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

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

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

Categorically, “Literary Fiction” is Left in the Cold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The guest poster is introduced thusly:

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

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

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

What is Climate Fiction?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why am I Grumpy about What Gets Called Climate Fiction?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why I Write Climate Fiction

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

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

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

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

The Percentage: Can We Do Something?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn’t that an interesting story?

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

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.

What I am talking about is the clear identification of the fossil fuel industry—I like the moniker “Big Oil”—as the enemy. Enemy to whom? How about those billions and billions of us alive today and those in the future who directly suffer because of the actions of Big Oil in denying, delaying, and actively opposing the benefits of energy sources and policies that reduce carbon emissions.

The main arguments for clean energy to be the only energy source going forward for electrical generation and transportation are:

1. Clean energy is the cheapest energy resource to build and implement compared to fossil fuel-based energy, making clean energy the affordability winner;
2. Clean energy is the fastest to build and implement compared to fossil fuel-based energy, making clean energy the best choice for meeting growing energy demands;
3. Clean energy significantly reduces health problems tied to fossil fuel use across the world in many ways, including declining asthma and premature deaths;
4. Clean energy reduces geopolitical conflicts based on energy resources, since solar and wind do not rely on scarce consumable commodities but derives energy from the sun and wind available to all.

Fossil Fuels Had Their Day

Every time I mention that Big Oil is bad there will be people ready to jump down my throat with some version or another of “Fossil fuel built our modern economy” or “If we stopped using fossil fuel today, millions would die from starvation.”

This kind of reaction is still all-too common, and my answer is, “Yeah, so stipulated.” An immediate full stop in our use of fossil fuels would be disaster for the world. But replacing fossil fuels with clean energy electricity as soon as possible will go a long way in dropping carbon emissions.

Solar, wind, and batteries are now so low in manufacturing and build out costs that fossil fuels can’t compete. Building out solar, wind, and batteries is the way to go if you want lower electricity bills. Clean energy now makes reducing our economy’s carbon footprint the best choice just on economic basis, never mind the health benefits and slowing climate change. Even if you are part of the small minority that doesn’t care about climate change or reducing environmental pollution, I’ll bet you’re interested in lower electricity bills.

You know who’s not interested in lowering your electricity bill? Big Oil. Big Oil’s business model is to keep selling you oil, gas, and coal for you—well, when it comes to electricity, your utility—to keep burning their products, replacing every volume used with new volume, and on and on until the generation plant gets decommissioned. How long do fossil fuel generator plants last?

Here’s a quick Google AI Overview:

Fossil fuel power plants typically operate for 30 to 50 years, with coal-fired units averaging around 45 years in the U.S. and some lasting over 60 years with maintenance. Natural gas combined-cycle plants generally have a 25 to 30-year design life, though they may operate longer. 

• • Coal-Fired Plants:Often designed for 50 years, many in the U.S. are approaching or exceeding 45 years of age.
  • Natural Gas Plants:Combined-cycle units typically last 25–30 years, while simpler, smaller generators might require major overhauls within 10–20 years.
  • Retirement Trends:While many plants last 30-50 years, environmental regulations and economic factors are leading to earlier shutdowns, with 28% of U.S. coal capacity planning to retire by 2035.
  • Replacement vs. Life Extension:Despite aging, some plants are granted extended lifespans to ensure grid reliability, particularly in areas with high energy demand, such as data centers. 

For every new fossil fuel generator plant built, you and your utility are signing up for buying more natural gas or oil or coal for 25 years or more.

Want to know why Big Oil is fighting so hard to keep solar/wind/batteries from getting built? Big Oil, of course, wants to continue in the business they know and have invested in, which is selling you energy that you burn up and need to buy more of year after year after year. Do U.S. fossil fuel generator plants get to pass on increased costs of fuel?

Here’s another Google AI Overview:

Yes, in the United States, fossil fuel generator plants—specifically investor-owned utilities—are generally allowed to pass on increased fuel costs to customers, often with little to no risk to their own profits. This is accomplished through regulatory mechanisms known as Fuel Adjustment Clauses (FACs) or similar cost-recovery trackers, which are overseen by state-level Public Service Commissions. 

