Twenty-two years have passed since novelist Kim Stanley Robinson published the first volume of his “Science in the Capital” trilogy about an unleashed National Science Foundation meeting the challenge of a changing climate. Twenty years have passed since Al Gore lit a climate fire under the world with “An Inconvenient Truth.” And 19 years have passed since Annie Leonard wryly explained, in “The Story of Stuff,” how our hyper consumerism was trashing the planet, including the atmosphere.
Today, in 2026? Trump is gutting the NSF, gilding the White House (and Washington), and still blowing smoke on climate change by responding to the red clouds from Canada’s wildfires with punitive tariffs rather than adaptive aid or cooperation.
Juxtapositions of commemoration and backsliding like these have resulted in an outpouring of new titles offering new takes on climate change. To give a better sense of scale, this bookshelf holds 15 titles sorted into five takes, or retakes, from techno-optimism to philosophical pessimism.
Some titles could reasonably be placed in more than one group. One of the titles in the positive trio of pragmatic guides for better climate change communication nevertheless predicts that 130 degrees Fahrenheit will be the summer norm for southeast Texas by 2100. Even the upbeat takes sting.
The five levels of response — or takes — presented below are distinguished by the amount of change they prescribe for our daily routines, our psyches, our economy, or our society.
- We have the technology.
- We have to change the way we talk about climate change.
- We have to change the way we feel — by reconnecting with nature, ourselves, and each other.
- We have to change how we live together.
- We have to learn how to live with the violent climate we created. It won’t be easy.
Alternatively, climate change itself could completely dis-order our lives.
As always, the descriptions of the titles below are adapted from copy provided by the publishers or organizations that released them. When two dates of publication are listed, the second is for the paperback edition.
We have the technology.
Abundance: How We Build a Better Future by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Avid Reader Press 2025, 304 pages, $30.00)
After years of building insufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget. The crisis clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough. Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance.
Still No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air by Mark Z. Jacobson (Cambridge University Press 2026, 462 pages, $24.95 paperback)
What if we don’t need ‘miracle technologies’ to solve the climate problem? What if the technologies we need are already available? And what if we can use those existing technologies to ensure reliable electricity, heat supplies, and energy security? In a revised and updated edition of his award-winning climate bestseller, No Miracles Needed, the world’s premier thinker on energy futures, Mark Z. Jacobson, explains how existing technologies can harness, store, and transmit energy from wind, water, and solar sources to ensure reliable electricity and heat supplies. This edition includes new, cutting-edge technologies, additional new real-life case studies about the solutions, and additional references. It shows how the problems identified can be solved and then enumerates the economic, health, and climate benefits of the solutions.
Clearing the Air: A Hopeful Guide to Solving Climate Change in 50 Questions & Answers by Hannah Ritchie (The MIT Press 2026, 296 pages, $27.95)
We can’t afford to delay climate action, but with all the shouting and disagreement, it’s hard to know where to turn. In Clearing the Air, data scientist and bestselling author Hannah Ritchie answers 50 key climate questions once and for all, clearing the air so we can take action and fix things. The first piece of good news is we know the answers and the steps we need to take right now. Using simple, clear data, Ritchie tackles the tough questions: Is it too late? Won’t we run out of minerals? Aren’t we too polarized? The second piece of good news: The truth is far more hopeful than you might think. We’re at a critical moment for our planet, but even more crucial is feeling hopeful about what we can do next. The third piece of good news? We already have many of the solutions we need to create a more sustainable planet for future generations.
We have to change the way we talk about climate change.
Radically Reframing Climate Change: A Guide to Saving Ourselves by Will Hackman (Bloomsbury Academic 2026, 264 pages, $27,95)
In Radically Reframing Climate Change: A Guide to Saving Ourselves, Will Hackman identifies three main obstacles to solving climate change: polarization, paralysis, and stale, ineffective messaging. He empowers readers to turn their anxiety or apathy into passion, and anger into action at the personal, community, and government levels. The climate rallying cries to “Save the Planet” no longer work in our hyper-partisan world, nor do images of polar bears on melting glaciers. Hackman reframes the climate crisis as a humanity crisis, arguing that we must change how we think and talk about climate change, both in our conversations with non-believers and among those who care. Assuring humanity’s place on a changing planet will require a near-universal level of public support we will never reach if we keep making the same mistakes.
