly inclined to keep up with the science and policies may consider their own understanding advanced, and, yes, this is something of an illusion for those future timelines, but then novels are derived from the creative act of controlled illusion. Yet more speculative, I suspect, will be the political winds and social expectations governing these timelines, made all the more challenging because making assumptions about such trends requires forecasting political and societal developments that march on up and down and sideways.

An example of this challenge of future forecasting happened when I was preparing Dear Josephine for production in 2024.The national election was underway, with Harris and Trump trading leads a number of times. The situation was sufficiently unclear, so I paused in order to suss out which way the wind was blowing. My original working assumption in the manuscript was that Harris would win, and the Biden-era clean energy work would continue, but at times this seemed less or more likely. And then November 7 happened and Trump prevailed, and after recovering from the shock, I was back to work on the manuscript to have the book’s 2029 timeline reflect this dark turn in American politics. Before I shifted the Dear Josephine story to reflect the political reality, there was similar work to do with the already published Kill Well, which has the story taking place in 2026, and so a Trump-ascendent revision was issued. The main thing I got out of this experience was this joke: Who knew that writing near-future fiction wasn’t easy?

There are other problems to solve in attempting to portray the future. These include representations of technology development, but here I think I’ve taken the right approach. Science fiction books tend to over-emphasize technology’s advancement, but for 2026, major advancements were known and other than a few mentions of how AI is becoming part of the characters’ work-a-day worlds. All the surveillance tech that figured into a plotline—things like Ring cameras and ways to hide IP tracking in emails—were already sufficiently prevalent, and a few other cyber-related tech was (one hopes) sufficiently covered by plausible handwaving. For Dear Josephine in 2029, AI is more prevalent, but not by a lot, and, no, no flying cars or major new technological developments, and that’s because human economies and technologies role out more slowly than the sci-fi-inclined often hope. Not just more slowly but also quite unevenly (tip o’ the cap to William Gisbson!), and most of the characters in this series are regular people and not pioneering tech heads.

Jump ahead to 2035, and in Over Brooklyn Hills AI and the spread of some other technologies advance, with smart glasses and haptic feedback and some modest virtual reality interfaces showing up through uneven adoption rates and with varying levels of interest. Davin, a content management systems architect involved with an online “local newspaper,” is a bit tech-forward, but he’s in his early seventies in 2035 and set in his ways, with his biggest tech adoption being a wide-screen interactive monitor that he can gesture at to swipe and select away using haptic wrist bands, but otherwise he’s using his laptop pretty much the way most people today do with keyboard and some voice interface. There’s the 6G networks that provide ubiquitous Wi-Fi.

This challenge of moderating regular people’s interactions with tech changes grows harder the further one goes into the future but faulting on the side of less-is-more is the right bet. For the Farm to Me story taking place in 2047, there’s a part that involves regenerative agriculture, and there are advances in sensor technologies that can accurately analyze carbon sequestration in soil. This sort of development is not a big stretch but rather an incremental improvement in monitoring systems, not doubt aided by AI-based computations. Still no flying cars, at least in any sort of common use by regular people. Improved information search and analysis is to be expected, of course, and this is likely to get some attention, but likely focused on the tension between those who desire better results than the low-hanging fruit of the personalization and prediction engines that typify Spotify and Netflix today. There will be some movement toward direct democracy, although mostly in the form of growing public interest and hardly a done deal. The production and markets for cultured meat and fermentation-based protein are becoming well established. The failure of property insurance and the threat to housing markets in some areas will be leaking into the general economy. There will be some new nuclear reactors, although fewer than one might expect, since such energy production is hampered by high costs and bankruptcies.

In Farm to Me, I’m looking at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, which happens to be based in Great Barrington, and you may remember Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered that was written by the founder E.F. Schumacher. I want to consider what the shift toward a more local economy might look like, especially in response to climate change, although this will be more in the background, I suspect. Did I mention no flying cars?

Of course, I’ve got to write the damn thing first.

The post Writing the Future of Climate Change first appeared on David Guenette.

Everybody tries to figure things out, although what is being figured out is hardly the same for everyone. Nor is the method for figuring things out the same for everyone, with academics a class of its own, and this applies to climate fiction, too.

Here’s how “Six books to help you explore the role of storytelling in the climate fight,” starts:

Humans are storytelling animals. 

That, at least, is one of the stories that humans tell about themselves. We are not logic machines or information processors; we need the tug of a narrative thread to carefully follow an argument. 

This poses a challenge for science, especially climate science, which has such a long timeframe, such a vast playing field, and way too many characters. But climate scientists, social scientists, reporters, and activists have tried, in permutating collaborations, to meet this challenge. And they have stories to tell about their efforts. (Or should we call them quests?) 

You have to love academics, and I mean this positively. Appearing in Yale Climate Connections, this article runs the deck, “This special selection includes books on storytelling, science, and climate change.” The article is found through an initiative of the Yale Center for Environmental Communication. The article is written by Michael Svoboda and was published on January 30, 2026. Svoboda has been at George Washington University and teaching in the writing program there for two decades-plus, where “… he has pursued two very different research programs—on ancient Greek rhetoric and on communicating climate change. In 2010, he became a regular contributor to Yale Climate Connections. His current book project—and the focus of his year with GW’s Humanities Center—will further develop pieces he wrote for YCC on how climate change is depicted in advertising, in popular books and magazines, in documentaries and fictional movies, and in American political cartoons and commentary.”

Like I said, you got to love academics.

There’s a sub-industry on climate fiction these days and this recent Yale Climate Connections contribution is but one manifestation. Not that the books covered in this article are necessarily focused on climate fiction, but rather are books on the forms and values of storytelling about matters including climate change. I’ve read none of them, although I have looked a bit at We All Die in the End: Storytelling in the Climate Apocalypse and read the generous, albeit hopscotched, “Read sample.” I found myself impressed.

Not surprisingly, as a writer of what I call “literary climate fiction,” I have a dog in this hunt. I’ve reviewed quite a few cli-fi books, dived deep into such pools as Climate Fiction Writers League, and explored various academically-oriented programs looking at climate fiction or more generally the topic of storytelling associated with or applied to climate fiction.

Here’s a list of posts about climate fiction on my website published since September 2025:

• Climate Fiction, Climate Fantasy: What’s the right mix of hope and disappointment? 
• Let’s Talk About Climate Optimism and Hope That We Can Write About Doing Something About Climate Change
• Is Climate Hope Fiction Hopeless?
• Climate Fiction, Optimism, and Realism
• Fun with Apocalypse, Part 2
• Writing The Steep Climes Quartet, Part 2: Economics in Climate Fiction
• Climate Change and the Human Condition
• Writing Villains on Both Sides in Climate Fiction
• Democracy, Climate Action, Climate Fiction… and Criminality
• Why We Write: A look back at why the heck I’m writing a four-book climate fiction series

There are more, going back to mid-2023, too, back when the first book of The Steep Climes Quartet, Kill Well, was published, although I’m not sure what this tells me. Maybe that I’m a slow learner or that I still have questions about what kinds of climate fiction may be most efficacious?

Climate Fiction’s Scorecard

There are plenty of great climate fiction works out there. I place Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future in the top tier, although the scale is global and across many domains and the book carries a lot of policy wonkiness, but entertainingly so. The Deluge, by Stephen Markley, is another solid work along a similar scope as Ministry. Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver, places readers into the lives of everyday characters, encouraging readers to live alongside these characters in regular lives, even as the sublime aspects of climate change manifest. Weather, by Jenny Offill, accomplishes much the same, but at an even subtler level. Snowflake: A Novel, by Arthur Jeon, is a book I’ve greatly appreciated both for its form—journal entries by a climate/Trump obsessive high school senior with spectrum disorder—and its perspective, and there are a number of independently published works by others of note, but if you want to see more, look under “Other Writing” category on my website for reviews.

You’ll also see books that carry my complaint. One critical aspect is catastrophic climate occurrences that fall outside of known science. Another critique is focused on books that re-write human culture as climate solution or adaptation, pre-supposing either the passage of time or major human cultural shift, or both. These sorts of climate fiction can be engaging but represent what I term the “You can’t get there from here” problem.

What most concerns me is the question of how writers get people interested in climate change action, which for me seems mostly that of political action (i.e., voting) to affect legislation supporting the renewable energy transition. In America today, this has become part and parcel of the struggle to continue our democratic experiment, where today’s emerging authoritative threat bleeds into the fight between fossil fuel’s policy ascendancy and the anti-competitive market conditions being imposed on the clean energy transition. Traditional storytelling, such as the hero’s journey or a main focus on action plots or disaster stories, I argue, keep people from identifying with the current situation, even if such stories can be satisfying reads in and of themselves. Unfortunately, few of us are indeed heroes or survivalists or champions on the international stage. Most of us find our attention taken up with paying next month’s rent or mortgage payment, or current or dreamed of relationships, or the grocery or utility bill. An individual’s positive climate action takes place within the quotidian and having readers identify with characters’ experiences seems the way to bridge our everyday concerns with climate concerns, and not by making people into outsized heroes but rather by showing more informed citizens who realize the normal actions within which they participate can lead to better outcomes. Still, the range of concern varies from character to character, from intense climate action involvement to indifference or denial, and why? Because this is the world in which we live and so must be represented in climate fiction to support identification by the reader with the issue of climate change and what we can do about it.