Here is how this process works and its implications:

• • How Fuel Costs Are Passed On:Utilities are permitted to adjust electricity rates outside of formal, lengthy rate cases to reflect fluctuations in the cost of fuel (coal, natural gas) used to generate electricity. If fuel prices rise, the cost is passed to consumers as a surcharge on their monthly bills.
  • “Dollar-for-Dollar” Recovery:In many regions, particularly the Southeast, 100% of these fuel costs are passed on to customers. This means that if a power plant pays more for natural gas, the utility does not absorb that expense; rather, customers pay it.
  • Regulatory Oversight:While these adjustments are often automatic, they are reviewed by state commissions for accuracy. Regulators may disallow charges if they find improper fuel procurement practices.
  • Impact on Utilities vs. Customers:Because these mechanisms exist, utility investors are often insulated from fuel price volatility. Critics argue this reduces the incentive for utilities to seek lower fuel costs or invest in more stable, renewable energy sources.
  • Incomplete Pass-Through:While many utilities pass on costs completely, studies suggest that across the industry, marginal cost pass-through is not always 100%, with consumers bearing between 25% and 75% of the cost increases in some scenarios.
  • Timing Differences:Fuel adjustment charges are often calculated monthly based on costs from previous months, which can lead to a lag in how quickly price increases or decreases are reflected in customer bills. 

Are power utilities motivated to seek the lowest energy cost? Public power utilities are notoriously conservative, not liking change. After all, one of their mandates is reliability of electricity. Of course, solar/wind/batteries are reliable suppliers of electricity and the application of digital management of grid balance and support of distributed energy resources such as demand flexibility make more of the overall capacity of the grid available meet peak demand loads.

According to “U.S. Spending Bill to Grant $40 Billion in Fossil Fuel Subsidies,” originally published in Wired in late 2025, fossil fuels still get billions of dollars in U. S. subsidies each year:

The Trump administration has already added nearly $40 billion in new federal subsidies for oil, gas, and coal in 2025, a report released Tuesday finds, sending an additional $4 billion out the door each year for fossil fuels over the next decade. That new amount, created with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act this summer, adds to $30.8 billion a year in preexisting subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. The report finds that the amount of public money the U.S. will now spend on domestic fossil fuels stands at least $34.8 billion a year.

Keep in mind that the U.S. had already been subsidizing fossil fuels for a century or more. President Biden’s 2021 budget had called for ending tax breaks for oil companies, but these phaseouts were struck down in the Senate and now, with President Trump, new subsidies have been added, including for coal, a favorite fixation of the Trump Administration.

Why Big Oil is the Enemy

Quite simply, Big Oil puts profits over the common good and ignoring the common good in this case leads to disease, death, and the collapse of the climate environment of the last ten millennia that has fostered human development.

Big Oil isn’t doing this out of ignorance, but rather in willful disregard for the physics behind global warming. In short, those leading the corporations that make up Big Oil seem happy enough to forfeit our future and that of our children and their children, down the many generations. Here’s the right analogy: “Big Knives” has employees test the sharpness of their products by stabbing people and children in the street and since Big Knives get paid only when selling knives that are so tested, there are one hell of a lot of bleeding people in every neighborhood, although more so in poorer neighborhoods.

As absurd as the analogy sounds, the correlations are direct. Big Oil produces a product (the knife) that poisons the air we all breathe (people getting stabbed). The question becomes how we shift to clean energy in a way that supports the essential and pervasive energy benefits to people.

Keep in mind that Big Oil plays dirty. Big Oil—along with other big money interests—has purchased much of the federal government, from the Executive branch to many in Congress. What has Big Oil gotten? Here’s a very partial list:

• A DOJ attempting to repress court cases and many states’ legislation against Big Oil corporations, including, most recently, “polluters pay” bills that Trump calls “extortion.”
• The EPA’s recent removal of the endangerment finding that has been a central regulatory enforcement mechanism against greenhouse gases.
• The Executive branch’s overriding of massive Biden-era funding programs (such as IIJA and IRA) for clean energy.
• Outright market interference, such as Trump’s anti-offshore wind projects shutdowns.

Since Big Oil has clearly demonstrated it wishes to continue business as usual—the current efforts to build dozens and hundreds of new gas electricity generators are just the latest example—we see that these corporations stand in opposition to what needs to happen.

Al Gore is right when he says, “They [Big Oil] are much better at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions… They are the enemies of progress.”

Bill McKibben is right, when he says, “We have a literal enemy in this fight… The fossil-fuel industry has played the most disgraceful role of any set of corporations in the history of the world. They are Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our civilization.”

