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This year set a high bar for climate writing, from fiction like Eleanor Catton’s terrific Birnam Woods and Lydia Kiesling’s sharp and prescient Mobility to nonfiction like John Vaillant’s best-of-list-topping Fire Weather and Jeff Goodell’s timely The Heat Will Kill You First. Needless to say, next year has its work cut out for it.
But after spending the past several weeks digging through publisher catalogs and publicist emails (so … many … emails), I feel confident that the coming year of climate writing will be able to hold its own. Here are 17 books I immediately added to my to-be-read pile for 2024. (We’ve made it easy to add them to yours, too. Just check out our curated list on Bookshop here.)
Author Christy Lefteri first encountered wildfire in 2017, when she was working in Greece as a volunteer at a refugee shelter for women and children displaced by the Syrian Civil War. “I woke up one morning and the sky was filled with smoke,” she recalled to Publishers Weekly. “There was a fire in a nearby town. It haunted me.” The Book of Fire — which follows up Lefteri’s 2019 bestseller The Beekeeper of Aleppo — centers on a Greek family whose lives are forever altered when a forest fire destroys their home and village. The Guardian called it a “poignant, intimate family” story. Preorder it here.
Hannah Ritchie is the deputy editor of Our World in Data, one of my favorite resources for climate information, and her debut book has been described as a “surprisingly optimistic and often counterintuitive story, one that completely contradicts the doomsday-ism in most climate change conversations” by none other than — wait for it — Bill Gates. While many climate handbooks do a lot of handwringing, Ritchie aims to give readers actionable and data-backed ways to address urgent environmental problems. Not the End of the World has already earned a starred review from Kirkus Reviews and counts Margaret Atwood among its growing fans. Preorder it here.
If you want to get a jump on the book everyone will be talking about this winter, you should preorder Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto now. Already an international bestseller — the English translation arrives in January — Slow Down makes a Marxist argument that growth-focused solutions to inequality and climate change like the Green New Deal are a “dangerous compromise.” Instead, Saito argues for decarbonization through shorter working hours and an end to mass consumption. The book has received starred reviews from the major trade publications and excited intellectuals including philosopher Slavoj Žižek, critic and editor Malcolm Harris, and Fire Weather author John Vaillant, among others. You’ll want to have an opinion on this one. Preorder it here.
What do we owe the places we love? In 2017, Manjula Martin and her partner moved from San Francisco to a peaceful refuge in the forest of California’s Sonoma County. On the night of their housewarming party, however, a fire tore through the region; Martin’s new home survived, but it would only become under greater threat in 2020, one of the state’s worst fire seasons in recorded history. “Humans have evolved with fire,” Martin explained to my colleague Neel Dhanesha earlier this year, “and the more I engage with fire, the more I learn about it, the more I understand its role in both the land and the history of this place, the less afraid I feel.” Kirkus praised her memoir as “insightful and alarming, hopeful, and consistently engaging.” Preorder it here.
I’ve been hearing great things about Ray Nayler since the release of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, in 2022, and if I’m not careful, I will soon be playing catch-up: His sophomore book will be out in just a few weeks. In this novella, Russian scientists have managed to bring woolly mammoths back from extinction, but the creatures need to learn how to survive in the modern day. Enter elephant behavior expert Damira Khismatullina — who was murdered trying to protect the world’s last herds from ivory poachers. Luckily, Damira’s consciousness was uploaded to the cloud before she was killed, and the scientists are able to implant it in the woolly mammoths’ matriarch. Library Journal named this book its sci-fi pick of the month and “highly” recommends it for “readers of eco-terrorism thrillers and climate fiction.” And the premise might not be as far-fetched as it sounds: At COP28 this year, a Russian billionaire hawked a plan to bring back woolly mammoths to Siberia. Preorder it here.
“Near-future thrillers don’t come much better than this stellar effort,” according to Publishers Weekly. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, Ben’s fiancee Cara takes a job working for a billionaire on a private island called Sanctuary Rock — then writes Ben to say she isn’t coming back. Ben, worried, decides to track down Cara by joining the community while poking around for clues into what he’s sure must be a dark plot. This climate thriller is already out in the U.K. and I keep hearing about its “effective shocker of an ending” — pick up this one before someone spoils it for you. Preorder it here.