Huh. Maybe I should write an academic paper about this.

The post Figuring Out Climate Fiction first appeared on David Guenette.

The Present State of World: Them and Us

If you follow the news (ha!), you know that reducing emissions is far harder these days in the United States, thanks to Big Oil throwing pin money around to buy political influence that includes that industry acquiring President Big Oil Stooge, the man who claims that every revolution of a wind turbine costs $1000 and whose administration, through Lee Zeldin, is at this very moment killing EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding. This latest effort is designed to dismantle major climate regulations, including vehicle tailpipe standards and power plant emission rules. Clearly, optimism in climate progress has taken a hit in the U.S. Of course, the very continuation of America as a democratic entity is taking a hit, too.

On the other hand, market forces are pushing clean energy forward faster and faster. There’s a simple reason why clean energy is having its day in many other parts of the world and led by China. The reason is that clean energy is now cheaper, in and of itself, and even cheaper for undeveloped countries that may have a limited ailing grid system but can now directly build ubiquitous microgrids. Global South countries can “leapfrog” the large and capital-intensive centralized grid infrastructure. So, yes, grounds for optimism for reducing emissions are to be found in many parts of the world. China and India—not exactly small polluting players—both show signs of coal use plateauing, hence the plateauing of carbon emissions. Many other nations provide good instances for optimism, too.

Unfortunately, petrostates, among which America can be considered current King, are playing hardball. The anticipated AI boom, with its attendant needs for data centers, is seen as argument for adding hundreds of new gas electricity generation plants over the next decades. Trump and his minions are keeping coal plants active despite their absurdly higher costs. The quickest and cheapest way to expand electricity capacity is to update the grids to better manage the excess capacity that currently exists, but somehow new gas plants and building out new grids are the order of the day, while future nuclear reactors the order of tomorrow. Windfarm projects get shut down and solar and battery projects go to the back of the interconnect queue, as we are told to dream of fusion and pretend that natural gas is a “clean” fuel.

How the Story is Shaping Up

Writing the American perspective about where we’re headed to address climate change is depressing at the moment. In fact, Kill Well, the first book in the series and published in the second half of 2023, takes place in 2026, but it had to be revised away from the initial rosier picture of continuing Biden-type climate and clean energy actions. The revision was to accommodate the shocking taking of the White House and Congress by Trump a little more than a year after the original publication date.

Dear Josephine, taking place in 2029, is the second book of the Steep Climes Quartet. This book was meant to be published in the Fall of 2024, but the necessary Trump-caused rewrites pushed publication to Spring 2025. The good news (fictionally speaking) is that Trump’s reign was soundly repudiated in the midterms of 2026 and election of 2028, and by 2029 the new administration is working furiously to get back on track. Of course, the timelines for legislation are long and progress slow. I’m writing fiction, not fantasy, after all, or at least that’s my fervent hope.

In Dear Josephine,the nation experiences a terrible blow when Florida’s Gold Coast, home of Miami, is largely destroyed by a monster hurricane hitting at the worst time and under the worst circumstances. Despite this, America rallies. Heck, even Davin, the somewhat hapless series’ main character who lives in the Berkshires, manages to help out in his modest way. The expectation that people will be inclined to help is no stretch: what we’re seeing from the communities in Minnesota, among other places, revives our understanding that we must all work together.

Of course, underlying the Dear Josephine story are a couple of assumptions. The first assumption is that America avoids collapse as a democracy, rallying to excise the current fascist cancer. The second assumption is that Big Oil’s thumb is taken off the scales and the ecological and economic benefits of the clean energy transition are ever more attractive. This second assumption doesn’t mean that Big Oil capitulates, to absolutely no one’s surprise. Big Oil keeps fighting, but their day in court is approaching. Unfortunately, the frustrations engendered by the Trump second term and the ascendancy of the Oligarchy and the long-running pushback against clean energy gives rise to a climate action terrorist group calling itself No One is Safe, which makes sure that they are true to their word when it comes to oil executives and Big Oil’s infrastructure not being safe.

By 2035, when Over Brooklyn Hills takes place, there’s been a lot of progress on The Electrotech Revolution (thanks, Ember!). But the consequences of climate change advance as well. There’s a horrible and long heatwave that blankets NYC and parts of several Eastern states and the relatively cool green hills of the Berkshires finds itself with too many young people up from the city and everything is already booked. If you’re wondering if this story line is climate migration writ small, give yourself points. In the background of the book some big trouble is brewing with huge numbers of climate migrants around the world, including at our southern border. Our southern border is now militarized against the cartels and their various violent trades that embrace smuggling people. NOS shows up down Mexico way in a tight story line, but you’ll have to buy and read Over Brooklyn Hills when it publishes this Spring. I ain’t saying nothing.

Where the Story is Going

I have lots of notes for Farm to Me, the fourth and final book in the series, but I can’t tell you how the story plays out. I can tell you that Farm to Me takes place in 2047 and there’s a question of whether emission reductions are keeping pace against climate change problems. I’m not sure exactly how slowly, but we are all sure that we’ve moved too slowly and that the future days will see extreme weather events due to further increases in average global temperature. I’ll let you know that by 2035, in Dear Josephine, the average may be as high as 1.7 degrees centigrade, although there are those who say it’s lower and those who argue the average global temperature is higher. By 2047 the temperature will be higher yet, although I haven’t done my due diligence to come to the amount of increase.

We’re already locked into negative climate change consequences for many decades to come, and, yes, I’m being very conservative. What I know is that in this final book, droughts and water scarcity have collapsed or badly hurt some of America’s best food production areas. I’m looking forward to diving deeper into regenerative agriculture and describing how agriculture—think truck farms—has again come to the Northeast, where, all around New England, we can still find the stone wall traces of the area’s rich agricultural past.

Of course, there’s a murder from an effort to extort consolidation of competing food distribution companies. Of course, the rest of the world is heard about from the news. Of course, progress in decarbonizing the economy continues, even while other economic engines emerge for resilience and adaptation. Of course, the problems inherent in human society continue and the world of 2047 therefore is not all that different from today.

I’m writing fiction, not fantasy.

The post Climate Fiction, Climate Fantasy: What’s the right mix of hope and disappointment? first appeared on David Guenette.

There’s an old Downeaster joke I know, but here’s what AI Summary says of it:

You can’t get there from here” is a classic Maine and New England saying used to humorously explain that a destination is actually very close but requires overly complicated, non-direct directions due to the area’s tricky roads, or that a far-off place is simply too difficult to reach efficiently, often baffling GPS devices too. It’s a sign of local dialect, meaning “it’s complicated” or “you’re nearby but I can’t explain easily.”

Here’s another AI Summary on the definition of hope, and gosh-darn it, but this starts off with a reference to Aristotle, and that is thrilling for me, since I used Aristotle’s definition as the epigraph in Kill Well, my first book in my literary climate fiction series, The Steep Climes Quartet:

Aristotle viewed hope (elpis) as a neutral anticipation of the future, linked to imagination and motivation, but not a primary virtue; it’s a “dream of a waking man” that provides vision and drives action, requiring experience and the possibility of both good and bad outcomes for true hopefulness (euelpis). He connected it to courage, confidence, and ethical self-improvement, stating that hopefulness underpins deliberation, but warned against empty optimism, emphasizing experience as crucial for justified hopes, distinguishing it from mere youthful wishfulness.

Well, well, didn’t I pick my epigraph well?

As a writer of climate fiction, it’s understandable that I’m curious about the nature of the writing world into which I’ve thrust myself. Yes, this sort of curiosity is not mandatory, but what can I say? I was an English Major.

It turns out that understanding climate fiction is a more difficult task than it should seem. One problem straightaway is that there is no such genre as “climate fiction,” at least in any official sense. Look up books on Amazon, for example, and no such genre, or, more to the point, sub-genre. If you read through the sub-genres of science fiction that range from “Adventure” to “TV, Movie, and Video Gamer Adaptations,” with twenty-one others squeezed between, you won’t find climate fiction. The genre of climate fiction is missing within R.R. Bowker’s Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) too, nor does the Library of Congress’s Library of Congress Classification (LCC) acknowledge climate fiction as either genre or sub-genre. Who knows? Maybe overseas the Bliss Bibliographic Classification, a system known for its highly faceted structure that allows for great specificity, and primarily used in some British libraries, carries “climate fiction.”

Substack, Climate Fiction, and Thrutopia

These days what I’m more interested in is an emergent term, “thrutopia,” which AI Summary describes as follows:

Thrutopia is a concept and emerging genre, particularly in climate fiction, that describes a hopeful but realistic future where humanity overcomes immense challenges (like climate change) by “fighting through” obstacles, rather than falling into paralyzing dystopia or relying on unrealistic utopia. It’s about finding practical, grounded paths to a flourishing future through “bold and inspired pragmatism,” focusing on adaptation, community, and systemic change, not easy solutions.

The term is often credited to Prof. Rupert Read, from a 2017 article in Huffington Post, where his byline ran with “Philosopher working and writing at the University of East Anglia, Chair of Green House think tank, former Green Party of England and Wales councillor, spokesperson, MEP-candidate & MP-candidate.” Manda Scott, author of Any Human Power, added to the definition, suggesting that “a Thrutopia crucially needs to offer at least one plausible, inspiring, grounded route map through from exactly where we are to a future we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.” This quote is from her post on Substack’s Climate Fiction Writers League titled “Thrutopian Writing – a new genre for a new world,” published on May 28, 2024.

