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.