Becoming Ecological: Navigating Language and Meaning for Our Planet’s Future by Derek Gladwin and Kedrick James (Aevo/University of Toronto Press 2026, 304 pages, $24.95)
Becoming Ecological offers a fresh and empowering perspective on the natural world by insisting that our relationship with language can transform issues of sustainability and environmental catastrophe. The book explores how language, meaning, and communication can help us in the ongoing process of “becoming ecological” in our daily lives, encouraging us to listen, relate, and act with greater awareness. Language/literacy experts, Derek Gladwin and Kedrick James center dialogue as the catalyst for ecological transformation. Drawing from various views on relationships, values, and responsibility, as well as topics like AI, food, compost, improvisation, extinction, and climate anxiety, Becoming Ecological is an invitation to engage with the world differently, to consider other perspectives, and to participate playfully.
Fixing Climate Communications Moving Beyond Narrow Narratives to Power Durable Progress by John Marshall and others (Potential Energy 2026, 123 pages, free download with registration)
Climate change messaging has driven incredible progress over the last 20 years, educating the public, building support for clean energy, and advocating a shift away from fossil fuels. But progress has begun to stall. Even as the effects of climate change become more obvious in the numbers on our insurance bills and thermometers, leaders are growing quiet and media coverage is getting patchier. The most universal threat humanity has ever faced is being treated like a narrow concern for niche audiences. The climate movement is at a critical juncture. The path forward requires a fundamental shift from the jargon and limiting language of the past. By grounding our message in people’s everyday concerns and costs, we can turn climate change into a top citizen priority and motivate leaders toward the bold actions we urgently need.
We have to change the way we feel — by reconnecting with nature, ourselves, and each other.
Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home by Katharine R. Wilkinson (Andrew & McMeel 2026, 256 pages, $27.99)
Through her transformational programs and books, including All We Can Save, Wilkinson has inspired hundreds of thousands of climate journeys. In Climate Wayfinding, she shares a proven process for looking inward with care, outward with curiosity, and forward with courage. With her singular blend of warmth and rigor, Wilkinson lights the way through stirring personal essays, interwoven with the wisdom of other climate leaders and the beauty of poetry, art, and song. A book to sit with and savor, Climate Wayfinding also invites engagement with journaling prompts, practical exercises, and guides for conversation. Whether steeped in climate or newly curious, readers will discover something grounding and generative in these pages. The terrain ahead is calling—and we have everything we need to find our way.
Noticing: Intimate Encounters with the Natural World by Richard Louv (Algonquin Books 2026, 288 pages, $30.00)
Long beloved for his insightful, inspiring nature writing, Richard Louv returns with his most personal book yet. Noticing is about discovering who you are by exploring the natural world. Louv shows how, by tapping into the 30 or more human senses we have, readers can develop skills–sensory, scientific, artistic, and spiritual–to see and experience the otherworlds of nature. Through personal essays, rich with descriptions of the California wilderness around his home in the most biodiverse county in the nation, Louv draws on wisdom from influences as far-reaching as neuroscience, nature photography, Indigenous traditions, and mindfulness to foster what he calls “bioenchantment.” He offers a new, deeper understanding of what it means to see a tree, know a fox, and to become fully human.
The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore Our Planet by Jason Dove Mark (W.W. Norton 2026, 224 pages, $24.99)
As the climate emergency worsens, we somehow get used to it. We struggle to remember what summers were like before the unrelenting heat, before wildfires became an annual routine. We adapt, we normalize. Scientists call this “shifting baseline syndrome.” It’s why we are increasingly sleepwalking toward disaster. In this inspiring manifesto, environmental advocate and longtime editor-in-chief of Sierra magazine Jason Dove Mark offers antidotes that everyone can use to resist ecological amnesia and make lasting progress to repair and revive a livable planet. He puts forth four simple but powerful rules for a life lived in communion with the Earth: go outside; bear witness; make a record; pass it on. The Earth Said Remember Me is a hopeful, achievable prescription for protecting the planet, one citizen at a time.
We have to change how we live together.