But what is the state of climate fiction? There are many dystopian and post-climate apocalyptic stories. If you do a quick search on Amazon Books using the phrase “climate fiction” in lieu of having the sub-genre available, you’ll get over 50,000 results. As applicable any and all critiques of Amazon’s search function may be, I was pleased to see two of the strongest climate fiction books present on the first page of results: The Ministry for the Future: A Novel, by Kim Stanley Robinson and The Deluge, by Stephen Markley, both of which I would hold up as great examples of Thrutopia. There were a number of short story anthologies, including Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, edited by Grist and adrienne maree brown and Metamorphosis: Climate Fiction for a Better Future, by Grist, which, by the way, is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change for the past twenty-five years.

There are now books about writing climate fiction. Appearing on the first page search results referenced above was Climate Fiction Futures: The Optimistic Writer’s Guide to Cli-Fi Success, by F. Cocentino and The Climate-Conscious Writers Handbook, by Wren James; James runs the Climate Fiction Writers League. Of course, if your search phrase is “climate fiction optimism” you get twenty-six results in all. “Climate fiction thrutopia” gives you eight results.

Grounds for pessimism?

Climate Fiction, Optimism, and Realism

In a recent post of mine, titled “Climate Fiction, Optimism, and Realism” I explore the role of climate fiction in fostering hope and action (you’ll find parts of that post cannibalized in this post). That post was inspired by this Literary Hub roundtable on the new anthology Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures, from MIT Press. The Literary Hub essay is titled “On the Urgency of Climate Change, Creating Hope in a Crisis, and the Limits of Western Storytelling: A Roundtable on Our Climate Futures with Libia Brenda, Vandana Singh, Gu Shi, and Hannah Onoguwe.” The essay was written by Joey Eschrich, who is the co-editor of the above-mentioned anthology collection of speculative fiction, essays, and artworks, just publishing on December 2. Here’s how the anthology is described by Eschrich:

We challenged our contributors, who represent 17 countries around the world, to envision hopeful futures shaped by climate action. These visions of the future are grounded in the scientific consensus about the severity and urgency of the climate crisis, but also in the cultural and geographic complexities of real places across the globe, and real communities on the ground.

There’s a lot I like in the essay, and the anthology’s focus on local, culturally specific stories especially resonated. Among the global contributors, such as Hannah Onoguwe (Nigeria) and Gu Shi (China), there’s a common argument that hope is found in resilience and the “unwavering courage to never give up.”

I now have the anthology in hand, and so I have the sense of how far into the future the stories are chronologically, including excellent works set decades or even centuries down the road. Still, I’m wondering if true optimism better rests in “realistic” stories set in the near-term, through narratives that show how we get from our current crisis to a cleaner future. Of course, I better believe this, since my own series, The Steep Climes Quartet, which has books set between 2026 and 2047, is an example of fiction that grounds climate progress in the recognizable political and economic realities of the present day. It could just be that I’m obsessed with how we get there from here, to misquote the proverbial Downeaster.

And then another paragraph I liked from the essay by Eschrich:

It [climate change] kicks up chaos in disparate forms everywhere—a wildfire here, catastrophic flooding there; crop failures here, migration crises there—but it’s also a protean, or perhaps a tentacular thing. We’re all dealing with it locally, on our home turf, with our friends and neighbors. Climate stress and climate action are multifarious, which makes it easy to forget that we’re all in the same struggle together.

One of the contributors, Hannah Onoguwe, who has ties to West Africa, raises an interesting point:

I’ve found that with readers, when a story is rooted where they are, then it morphs into something that could be happening to someone they might have bumped into recently. When it actually resonates and the issues are close to home, they are more likely to be moved to action. It ceases to just be science fiction, something “out there” from the West created and consumed purely for entertainment.

Climate Imagination carries a subtitle: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures. Gu Shi, who contributed two short stories, caught my eye in this regard. “City of Choice” presents a world where, “due to climate change, an annual ‘Flood Season’ arrives each summer, submerging the city’s roads, plazas, green spaces, and the lower floors of buildings. The protagonist, a mother who works as an urban planner, uses her professional knowledge to enhance the city’s resilience while repeatedly escaping crises with her three children, aided by artificial intelligence.” Shi’s take on optimism is that things can get worse, but we can take action. “I believe that this unwavering courage to never give up in the face of disaster is perhaps the greatest form of hope.”

Well, amen.

For Onoguwe, her novelette “Death is Not an Ornament” conjures up another Nigerian civil war for a hopeful climate future, because “much has to change besides the mindsets of stakeholders—it will require policies and institutions that ensure that countries are actually keeping their word when they make environmental commitments.” She continues:

To catalyze change, we will need people fueled by this radical passion who are also able to communicate in the local languages and proffer little everyday practices and manageable changes that work. I think if we turn away from purely economic considerations to a more nurturing outlook, then it won’t seem like we’re losing too many of the benefits and conveniences of the current status quo.

Overall, the thing I was most curious about is not only the grounding aspects of the anthology’s story settings, but whether or not these stories are temporally local, by which I mean near- and mid-futures that reflect the reader’s world. Writing future worlds is challenging, but therein lies a common problem with climate fiction: worlds decades and centuries past our own time may reflect consequences of climate change and even offer optimistic new worlds that have overcome or adapted to climate change, but such stories miss the thread from where we are today and these future worlds. In the end, I’m more inclined to consider that the most optimistic climate fiction is grounded in the world we recognize as our own but also shows how we can deal with climate change.

There’s a solid basis for optimism as many other countries find themselves leapfrogging fossil fuel infrastructure into clean energy, although, arguably, America under Trump is among the most pessimistic locales relative to climate change today. One can argue that Trump will prove little more than a speed bump in America’s path toward the clean energy transition, because legislation is the biggest driver of the clean energy transition, with Biden’s IIJA and IRA legislation making the point, at least before these acts got smothered in their cribs. Economics plays another essential role, although the American concept of “free markets” is tainted these days when the concept of hope can seem dim and dimmer.

Nevertheless, lowering carbon emissions is the order of today in order to avoid a worse tomorrow, including those worse tomorrows that writers of climate apocalypse seem so overly fond. Lowered carbon emissions won’t happen at a significant level unless the nation transitions to low carbon power (and, yeah, a bunch of other stuff, but energy and transportation are main drivers of carbon emissions). This transition will happen faster with the right legislation that mandates or supports the work needed to embrace it. In America, today, that’s the basis for climate optimism. That’s how we get there from here.

The two books of the four in my series are published, and the third is due out soon. Kill Well takes place this year, while Dear Josephine (Book Two) is set in 2029 and the next book, Over Brooklyn Hills, takes place in 2035. The last book, Farm to Me, is set in 2047. The series through characters live in one locale, and climate change problems and progress are seen directly and primarily through the Berkshires (Massachusetts) perspective. It isn’t that there aren’t plenty of plot points and transient characters all over the series, or fossil fuel thinktanks and pro-climate progress actions in Washington D.C., but the perspective is local. And that is as it should be, considering that just like for the vast part of the American majority, the struggle is seen from where one sits and we mostly don’t sit in the labs and boardrooms and halls of power. For most fortunate Americans, climate change is mostly a matter of our drowning in news, the occasional deluge or smoky wildfire atmosphere or stretch of hot days notwithstanding.

Describing a path toward climate progress within a recognizable world for the reader is an act of hope, one grounded in today’s and tomorrow’s world where we live, with all the facts, political realities, societal struggles, business conflicts, household economic anxieties, personal relationships, and all the other big and small questions, just like in our very own lives. This is the story that needs believing. This is the story of actual thrutopia, the act of hope showing, with all our stuttering steps, how we will get there.

Why I Don’t Like Climate Fiction

“Why I Don’t Like Climate Fiction” is the title of a post by D. A Baden, founder of Green Stories and Habitat Press, published on Climate Fiction Writers League’s Substack on Oct 28, 2025. Refreshingly, she begins, “It’s a controversial title for an article for the Climate Fiction Writers League, and I admit it’s mostly an attention-grabbing ploy.”

Baden’s complaint is that much of climate fiction is “avoidance and distraction” by way of descriptive imagination of how bad things can become. But “if people were going to be scared green, then they already would be,” argues Baden early in her post. She cites studies about climate fiction’s efficacy—or, rather, as the data mounts, the lack of efficacy—in getting people acting for climate progress. She talks about how authoritative leaders use fear and suggests that freaking people out about climate change works in inaction’s favor, when raising alarm serves—as she’d done with her post’s title—to chase after people’s attention. Her conclusion is thrutopian:

What I’d really love to see are positive visions of what a flourishing future might look like if we did things right. A vision to give us something to aim towards rather than run away from. I like the thrutopian ideal championed by Manda Scott and Rupert Read and others of using fiction as a space to explore some of the steps by which we can get from where we are now to where we’d like to be.to

The problem I see is that facts today—yes, despite Trump—suggest a much different world than masses of people, including climate fiction readers, huddling in fear and paralysis. The dangers of climate change are widely known, as is known that most people want something done to relieve the danger. This is according to Yale University and the partners of the 89 Precent Project, which describes itself this way:

The “89 Percent Project” is a global journalism initiative by Covering Climate Now (CCN) highlighting that around 80% of people globally support strong climate action, with research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) confirming these widespread views on climate concern and desire for solutions. Yale’s research shows Americans’ opinions on climate change, including misconceptions and desire for more info, often aligning with the project’s findings, while Yale also runs its own Planetary Solutions initiatives supporting numerous climate projects.

