Early on in the creation of the series The Steep Climes Quartet, I wrote a post for my newly configured website. The website was reconfigured to support the series and the related writing about climate change. “Writing The Steep Climes Quartet” posted on July 15, 2023.
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.”