The Environmental Republic: Why Citizens Will Save the World by Giulio Boccaletti (Princeton University Press 2026, 272 pages, $29.95)
Republicanism is arguably the most powerful political idea in history, a feat of human imagination that balances individual liberty with collective responsibility. Giulio Boccaletti presents the “environmental republic” as a necessary alternative to blind faith in technocratic management, the shallow moralizing and apocalyptic rhetoric of some activists, and the disingenuous skepticism of vested interests. Our challenges are not simply about “agreeing on the facts” or living within technical limitations—they reflect a deeper failure of political institutions. Offering hope against authoritarianism and pessimism, The Environmental Republic challenges the false choice between environmental protection and human freedom, showing how place-based institutions can deliver both sustainability and human development through true self-governance.
Elemental: The New Geography of Climate Change and How We Survive It by Arthur Snell (Wildfire Books 2026, 400 pages, $30.00)
As natural disasters and increased scarcity shake the established world order to its core, an alternative future is still possible. Unprecedented challenges will inevitably drive conflict, but they will also encourage innovation, upending economies and global power structures to create opportunities for new players and pioneering ways of living. In this groundbreaking study, Arthur Snell visits rapidly changing societies to show how we can live on a warming planet. He presents a vision where autocratic oil states are no more and new shipping routes across the melting Arctic bring regions closer than ever before. Through four sections—Earth, Air, Fire, and Water—Elemental blends reportage with analysis and interviews with key experts to reveal the turbulent future we face — and the choices we need to make to avert disaster.
Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works for All by Jeremy Lent (Melville House 2026, 400 pages, $32.99)
It has often been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism—and yet that is what the historical moment urgently calls for. Incremental policy improvements are no longer enough—we need a deep transformation of our current civilization to continue to survive. In Ecocivilization, leading thinker Jeremy Lent offers that reimagination, grounded in proven design principles of ecosystems and in humankind’s evolved inclination toward justice, mutuality, and dignity. From the global economy to universal housing and income, from infrastructure to agriculture, every major aspect of our society can be redesigned to work together, setting the conditions for all people to flourish. Ecocivilization shows how this future on a regenerated Earth is not only desirable, but entirely feasible.
We have to learn how to live with the violent climate we created. It won’t be easy.
The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late by Wim Carton and Andreas Malm (Verso Books 2025, 656 pages, $39.95)
The world is crossing the 1.5°C global warming limit, perhaps exceeding 2°C soon after. What is to be done when these boundaries, set by the Paris Agreement, have been passed? In the overshoot era, schemes proliferate for muscular adaptation or for new technologies to turn the heat down at a later date by removing CO2 from the air or blocking sunlight. Such technologies come with immense risks and provide an excuse for those who would prefer to avoid limiting emissions in the present. But do they also hold out some potential? Can the catastrophe be reversed, masked or simply adapted to once it is a fact? The Long Heat maps the new front lines in the struggle for a liveable planet and insists on the climate revolution long overdue. In the end, no technology can absolve us of responsibility for our planet and each other.
North: The Future of Post-Climate America by Jesse M. Keenan (Oxford University Press 2025, 288 pages, $29.95 paperback)
Climate change is already influencing how and where people live. In North, Jesse M. Keenan argues that America is entering a new era marked by shifts in population that will transform everything from the physical landscape of cities to electoral politics. First, Keenan examines how human mobility is shaped by the environment and the economy. Next, he provides a conceptual and empirical overview of adaptation science, with a focus on how people, governments, and markets are preparing for and responding to climate impacts. He shows how physical impacts, escalating costs, and public sector inertia converge to drive people out of high-risk areas, while other areas attract people seeking sustainable ways of life. North is not just about the peril of those left behind; it is also a projection of optimism about America’s capacity for adaptation.
Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress by Roy Scranton (Stanford University Press 2025, 392 pages, $30.00)
We need a new realism in the face of global climate catastrophe. Yet instead of serious responses from world leaders, we get more of the same: more capitalism, more complexity, more “progress.” The impasse we face is not only political and institutional, but cognitive, existential, and narrative. Our brains can’t make sense of how radically our world is changing. And we optimistically cling to a civilizational narrative that promises a better tomorrow if we just keep doing what we’re doing. If we want to have any hope at all for the future, it must be grounded in a recognition of human limits—a view Roy Scranton calls ethical pessimism. Scranton describes the challenges we face in making sense of our predicament. What emerges is a hopeful proposition: If we can accept our limits, we may find a way to embrace our future.
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