Another counterfactual of climate fiction as doom is seen in the emergence of the “affordability” issue in today’s politics working in conjunction with what Ember calls The Electrotech Revolution. The transition to clean energy is accelerating. Over the next couple of years, and especially as the next American political cycle gears up, wider understanding that clean energy is both the least expensive and the quickest way to boost supply for growing electricity is likely to become widely understood. Add to this the digital grid management systems already being put in place (well, in some states more than others—care to choose a color?), and it’s hard to see how Big Oil wins this argument, at least long term. Of course, we may also see the courts—and I am imagining the Supreme Court getting set straight (impeachments, please)—deciding against Big Oil in many ways.

Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of climate fiction is not that the genre has alarmed people into inaction, but rather that too little climate fiction celebrates the advancements today that are dropping carbon emissions. But too many climate fiction stories, when dealing with near-future, present worlds where the IIJA and IRA hadn’t passed in 2021 and 2022, respectively, or that solar electricity generation isn’t now 90 percent lower in costs over the last decade or so, or that wind power works and is economically better (like solar) than natural gas electricity generation, or that batteries haven’t dropped in costs so radically—and aren’t done yet!—that the old bugaboo about “intermittency” has been pushed aside.

Clean energy progress is possible and happening at scale in a quickly growing number of countries. Plenty of challenges remain, but the path forward is clear and real.

What of these challenges? One, of course, is the power of Big Oil and its history of corruption and violence to maintain and expand their business of dumping poison into the world. What we’re seeing in the United States today is this power on full display, with Big Oil’s greasy thumb hard-pressed on the scales. Shouldn’t climate fiction stories look at such situations and suggest that Big Oil might keep its thumb greasy,  but all the better for taking fingerprints down at the station?

So where is thrutopian climate fiction? I argue that climate fiction that takes us from where we are today toward a world that has made progress against climate change remains largely AWOL. There’s a lot of climate fiction that shows better futures, but somewhat hopelessly fail to make how we got there part of the story.

The good news is that there is some great thrutopian climate fiction, although I’m not sure these authors think of themselves as Thrutopians. First on my list is Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. This book does the hard work of showing the world and all the messy components of progress; that Robinson makes UN bureaucratic maneuvering and the meetings of the giants of finance captivating is a truly impressive accomplishment. Ministry for the Future has remarkable scale, both in the wide scope of locations and characters, but also in the book’s chronological span. This book, all on its own, has significantly advanced real-world conversations and arguments about new forms of financial instruments and currency designed to push investment into longer timeframes when carbon-reduction investments show attractive returns. Add compelling characters and a number of genre-like plotlines and you are on a riveting ride from where we are today to where we want to be tomorrow.

Another good example is The Deluge, by Stephen Markley, which is, similarly to Robinson’s Ministry, multi-decade, multi-locale, and multitudinous characters that all help to approximate the real world. And like Ministry, there’s a lot of attention to nuts-and-bolts issues of solving climate change. The Great Transition, by nick fuller goggins, is another good example, although one framing climate solutions in retrospect, looking back from a time of action that includes holding accountable climate guilty parties such as those in the C-Suites of energy corporations.

Take Hope: Here’s the Conclusion

The Steep Climes Quartet, according to the definitions, is clearly a thrutopian series. What differentiates this series from most other thrutopian works is in its grounding in the personal. Readers get to follow around people doing climate stuff, but the thrust is to build a world familiar to us, which means a world where climate change is not the number one concern of most characters, despite climate change’s grave dangers. I haven’t asked AI to analyse the stories, but I’d guess that for many of the series’ through characters, climate change is some spots behind paying the mortgage or figuring out what’s for dinner. This may come across as flippant, but I assure you that climate change plays a central role in the stories. That doesn’t mean, especially for those of us who aren’t activists or politicians or academics concentrating on the issue and challenges of climate change, that most people live and breath climate change. We may be assaulted by the topic in the news. We may experience flood damage from a terrifying deluge, or find ourselves gasping for a clean breath of air during a bout of wildfire season, but we’re more likely to grumble about our house insurance going up and up, and may not even understand the casual link with climate change.

In other words, despite climate change, we don’t stop being people and living our lives. (Well, unless you’ve been swept away in a flood, or burned out of your home, or see your kid get asthma from all the PPM.) Those of us who are paying attention—and that is a hell of a lot of us, these days—know climate change is a terrible challenge, but mostly we’re thinking about the next bill due, the car or dental appointment, the grocery list, our child’s birthday. Most of us likely give far more attention to why we keep getting swiped left on the dating app, or what exactly our best friend meant when he made that odd comment last week, or what the blood test results expected tomorrow might portend.

Readers of The Steep Climes Quartet could come away from reading with a better understanding of externalities or more prone to look carefully at just how close that small stream is to their house. But the books fail if the reader doesn’t see his or her own life reflected accurately in the pages and thus not identify with the characters who sometimes find themselves worrying about just what, exactly, they should be thinking about climate change and what to do about it (hint: vote!), but all within their own human experiences, because that’s where we all are today.

We live and we hope for a better world and we sometimes struggle a bit about it.

Well, that’s my hope.

Of course, the focus on characters is why I describe The Steep Climes Quartet as “literary climate fiction.” Just so you know that I am indeed an English Major, let me leave you with this very funny definition of literary fiction I came across the other day.

On her Substack, Shannan Mann posted a Note, as follows: “literary fiction means the protagonist makes bad decisions slowly,” which I find to be terrifically funny and shockingly apt. But I think myself in good company—her list of bona fides on her Substack profile includes Creative Director @ ONLY POEMS & Strange Pilgrims; Executive Editor @ Sub Club; writing a horror magic-realist novel; reading classics & poetry; researching literary publishing.

It is important to find other optimists in this world of ours.

The post Let’s Talk About Climate Optimism and Hope That We Can Write About Doing Something About Climate Change first appeared on David Guenette.

I’d written, “I like a survival story as much as anyone. I’m less sanguine about taking on fundamental catastrophes for shallow entertainment, however. It strikes me as unseemly as well as potentially unhelpful or even dangerous by suggesting—as inadvertent as such suggestion might be—that nuclear war or climate change or even a zombie plague is just another of those sort of things that could happen, and boy, can they have an element of fun!”

I especially like zombies as a secret pleasure, although mostly in terms of movies and television shows, where part of my enjoyment often rests with the appreciation of the ludicrousness or stupidity of the storyline or character or production values or any and all such combinations thereof. After the first season of The Walking Dead, for instance, the fact that the characters had not developed effective means to clean up the zombie problem made me wonder if the series was about a different plague, maybe widespread lead poisoning. Yeah, I know. I can be snarky, but message me if you what to hear my top ten ways for solving The Walking Dead zombie problem.

Anyway, one point of the July 2023 post was that there are too many climate fiction stories that leave out the deeper human element, instead killing off huge numbers of people completely dry-eyed and even giddy. This isn‘t just experienced in some climate fiction works, but also in EMP-related books and a slew of post-nuclear war holocaust novels or any other such stories grounded in wide-spread immense catastrophes.

Another and more central point of that post was that well-written or not, climate fiction that sets itself in a future post-disaster time means that the novel isn’t set in our own time and therefore less likely to offer readers opportunities to directly identify with the characters and settings of the story. There’s no guarantee that setting climate fiction in our own time results in readers identifying with the story, or that the story is any good. There are certainly well-written and engaging climate fiction set in some barely recognizable future that still illuminates climate change. The question of effectiveness of books to educate and motivate readers toward climate change awareness and action is, in the end, a literary issue, just as the question of a book’s engaging qualities are a literary issue.

But one value in setting stories about climate change within a recognizable setting—our place and time now and the near future—is that the topic of climate change action can be explored and modelled from our current perspective. BTW, the short version of action modelling is: Vote for the right candidates who support the clean energy transition ASAP. Climate change is now seen as real by  large majorities, so the next step is to see the clean energy transition as not only progress against carbon emissions, but also as an economically beneficial energy system. Oh, and getting the right people in office to support the transition, to repeat myself.

Davin, the main through-character of the series, is still at a distance from climate issues in the first book, Kill Well, set in 2026. By 2029, in Dear Josephine, he’s paying more attention and has even joined Climate Covenant, a pro-climate progress candidate vetting organization. By 2035, in Over Brooklyn Hills (the book due this coming Spring), Davin is modestly tithing to Climate Covenant and Congress has been actively supporting clean energy progress through legislation. The books aren’t fairy tales, though. In 2035, fossil fuel interests are still playing hardball, protecting their profits at the expense of all, but hey, even Davin has rooftop solar and an EV. Unfortunately, another decade from now, climate change consequences are going to be exacting higher costs.

