Book cover for Losing Earth

Losing Earth

Synopsis

Details

18 April 2019
318 minutes
9781529015867
Imprint: Picador

Reviews

As Nathaniel Rich observes “nearly every conversation we have in 2019 about climate change was being held
in 1979.” His gripping, depressing, revelatory book makes it clear that not only is climate change a tragedy,
but that it is also a crime — a thing that bad people knowingly made worse, for their personal gain. That,
I suspect, is one of the many aspects to the climate change battle that posterity will find it hard to believe, and
impossible to forgive.

The excellent and appalling Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich describes how close we came in the 70s to dealing with the causes of global warming and how US big business & Reaganite politicians in the 80s ensured it didn’t happen. Read it.
Others have documented where we are, and speculated about where we might be headed, but the story of how we got here is perhaps the most important one to be told, because it is both a cautionary tale and an unfinished one.
[Losing Earth] chronicles the failure of our scientific and political leaders to act to halt the climate apocalypse when they appeared on the verge of doing so, and casts the triumph of denial as the defining moral crisis for humankind.