George Monbiot, the journalist and activist, puts it this way, “We are not just fighting climate change; we are fighting the people who profit from it. The fossil fuel industry is the enemy of nature and the enemy of humanity.”

Kevin O’Brien, author and ethicist, In his 2024 book Meeting the Enemy, writes, “To make progress on climate change, we must recognize that the fossil-fueled industrial complex is a strategic enemy… treating them as such is a requirement for justice.”

António Guterres, UN Secretary-General, said, “We are at war with nature, and the fossil fuel industry is the fuel for that fire. We must end this war on our planet… We are seeing a historic battle between those who want to protect life and those who want to protect profits.”

Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator, said, “We are in a battle for the survival of the planet. We are taking on the greed of the fossil fuel industry, and it is a war we cannot afford to lose.”

Jay Inslee, former Governor of Washington, during his presidential campaign, stated, “This is a world war… it is a war of survival against the carbon-industrial complex that has held our democracy hostage for decades.”

Why We Will Win

Despite the decades of Big Oil’s explicit effort to deny climate change and fossil fuel’s contribution to it and the political favors and market advantages bought with a small part of profits, Big Oil has the losing hand. The industry continues to expand its investments when fiduciary responsibilities dictate that a managed drawn down of production is called for to avoid creating stranded assets and further legal liability. Fossil fuels are, simply put, an increasingly bad investment that is now offering “last idiot in” conditions.

Costs

Generating electricity from fossil fuels is more expensive. While the capital investment for solar farms and wind farms together with battery storage may have somewhat higher initial capital costs (i.e., to build), based on 2025 industry data, natural gas peaker plants are generally more expensive than solar plus battery storage systems when comparing the total cost of electricity generation (LCOE) over their lifetimes. While natural gas remains a cheaper option for instantaneous dispatchable power in some specific scenarios, newly build, unsubsidized solar-plus-storage often beats the cost of new-build natural gas, particularly when accounting for the volatility of fuel prices and lower maintenance costs.

Here’s a Google AI Overview:

Cost Breakdown (2025 Estimates)

Key Comparison Drivers

• • Fuel Costs:Solar and storage have zero fuel expenses, providing stable, long-term costs. Natural gas plants are subject to market volatility and rising, unpredictable fuel prices.
  • Capital Costs:Solar + storage has higher upfront capital costs (installing panels and batteries), but lower operating expenses (O&M) compared to the ongoing, high fuel and maintenance costs of gas plants.
  • Battery Advancements:Battery costs have fallen by roughly 89% between 2010 and 2023, making them highly competitive.
  • Subsidies:Even without tax credits, solar and wind are frequently more cost-effective than new-build gas plants. With subsidies, the cost advantage for renewables is even more significant. 

While gas plants are still used for reliable 24/7 baseload power, solar + storage is increasingly seen as a more economical choice for new capacity in many regions, especially as technology improves to handle grid intermittency. 

Legal Position

There are many bases for legal action against Big Oil, including causing harm (pollution and global warming), corruption (dark money and “lobbying” for market advantage), more expensive electricity (the issue of affordability), and many social justice offenses (local pollution and reduced quality of living conditions). There are, as of early 2026, 3,000 climate court cases worldwide, although active litigation targeting Big Oil is a subset.

Here’s what Google AI Overview has to report:

Global Active Cases

• • Total Against Fossil Fuel Corporations: Approximately 86 major lawsuits have been filed specifically against “Carbon Majors” (the world’s largest oil, gas, and coal producers) since 2005.
  • Active Status: As of recent reports (late 2024/2025), over 40 of these cases remain active and pending in courts.
  • Top Defendants: The most frequently targeted companies are ExxonMobil (43 cases), Shell (42 cases), BP, Chevron, and TotalEnergies. 

U.S. Active Cases

• • Concentration: The United States is the primary battleground, hosting approximately 50 of the 86 global cases filed against fossil fuel companies.
  • State & Local “Deception” Suits: There are over 32 active lawsuits brought specifically by state attorneys general (e.g., California, Massachusetts, Minnesota) and local governments (e.g., Honolulu, Boulder) seeking damages for alleged climate deception.
  • 2026 Developments: This number continues to grow. In January 2026, Michigan filed a new federal antitrust lawsuit against major oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute (API), accusing them of operating as a “cartel”. 