Written years ago, my first novel-length work—The Wall, a collection of inter-related stories sometimes called a short story cycle or story sequence or composite novel—presented snapshots of a post-nuclear apocalypse across time ranging from one month post-event to eight years post-event, each taking place in the same location but mainly with different characters per story, although there were some re-occurring characters, too. One impetus for that work was to counter the absurdist post-nuclear apocalypse works that had authors killing off millions merely to serve up survivalist fantasies. There was a rash of such survivalist works in the Reagan years, inspired, I imagine, by the increase in the nuclear threat of that time, not to mention the shifting focus and strength of the NRA.

While I am pretty sure that I’ve forgotten three-quarters of what I’d learned about the consequences of nuclear explosions over the many years working on The Wall, that learning was important to my effort to extrapolate as accurately as possible and so better imagine what it might be like for people in that situation. I was particularly interested in how different characters might feel, which is to say their psychological and emotional states. Imagining characters’ feelings, I believed, would be essential for understanding the conditions of their survival or whatever one might call such existence. Getting details right makes for a better story, too.

Writing The Steep Climes Quartet requires a similar effort to mount the learning curve, although in terms of climate change, not nuclear bombs. One thing that remains the same between my earlier writing and the work I’m currently engaged in is the effort toward realism. One part of the reality of climate change is the costs climate change exacts. As I wrote in 2023, “It is easy to ignore the prospect of a future drowned world when your feet are still dry, but when you realize, for instance, the cost of climate change for you today, you just might pay more attention.”

One can hope.

The post Fun with Apocalypse, Part 2 first appeared on David Guenette.

I thought it would be good for me to revisit that post and see what I didn’t know what to say. A lot has gone on since then, including having two of the four books out in the world and the third in manuscript revision.

Here’s a quote from the July 15, 2023 post:

I was interested in writing a book that would offset the deficit I found in many climate fiction novels, which was the tendency to create apocalyptic scenarios—drowned worlds, burnt worlds, post-apocalyptic survivor worlds. There are some entertaining and good—even great—books of this sort, but I was concerned that many such books did little to make climate change real to readers.

How well have I achieved this goal?

I’ve created characters and some of them appear in all four books, and these books span from 2026, then 2029, then 2035 (the in-process book, Over Brooklyn Hills), and the final book taking place in 2047. The main characters are grounded in one locale—Berkshire County, Massachusetts—and there’s a wide spread in the climate change awareness among the characters. The time span across the series shows the main character, a somewhat hapless 61 year old man struggling with a divorce and its economic and personal aftermath, become less hapless, both in his day to day life and in his understanding of and action on climate change. Does he become an activist? No. He’s a regular enough guy—middle class, but with many money worries, and the rising costs of energy is one such worry. Another worry is the rising costs of living in a world that suffers increasing numbers of negative climate-related events, whether in the price of food or insurance or relationships.

There are several characters who know some or a lot about climate change, and Jeannie Louise Smith, a freelance analyst focused on climate change policies, is one example. There are an assortment of friends and neighbors, and references to politics and social trends, and there are bad actors, too. On thing I’ve learned in the course of writing the series is that I like writing characters who murder and scheme, but I assure you, I’m innocent in the real world.

Most of the content of these books is not about climate change, and that’s because much of our life is not about climate change, but rather our families, our work, our financial anxieties, friends, and love interests. We haven’t stopped being human because of climate change and these many other things will continue to dominate our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Many of us now understand that climate change costs us more, but it is rare for this fact of life to be part of climate fiction. If I were to focus on catastrophic disasters—climate apocalypse—the identification of the reader with the characters becomes weaker because this moves well beyond addressing the issues we share. In world-wide floods or desertification of huge swathes of the planet, people—fictitious and real—aren’t worrying about grocery bills and invoices from power utilities or the jump in house insurance premiums or how voting a certain way may help ease financial discomfort—and climate change!—or make things worse. Furthermore, in the timeframe of the series, such climate apocalypse is not backed by science, at least outside of any unfortunate series of untimely tipping points, and the resources to ameliorate some of the current effects of climate change remain available for the vast majority of citizens in the developed world. This doesn’t mean that some poor sap standing in the wrong place at the wrong time won’t get swept away by a sudden deluge, or get wiped out by a wildfire, or succumb to heat stroke and illness, but such small disasters will remain for most of us news stories, not direct experience. That holds true even with the destruction of large parts of the Gold Coast, in Dear Josephine, where Miami, hit by a strong hurricane in the worst possible conditions, ceases to exist as it is today. America and Europe survive these sorts of disasters. Such disasters are painful and extremely costly, but are not enough to bring about the collapse of our societies. I’m not soft-pedalling the consequences of climate change, but rather putting the consequences into perspective, both in chronology and scope. This annoys some people, including some of the characters in the series who know that we need to act as fast as possible today to constrain the scope of future disasters.

By the way, I don’t mean to suggest that climate fiction that projects into mid- and far-term futures can’t be excellent. For example, I‘m a huge fan of Paolo Bacigalupi ever since reading The Windup Girl and I read pretty much everything he publishes and I recommend his work widely. Of course, the work of Kim Stanley Robinson is outstanding, and his recent novel, The Ministry of the Future, is rightly considered the seminal climate fiction work, as new as this book is. Robinson (or “Stan” as I’ve learned to reference him in my video viewing of many of his excellent interviews, lectures, and panel discussions) has emerged not only as one of the best thinkers about climate change solutions but also one of the most effective public voices about global warming, and his timeline in this book is congruent to much of my series. The largest difference between Ministry and The Steep Climes Quartet—besides raw writing talent!—is the longer timeframe applied to one locale and characters, in what I think of as a longitudinal study. It is my aim to take readers recognizing their current reality through to where their recognizable reality morphs, because of climate change, into something they can see as an unwanted future. In doing so, I hope that some readers might then consider this unwanted future and take action to avoid it.

By the way, if you want to avoid an unwanted future, and you don’t want to read the books, here’s the Cliff Notes: Political action that places candidates into power to create legislation that reduces carbon emissions and supports the transition to clean energy as quickly as possible, and let’s throw in the export of clean energy to the developing world so that those countries can also enjoy abundant energy without stinking up the joint like we did. I’m less concerned about an individual’s action, say to install rooftop solar and battery backup or to buy an electric vehicle, because the marketplace will guide the individual to economically beneficial actions, and EVs are already closing fast as the best economic option relative to gas cars. The death of gas cars will come sooner or later because that kind of vehicle is intrinsically more complex and expensive to manufacture, and because the cost of carbon pollution will rise. Driving an internal combustion car will be not only more expensive to buy, but ridiculously expensive to use, but I digress.

The series is also interested in political factors, including which party claims the pocketbook issues. Want lower cost pressure on the health system? Shift away from fossil fuels. Want lower power costs? Shift away from fossil fuels. What to avoid paying high taxes because infrastructure repair and adaptation projects are more expensive with worse climate change consequences? Shift away from fossil fuels.

The big challenge is that lower power prices and other economic advantages of the transition to clean energy will take time to manifest, because we’re still using fossil fuels and, in the case of electricity rates based on the most expensive power generation input, that’s fossil fuel-based power generation. The big challenge is that there’s a lot of work that needs doing to reap the benefits of clean energy and fossil fuel supporters will cry that costs are going up because of the clean energy transition. We need to rightly blame fossil fuel corporations and the long-established system that artificially supports fossil fuel that hides very real costs, and here a really tough challenge emerges in the writing of the series. One beta reader for Dear Josephine noted that I’d used the term “externalities” X number of times and suggested that the number be at least cut in half.

Curious about externalities? I’m glad you asked. Externalities are the costs that the producers of fossil fuel don’t pay  in the making and consumption of their products but instead allowed to freely dump greenhouse gases (and particulates and other pollutions) right into the atmosphere and pass those costs to everyone. Typically, the costs resulting from the production, distribution, and consumption of any other product gets paid by those manufacturers and the users of those products, but fossil fuels get a free pass.

Except, of course, there’s nothing free. Everybody pays the price in health issues, environmental degradation, and increasingly costly climate change consequences. The International Monetary Fund(!) puts the real cost of fossil fuel at an additional $7 trillion worldwide, annually. In 2024, IMF estimates governance policies in America provided $757 billion to fossil fuels, including through industry-specific tax breaks, below-market lease deals, and tax and accounting advantages, among other perks not typically available to other industries. The direct subsidies are to the tune of $31 billion, but the much larger of the $757b cost is hidden in what is often called “indirect” subsidies. The fossil fuel corporations just dump pollutants directly, and the use of fossil fuels dumps pollutants directly, and the costs are borne by every person on this good Earth, including the cost of premature death to the tune of millions of people each year. Here’s a great primer from the wonderful Hannah Richie. Here’s a similar take by Sarah Carballo, writing for FracTracker Alliance:

Despite claims of free-market competition, the U.S. fossil fuel industry benefits from an estimated $760 billion annually through subsidies, tax breaks, and unpriced externalities, with direct government subsidies alone accounting for $10 to $52 billion per year. These policies distort energy markets, hinder renewable energy growth, and cost taxpayers billions. In this article, FracTracker Alliance explores the real cost of fossil fuel dependence and the policies enabling it.

These days, clean energy makes better sense because it is cheaper, even ignoring externalities. If the real cost of fossil fuels were known by all, no one would think fossil fuels make better economic sense than clean energy. Consider externalities and clean energy is absurdly cheaper in comparison to fossil fuels.

Of course, in fiction, pulling in such concepts as externalities is a writing challenge. I hope I’ve succeeded.

The goal I’d set myself with The Steep Climes Quartet was to create a world that is recognizable to regular Americans, and while I am less confident with many other countries, I’ll still claim relevance to other developed Western nations. This fictional world is like ours, where most of us are still dealing with the climate crisis at a remove—news stories, a bad storm, or when smoke gets in our eyes. In this fictional world, like ours, most of us don’t appreciate how much we are already caught up in the climate crisis, despite the many ways it already affects our daily lives. When I started this work, I had thought that it would be a challenge to keep from over-exaggerating the present effects of climate change, but it turns out the challenge has been to keep ahead of climate change effects that are entering history on a seemingly daily basis.

This balancing act is especially difficult in the first book, Kill Well, which takes place in almost the present day (2026). The election of Trump occasioned the biggest revision, my having first assumed some continuation of the Biden climate policies that are instead currently being kneecapped by Trump. As I like to joke (probably to keep from crying): no one ever said writing near-future fiction is easy.

The Steep Climes Quartet isn’t pollyannish or even optimistic, on balance. I have little reason to believe that human nature will change radically, even while we need a radical alteration in our relationship to our environment to reduce the severity of—and, yes, even potentially apocalyptic—global warming. Unfortunately, the current human perception of climate change is the same way we homo sapiens perceive other existential challenges, which is not much at all unless the particular existential threat happens to be standing on our heads. On the other hand, I’ve been pleasantly shocked by the rate of development of clean energy technologies. We now have what we need to supplant fossil fuels for most electricity production and in transportation, both of which are major greenhouse gas emitting sectors of the economy. The rate of the clean energy transition in many parts of the world is cause for optimism.

But something written in the July 15, 2023 post remains all too true:

Still, any sudden “Come to Jesus” moment on our part feels improbable, and our economic culture’s habit of thinking in terms of the next quarter’s results is hardly conducive for long-term planning for the changes we need. Our politics are also not likely to shift, at least in the near-term, although one can, of course, hope for improvement in the body politic. But hopeful or not, politics is becoming ever-increasingly important for real solutions. Even in the face of positive climate amelioration, there has been already enough damage done that significant suffering is unavoidable, even for the developed nations that have so far been willing enough to let others take the brunt of climate disasters.

The Steep Climes Quartet imagines the balance of progress and delay across time from the perspective of resourced places with the infrastructure to have much of their own population weather the coming storm better than others, but not without exacting a cost that grows bigger over time, and there’s two more books to go.

The third book in The Steep Climes series, Over Brooklyn Hills, due in Spring 2026, takes place a decade from now and looks at climate migration by addressing it writ small, with young urbanites escaping the increasingly hot New York City summers by coming to the Berkshires, even while also on the global scale mass migrations are leading to armed conflicts that hurt the economic and emotional capacity of many. The “Us versus Them” playing out in today’s headlines becomes more inescapable as competition for resources grows, whether it’s the rash of Airbnb conversions and local housing shortages and spikes in shoplifting and petty crimes in the relative green hills of the Berkshires or the basic food and water needs of those driven from increasingly inhospitable regions of the world.

The last book of the series, Farm to Me, takes place twenty-one years after the start of the series and looks at the issue of aging relative to the demands and stresses of climate change. This book also explores shifts back toward local economies, and especially in food production. Farms in the Berkshires and the Northeast are expanding because of the drought-stricken deterioration of the once-major U.S. food production areas, but also being explored is the rise in regenerative agricultural practices here in the Northeast as part of carbon-sink efforts. The main plot line involves an attempt to control regional food distribution, where the increasing reliance on local farms means there are new business opportunities for those criminal enough to threaten them.

My website holds another 30 posts in the category of “The Steep Climes Quartet” that focuses—no surprise—on the work of the books. There’s another post category called “Snips of Passing Interest,” where I write about and react to climate change-related articles, posts, Substacks, reports, and such, and wrestle with understanding complex issues involving climate change; this category has 38 posts. The final post category is a sort of catch-all called “Other Writing,” and this contains some essays of mine about climate change and some climate fiction reviews; this category has 20 posts. In looking at the count for “Other Writing,” I noticed one essay titled “We Have to Pay for Fixing the Greenhouse Gases Crisis: The Climate Fight in All of Its Complexities and Confusion about Costs… and Politics,” which is a topic I’ll return to soon, since the affordability issue, including that of electricity, has become a significant political topic and so deserves a rethink.

The second line of this post: “We in the climate progress movement need to talk about costs.”

The post Writing The Steep Climes Quartet, Part 2: Economics in Climate Fiction first appeared on David Guenette.

In my series The Steep Climes Quartet (first two books published, the third in manuscript and due in Spring 2026, and the last, which takes place in 2047, is awaiting its own desk date), climate progress isn’t imagined to simply happen, but rather that the fossil fuel corporations and related self-interests mount a countereffort to keep fast climate progress at bay.

I guess I got that one right. I started this work in 2015 and worried that the criminal pushback on the part of Big Oil might seem exaggerated, but if anything, the facts threaten to put my fiction into non-fiction.

As for the above-referenced “human condition,” one may safely say that we semi-wise thinking monkeys are never without corruption, and you don’t have to be a scholar of the mediaeval philosophers to understand this. You need only look around. Somehow America has shifted from the normal state of corruption, when some people, caught up in selfishness or pathology try to gain advantage over others, and this is often considered along the spectrum of selfishness to criminality; today, the level and scope of corruption is hyper.

I’m turning 70 years  and I understood from an early age that people could be good or bad or behave good or bad. I grew up in what I think of now as a “serious” moral family, and a Roman Catholic-inflected one at that, and I was a serious member of this serious family. Among my earliest memories are considerations of sin and grace, not that this is rare for those families where the mother had been a novitiate in a convent before leaving for a secular life and the father a seminarian who had been discouraged from continuing his calling because of an episode of seizure. And no, these two people who went on to become my parents (along with my five siblings, like any good Franco-American Catholic of the day!), they were not caught up in some sort of Abelard and Héloïse scandal, but simply two people from the same home town who went through their religious struggles all on their own in different places only to reunite back in civilian life. They dated, got married, and had a modest brood of kids, so get your mind out of the gutter, boyos.

Of course, keeping one’s mind out of the gutter was a common effort for a serious young fellow like me, right along with legions of other little monkey boys, and when I say others, I’m speaking about pretty much all of us, Baltimore Catechism or not. We’re strange creatures, us humans: capable of love and grace and caught up in selfishness and self-serving.

Even bees do it, I presume. If you want a great example of how wonderful we humans can be, here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia about “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love,” by Cole Porter:

…a popular song written in 1928… introduced in Porter’s first Broadway success, the musical Paris by French chanteuse Irène Bordoni, for whom Porter had written the musical as a starring vehicle.

Bordoni’s husband and Paris producer Ray Goetz convinced Porter to give Broadway another try with this show. The song was later used in the English production of Wake Up and Dream and was used as the title theme music in the 1933 Hollywood movie Grand Slam starring Loretta Young and Paul Lukas. In 1960 it was also included in the film version of Cole Porter’s Can-Can.

The first of Porter’s “list songs”, it features a string of suggestive and droll comparisons and examples, preposterous pairings and double entendres, dropping famous names and events, drawing from highbrow and popular culture. Porter was a strong admirer of the Savoy operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, many of whose stage works featured similar comic list songs.

The first refrain covers human ethnic groups, the second refrain birds, the third refrain marine life, the fourth refrain insects and centipedes, and the fifth refrain non-human mammals.

I’ll argue that Cole Porter shows the capacity for good in humanity’s creativity. I’ll further propose that Ella Fitzgerald’s various versions of this song rank among the best indicators for our capacity for greatness. There are myriad other examples of people’s high moral capacity, and while an English Major such as myself may think of art and high purpose, I also recall more personal instances, such as when my father showed great compassion to a much younger cousin of mine as my aunt and uncle traversed a divorce.

There are many examples in this age of hyper-corruption, and in fact, these examples can seem without limit. One particularly galling example is the behavior of fossil fuel corporations in the face of confident knowledge that the consumption of their products is altering the Earth’s ability to support life, and yet duplicity and denial are the watchwords of this industry. Tied to the world-damaging corruption of Big Oil, Trump et al.’s efforts to abrogate the rule of law seems very much in support of Big Oil’s astonishing selfishness and world-destruction.

But what is corruption? Here’s the denotation:

Corruption is a form of dishonesty or a criminal offense that is undertaken by a person or an organization that is entrusted in a position of authority to acquire illicit benefits or abuse power for one’s gain.

Here’s a broader view of corruption drawn from “Poverty and Corruption in the New Testament Perspective,” by Olusola Igbari, in Open Access Library Journal, Vol.3 No.8, August 2016:

It refers to a degenerate state, debased state, prevention, invalid state, putrid state, spoiled, fainted, vitiates and unsound experience [that] carries a moral or a cultic sense of violation of covenant that expects divine judgments.