Summary of Case Types

The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law categorizes these active cases into three main buckets:

1. 1. Climate Damages (38%): Seeking compensation for infrastructure damage and health costs (e.g., the “Climate Superfund” cases).
   2. Misleading Advertising (16%): Alleging “greenwashing” or false claims about net-zero commitments.
   3. Emissions Reduction (12%): Attempting to force companies to align their business models with the Paris Agreement (e.g., the landmark Milieudefensie v. Shell case in the Netherlands). 

Context: While there are over 3,000 climate-related cases globally (1,900+ in the U.S.), the vast majority target governments over policy failures or permitting decisions, rather than private corporations.

There’s one case getting a lot of attention, since the legal argument is fundamental: conspiracy. In January 2026, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against four major oil companies—BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell—and the American Petroleum Institute (API). This case is groundbreaking because it shifts the legal strategy from “consumer deception” to “anticompetitive conspiracy.”

Here’s what Google AI Overview says about this case:

Core Allegations of the “Cartel” Strategy

The lawsuit explicitly labels these corporations a “cartel” that engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to maintain fossil fuel dominance by sabotaging renewable alternatives. Key claims include: 

• • Suppressing Innovation: The defendants allegedly “acted in concert” to dismantle their own early solar and renewable energy divisions to prevent those technologies from maturing and competing with oil.
  • Hobbling EVs: The suit claims the companies coordinated to block the installation of electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructureat their brand-name gas stations to prolong consumer reliance on gasoline.
  • Market Manipulation: By using their collective power to withhold cleaner, cheaper energy options, the state argues the companies artificially inflated energy costs for Michigan households and businesses.
  • Coordinated Disinformation: The Michigan Department of Attorney Generalalleges the industry used trade associations (like API) to exchange sensitive information and coordinate the suppression of climate science as early as the 1950s. 

Legal Framework and Objectives

• • Statutes Cited: The case brings claims under the federal Sherman Antitrust Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Michigan Antitrust Reform Act (MARA).
  • Damages Sought: Michigan is seeking triple damagesand the disgorgement of corporate profits obtained through these alleged anticompetitive practices.
  • Affordability Argument: Unlike previous climate suits focused purely on environmental damage, Nessel has framed this as an “affordability crisis” case, blaming corporate “greed” rather than market forces for high energy bills. 

Industry and Federal Response

• • Industry Denial: Defendants like ExxonMobiland Chevron have dismissed the suit as “baseless” and a “coordinated campaign” to regulate energy policy through the courts rather than through Congress.
  • Federal Opposition: The S. Department of Justice(under the Trump administration) attempted to block the filing, arguing it threatened national security and energy independence, but a federal judge dismissed the DOJ’s challenge in early 2026. 

Marching Off to War

The first shots of the war against Big Oil were fired many decades ago. For decades clean energy skirmishes were small, scattered, and largely ineffective. The clean energy transition has been marshalling an army, though. Significant majorities of Americans—and worldwide—place climate change among top priorities of concern. Costs of clean energy are competitive, thanks largely to all the benefits of scientific and manufacturing learning curves driving down the costs of technologies.

In the fight against Big Oil there are plenty of weapons to be wielded. Here are some of the most powerful actions that can be taken to push back against Big Oil’s power: carbon taxes, carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAM), cancellation of direct industry subsidies, and including the negative externalities that makes the true cost of fossil fuels more evident, thus making clean energy even more competitive.

Many countries in the Global South are accelerating implementation of clean energy, often leapfrogging the old grid-style model advanced nations have long enjoyed. China’s high production of clean energy material and tools are making inroads to the Global South, which not only supports clean energy implementation, but favors China’s domestic industrial base and builds markets. China’s diplomatic advantage, relative to the United States, grows stronger.

Americans are catching on that Big Oil want to keep customers buying their products, even though this raises costs for these customers. Americans are catching on that the higher energy prices can be put to Big Oil’s corruption and influence within the political realm. Affordability is likely to be a major battle ground for fossil fuels and clean energy in the upcoming elections and this is a winning plank for clean energy.

Big Oil’s tricks and lies are becoming transparent to more and more citizens.

The question isn’t whether this war will be won, but how long it will take and whether the world is lit aflame in a pyrrhic victory.

Consider me enlisted.

The post The War on Big Oil first appeared on David Guenette.