This quote serves two purposes in this essay. In the first instance, the reference offers yet another example of how wonderful humans can be in what they create, and in this case not only the journal article itself, but more generally the Internet that brings such a reference to light at the cost of a few keystrokes. In the second instance, this ties to the earlier reference to mediaeval philosophy and its focus on the nature of man and the world, especially in relation to God’s goodness in the face of evil, but I’ll avoid further travel down this rabbit hole. You can always read A History of Philosophy, Volume 2, “Mediaeval Philosophy,” Parts 1 and 2, by Frederick Copleston, S.J., and then there is Volume 3, “Late Mediaeval and Renaissance Philosophy,” if you want more.

An image of A History of Philosophy, Volume 2, “Mediaeval Philosophy,” Parts 1, by Frederick Copleston, S.J, although I could have snap a photo of my own copy that’s sat on my shelf for decades. My copy is somewhat tattered, no doubt because I’d wrestled with it quite a lot. I’ve been meaning to re-read this volume, but it’s an even bet I won’t.

Trump and Gang hits the high-water mark (well, one can hope it doesn’t get worse!) when it comes to corruption, and that is corruption in the modern sense, anyway. This Administration is so bad that the country is facing an existential crisis as a democracy.

There I was (and many millions of others), concerned about the existential threat of climate change to continuing progress of human society and economy, but in America at least, the growing threat from climbing global temperatures and its consequences has been back-seated by political corruption. This corruption means that that the failure to resolve the current political condition of the United States retards progress on the climate progress front and will continue to do so until overthrown.

I wrote a recent post, “Democracy, Climate Action, Climate Fiction… and Criminality,” that addresses this and many other concerns about American climate progress. While the rest of the world (to varying degrees) march forward toward the renewable energy transition, we Americans look on as President Big Oil Stooge does all he can to game the system for the benefit of the fossil fuel industry while viciously suppressing climate action on the national level. Even as the projections for electrical load demand spike, renewables, which are the faster and less expensive way to meet growing demands, are being shut down, defunded, and the climate crisis denied.

Make no mistake about this: Trump is working for Big Oil, Big Money, Big Tech, Big Pentagon, Big Pharma, Big Health Insurance, and the work is the destruction of democracy here in the USA. There’s a simple enough explanation for this anti-democracy effort, which is that too many people—you know, a majority—don’t want the various Bigs running rough shod over the economy in ways that are one-sided. In a working democracy, these extreme series of corruption would be addressed at the ballot box. In an autocracy/oligarchy/totalitarian government, the corruption goes on unchecked, and the plundering of the country keeps happening.

Here in the United States of America, pro-democracy efforts are climate progress efforts, simple as that.

The post Climate Change and the Human Condition first appeared on David Guenette.

These characters are hardly the full focus of the books, but they do tend to be involved in some of the more snappy plot lines. In Kill Well, the series’ first book, there’s an operative working for the head of a company that “fixes” problems—in this case, the problem is an effort by oil divestment activists to persuade an investment company to forgo an oil pipeline deal on offer, and as novels tend to have it, complications ensue. In the second book, Dear Josephine, there’s a growing battle for control of a huge new Federal agency while the bill is still in various Congressional committees, but Big Money, which overlaps with Big Oil, wants the bill to go a certain way, and the executive director of a fossil fuel-funded think tank sets some murders and blackmail in motion.

I’ve had my doubts about such violence, not wanting to go-off halfcocked with fantastical imaginings, so early on—while working on Kill Well, the first book published—I did some digging. And, no, I do not know where the bodies are buried, but what I found when writing the post “Murder, Oil, and Blood Money: Is the climate fiction plot line of fossil fuel interests murdering someone far-fetched?” resulted in the following conclusion: I’ll stand by my plot device in Kill Well, both intrinsically and as metaphor.

What I’ll stand by also includes my knowing that fossil fuel use is itself deadly. And don’t you know but that the International Monetary Fund—hardly a left-wing outlier—has concluded in ongoing studies started in 2015, that the use of fossil fuels have resulted in 1.6 million premature deaths annually, and that is just from pollution/particulates, with the cost of climate change harder to determine, but growing increasingly significant. And I came across a paper published by Harvard Environmental Law Review, which argues fossil fuel companies “have not simply been lying to the public, they have been killing members of the public at an accelerating rate, and prosecutors should bring that crime to the public’s attention.”

So, yeah, Big Oil and villains.

If only these claims were true only in fiction, but every day brings more confessions of intentional malfeasance by fossil fuel folks, although no claiming of homicide yet. In today’s inbox comes the latest from ExxonKnews, a Substack that “covers fossil fuel industry disinformation, influence, and efforts to obstruct climate action. We’ll bring you the latest on climate accountability efforts, in the courts and beyond.” The Substack for October 2, 2025, written by Emily Sanders, is titled “The fossil fuel subsidy denier-in-chief,” which carries the deck, “Fossil fuel companies are getting propped up with billions in tax dollars, but the U.S. energy secretary claims otherwise,” with several passages excerpted below:

“There are not oil and gas subsidies,” Chris Wright, the top energy official for the U.S. government — which will now provide more than $34 billion a year in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry — told a room full of reporters and climate advocates last week.

Five days later, the Energy Department announced it would deliver $625 million in new subsidies to the coal industry after adding “Tax breaks/tax credits/subsidies” to an ever-expanding list of words its officials are banned from using.

…

It was a perplexing assertion [no oil subsidies] from Wright, the lead energy official in the Trump administration, which has allocated more than $4 billion in additional subsidies per year since coming into office, according to the new analysis by advocacy nonprofit Oil Change International (OCI).

OCI calculated fossil fuel production subsidies by adding up tax deductions, low-cost access to public lands, direct appropriations, and other financial backing from the federal government based on the definition of fossil fuel subsidies established by the World Trade Organization. 

…

That’s not counting “implicit subsidies,” or the external costs taxpayers bear on top of energy prices — including from climate change and local pollution, according to the International Monetary Fund. [The Steep Climes Note: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) calculated the implicit fossil fuel subsidies for the U.S. in 2022 at approximately $754 billion. This amount reflects the societal costs of fossil fuels—such as negative health impacts and environmental damage from air pollution and climate change—that are not paid for by producers or consumers.]

…

On top of the subsidies granted by the Trump administration, fossil fuel companies enjoy specific tax benefits not available to other industries, including larger capital cost write-offs, deductions, and deferments.

…

“If you can’t rock on your own after 33 years, maybe that’s not a business that’s going places,” said Wright at a press conference last week where he announced the cancellation of $13 billion in funding allocated for clean energy technologies.

I can admire people who dissemble so directly, if only for their chutzpah, but as best I can conclude from my Sunday school lessons, such bald-faced lying is a mark of a bonafide villain. I especially delight in the last excerpt above, where Wright wrongly claims that renewable energy subsidies over the last three decades means that this “clean energy technology” ain’t ever going anywhere. Look out the window, pal.

U.S. based fossil fuel corporations are worth something like $1.5 trillion and worldwide totals $4 or $5 trillion, as best I figure. These sums could, I suppose, provide motive for violence and crime, and that supposition is a certainty. I couldn’t find any 2024 statistics on crimes committed by U.S. fossil fuel corporations, but I did come across the wonderfully titled “The Fossil Fuel Crime File: Proven Crimes and Credible Allegations,” for 2023, by Greenpeace, but this focused only on European fossil fuel corporations.

Here’s some indication of what lies within the report:

Key Numbers and Findings:

• • Our research compiles 17 different crime categories.
  • These are backed up by 26 examples of criminal conduct, which are either credibly alleged or formally established.
  • We list 10 fossil fuel companies that have committed offences or have been credibly accused of breaking the law, many of them several times over.
  • The most recurrent crime was Corruption, of which 6 cases have been included in this Fossil Fuel Crime File.
  • A new generation of legal offences has evolved over the past few years such as misleading advertising in the form of greenwashing.

In addition to the compilation referenced above, this report breaks out two further categories of extremely serious allegations require separate consideration:

The Ogoni 9 Case. Allegations of Shell’s complicity in heinous crimes in addition to its environmentally destructive operations in the Niger Delta have been pursued through many courts in many jurisdictions over the past 25 years. Investigations into the 1995 judicial murder of nine activists known as the ‘Ogoni Nine’ and numerous other crimes by Nigeria’s then military regime led Amnesty International to publish “Shell: A Criminal Enterprise,” documenting decades of alleged complicity by the company in the crimes of the brutal regime. Shell has consistently denied allegations of complicity and no court has ever found Shell entities, directors or officers guilty despite legal action being taken against them by some of the widows of the Ogoni Nine since 2002. In March 2022, the Hague District Court held there was insufficient evidence against Shell. 25 years after the Ogoni Nine were imprisoned and executed, Amnesty has never withdrawn its call for Shell to be investigated for their murder and other extremely serious crimes.

Crimes against Humanity. Put simply, should those who bear responsibility for the effects of climate change be charged with committing crimes against humanity? CEOs of fossil fuel majors have known for many decades that their business model has increasingly caused and contributed to extreme weather events that have already killed or displaced untold numbers of people around the world. These events continue to cause countless billions of dollars in economic damage, to ravage vital ecosystems and wildlife and to disproportionately affect already marginalized communities around the world.

This report is a “work in progress,” according to the website, which also notes, “We do not claim to have included ALL crimes committed by fossil fuel companies, nor the total of allegations made against them. We will continue our investigations to uncover and publicize the industry’s crimes.” Unfortunately, I haven’t seen much indication that this is still an active project, much to my disappointment.

Another recent work comes out of Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, in an article written by Wes Hennricksen, called “Fossil Fuel Fraud.” Here’s the first two sentences of the Abstract:

In some recent climate litigation cases, plaintiffs have added a claim for common law fraud, in addition to the more traditionally pursued claims for nuisance, negligence, and trespass. Fraud claims against fossil fuel companies center on the decades-long campaign of climate change doubt that was organized, funded, and carried out by oil, gas, and coal industry leaders, as well as public relations firms and industry advocacy groups working on their behalf.

Not quite as provocative as the Greenpeace report and only focused on the fraud charge potential against U.S. fossil fuel corporations, but still fascinating, if in a lawyer kind of way.

In The Steep Climes Quartet there are villains on the other side, too. One, in Dear Josephine, isn’t so much anti-Big Oil as he is against the wealthiest among us, grabbing his target list from the annual Forbes 400 richest people in the world ranking. There is a climate action terrorist group in Dear Josephine but barely introduced until book three. No One is Safe is the group and there are several characters from NOS who form a significant part of plot line of the third book, Over Brooklyn Hills, which is due out in Spring 2026. It was an interesting exercise to look at purportedly well-intentioned people who do more and more terrible things, and, to be clear, I recommend against violence all around. As I say when giving a climate and climate fiction talk, “It turns out that I love to plan out murders. I swear, this is just a fictional thing, honest.”

There will come a time when Big Oil will face justice. I wrote a post called “Big Oil in the Dock: Can Suing Fossil Fuel Corporations Answer Climate Change?” about a year and a half ago, and the movement to sue fossil fuel companies has continued to grow since then. Make Polluters Pay bills are actively considered in several states, adding weight to the states that have passed such a bill already. Of course, President Big Oil Stooge is directing his DOJ (and it is his, isn’t it) to get the highest court to throw out the very concept.

There are some climate fiction that have portrayed criminal actions taken against entities found responsible for climate change; The Great Transition, by nick fuller googins, comes quickly to mind, Unfortunately, it seems still to be anybody’s bet whether fossil fuel corporations will be held criminally responsible.

I do like the sound of “Crimes Against Humanity” that gets mentioned in the Greenpeace report mentioned earlier. As foot-dragging and direct action against the energy transition carries on, this charge seems more and more appropriate in the real world.

The post Writing Villains on Both Sides in Climate Fiction first appeared on David Guenette.

Why We Fight Write

One year and one month ago, I wrote a post titled “Why The Steep Climes Quartet? Showing People in Today’s Climate Crisis.” The post holds up pretty well and my website stats would love for you to go check this post out.

I’m sticking with the opening paragraph:

I want to write climate fiction within which people can see themselves. What I don’t want to do with this series is to add to the already over-crowded pool of climate apocalypse novels that take place in future drowned or desert worlds we can’t correlate to our real lives. There are some great future climate fiction novels and stories, don’t get me wrong. Unfortunately, there is also a lot of climate fiction that falls into the “Fun with Apocalypse” approach, where, like many post-nuclear apocalypse stories from decades ago, these novels are all about getting the guns and the girl.

Since I’m gearing up for another of my presentations (up in Williamstown, on Wednesday, September 24, at 6:00 pm, at the David Joyce Milne Public Library, in case you want to drop by), I, of course, seek to interest potential attendees. I’m trying to describe as clearly as possible what will be in it for them should they come to the talk. As much as I am by nature a long-form guy, always whispering in my thoughts is the old business dictum that only bullet points really matter, so here’s me trying to comply:

We hear a lot about climate change these days, as well we should, but for most of us this still feels far away, in the news, abstract. But what can we expect in our neck of the world as climate change consequences increase in frequency and severity as time moves forward? This presentation considers where we live and extrapolates what our future may present, all drawn from a deep study of climate change that underpins the series. There’ll be talk about The Steep Climes Quartet and how this work provides a lens through which we:

• • Expect higher costs in household economies
  • Appreciate the most vulnerable locations
  • Understand what the effect on tourism could be
  • Consider how agriculture and outdoor work might change
  • Ponder the complexity of local, state, and federal politics and the GHG emissions work that needs to be done
  • Contemplate the timeline and what needs to happen to avoid worse climate change catastrophes

Climate Change is Expensive

It’s no accident that the first bullet point concerns household economies because household economies don’t get talked about enough in climate action circles and I’m afraid that’s a big mistake we’re making. It certainly doesn’t help that when we talk about costs, we tend toward pollyannish claims that electricity will be cheaper. It isn’t that this claim is wrong, but there’s still a lot of work to be done before we arrive at this golden age, and most of that work will end up getting paid for by us. I’m not going to go into things here like the way power utilities get to raise rates, but that makes for just a part of what’s ahead as we build out the grid and add digital intelligence for virtual power plants, for example. I’m concerned that if we aren’t upfront about costs—and there are a hell of a lot more costs to be applied in a worsening climate—the movement comes across like the well-off elites too many already think we are.

The fact is that climate change is expensive. Yes, doing what we must to reduce greenhouse gas emissions takes time and money, but this course of action will always be impressively so much cheaper than doing nothing.

We know that the signs of and fallouts from global warming are already part of our experience and there is more—much more—to come. But even if we escape for some fortunate length of time the heatwaves or fires or storms that increasingly appear in this wide world, we can’t escape the consequences of international, national, and local politics, or the unsettling effects on the world economy. I’ve started to use the phrase President Big Oil Stooge for Trump, and boy, is his effect on politics and climate change inescapable. President Big Oil Stooge and his compliant “Republican” Congress (and his purchased Supreme Court!) make it that much more likely we can’t avoid the increasing distress in our own families and households from climate change. This will make—is making—household expenses much greater.

The fact is that climate change is expensive. Yes, doing what we must to reduce greenhouse gas emissions takes time and money, but this course of action will always be impressively so much cheaper than doing nothing.

Climate change is already at work in our lives in terms of the size of our energy bills, the rising prices for food, and, of course, property insurance. Add in the absence of the Biden bills’ tax credits and rebates, and household climate action costs goes up that much more. But let’s face it, even with those significant tax credits, most Americans were left out of the action; people living paycheck to paycheck have a problem waiting for re-imbursement at tax time, never mind carrying the amortized cost of, say, installing a solar and battery system. While there were some very modest grant programs for poor people to put in heat pumps and other things to improve energy efficiency, most Americans—and it is a shameful majority—don’t have the financial resources to take these sorts of actions.

What We Can Do About Climate Change: Those Who Can Should Spend

The most common question people ask about climate change may be “What can I do about it?” It turns out, for anyone who can afford it, there’s plenty a person can do. Yet there remains a deafening silence among climate activists who instead should be shouting at the people who can afford to put up solar arrays or buy an EV or switch to more efficient appliances. With tech—and many of the ways to reduce GHG are based on tech—it is the early adopters who help bring products down in price by being the economic cohort that builds the early market. Fortunately, the nature of solar and battery tech means that cost drops are happening, despite the tepid participation of those households with sufficient resources.

And don’t get me started on economically advantaged NIMBYs.

What we can all do is vote (well, depending on the state and the level of voter suppression, actually). We need to rid ourselves of politicians who are in the pocket of Big Oil for the necessary change to meet the climate crisis. We need to be aware of climate change and how it results in higher costs for our households. We need to understand the financial conditions too many of us live in and address this head on. If we don’t, climate action will remain the domain of the elite, as far too many Americans still see us.

Writing About People Who Are Like Me and You

I’m ending my pitch for the next presentation this way:

The Steep Climes Quartet shares aspects of the thriller genre with action that drives plots, but the main focus is on the deeply drawn characters we identify with that are living in a place we know. The series is entertaining but also provides a deeply thoughtful glimpse into the years before us and our children’s and grandchildren’s future.

There are great climate fiction works out there. One of my favorites is Jenny Offill’s Weather, and that’s because climate change is in the background, bothersome, sure, but the characters’ in Weather are living their lives. Most of the characters in The Steep Climes Quartet—except for those working in climate change sectors—go about their lives thinking much more about many other things, like a pending bill to be paid, and their jobs and financial situations, their relationships and families, and their own various and sometimes odd personal struggles. As the series progresses from Kill Well, which takes place in 2026 (next year, yikes!), through to the last book, Farm to Me, more characters are caught up with climate in some way, whether victims of extreme weather or finding themselves growing more and more active working toward—or at least donating to!—climate action.

As I’ve mentioned, there are characters who focus on climate change or who work to keep fossil fuels a profitable business, and such characters allow me to explore specific issues and challenges of climate change, whether technology, or politics and politics, or economics and society. But even then, these characters are still living their lives, figuring out loves and friendships, and facing their inner crackpots and demons.

You know, life.

Positively working toward progress on climate change, or even just hearing about it on the news, doesn’t mean their lives otherwise stop. And that’s the challenge we all face, which is how we might contribute to a better society and a healthier world and live as full of a life as we can as we figure out how we’re going to get through the day, the decade, the century.

This is why I’m writing the series.

The post Why We Write: A look back at why the heck I’m writing a four-book climate fiction series first appeared on David Guenette.