Aboriginal-Australian author Alexis Wright’s newest novel is aptly named: Praiseworthy has received tons of acclaim abroad, with The Guardian marveling, “How can one novel contain so much?” The book centers on a small town in north Australia threatened by a strange haze — though a precise description of the plot is difficult to come by. “The Ancestors of contemporary Aboriginal people are key to a story that also addresses issues of sovereignty, colonial violence, and the devastation caused by global climate change,” reads one attempt. “In addition, Praiseworthy is a tale of migrations and family connections elsewhere. And it is a story about donkeys.” But as “freewheeling” as its plot might be, the raves for Praiseworthy are impossible to ignore. It’s a “heartbreaking masterpiece,” said Publishers Weekly, adding: “This is unforgettable.” Preorder it here.
Former HuffPost climate reporter Sarah Ruiz-Grossman makes her debut with A Fire So Wild, which its publisher describes as Little Fires Everywhere meets Disappearing Earth. On Abigail’s 50th birthday, she decides to throw a party to raise funds for a new affordable housing project in Berkeley. But while the haves mingle with the have-nots — Willow, whom Abigail met at a soup kitchen, is working as a server at the party — a wildfire burns closer and closer to the gala. This novel sounds juicy — and ripe for Hollywood. Enjoy the bragging rights of saying you read the book first. Preorder it here.
Birding to Change the World shares its name with a course that its author, Trish O’Kane, teaches at the University of Vermont, pairing college students with elementary school children and having them go birdwatching together. But O’Kane wasn’t always a birder; it wasn’t until Hurricane Katrina struck her home in New Orleans that she “took a cup of coffee and sat on the back stoop. About a dozen small brown sparrows clung to a few spindly trees. Where did they go during the hurricane? How did they survive?” In a starred review, Publishers Weekly praised the memoir for knitting together personal and natural history to share how O’Kane’s interest in birds grew to the point that she “quit her journalism career, [returned] to school at age 45 ... and [became] an ardent conservationist.” Preorder it here.
“My grandmother Mabel Raboteau fled the coastal town of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and the terror of Jim Crow along the northern pathway of the Great Migration, to Michigan, to save her life and the lives of her children.” So begins a 2019 essay by Emily Raboteau in The New York Review of Books titled “Lessons In Survival,” which goes on to review two other books. Now, though, it is Raboteau’s turn to tell her story. Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse” is “a probing series of pilgrimages from the perspective of a mother struggling to raise her children to thrive without coming undone in an era of turbulent intersecting crises,” per its publisher, and touches on themes of Black womanhood, art and history, and, of course, what it means to be a mother in an uncertain world. Preorder it here.
I can lose myself for hours looking at photographs by Virginia Hanusik, whose work explores how climate change is reshaping the Mississippi River delta. Into the Quiet and the Light is an apt title for her debut collection; her photos are often subdued, unpopulated, and symmetrical, a combination that gives them the quality of being both painterly and lonely. The collection will include texts from a number of writers, including architects, historians, activists, and organizers. Get a feel for Hanusik’s work with her 2022 photo essay for Bitter Southerner here before smashing that preorder link. Preorder it here.
A little over a year ago, Elizabeth Kolbert published a lengthy essay in The New Yorker under the title “Climate Change From A to Z.” It delivered on its premise: In 26 short essays ranging from “Arrhenius” to “Zero,” Kolbert tackled the uncertainty — and breadth — of the climate crisis. H Is for Hope expands on the original concept and, thankfully, doesn’t drop the lovely accompanying illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook. A must-have for your climate shelf. Preorder it here.
The planet is changing; more and more places around the globe are becoming uninhabitable. The United States is not immune: By journalist Abrahm Lustgarten’s estimate, by 2070, “at least 4 million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life.” Where will we be forced to leave? And if we leave, where will we go? Lustgarten seeks answers in his forthcoming data-driven book, On the Move, which explores what a mass migration might look like in the U.S. as fires in the West, floods on the coasts, and extreme heat and drought in the South drive populations inland. You might want to read this one before buying a house. Preorder it here.
I love history, science, and animals, so I feel pretty confident I’ll love Every Living Thing, which tells the story of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon’s dueling attempts to identify all life on Earth. I mean, pffft, how hard could it be? Author Jason Roberts reportedly spent more than a decade researching this book, which follows up his 2006 biography of James Holman, A Sense of the World, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Preorder it here.
It might seem like everyone is into birding these days — and you can count The Joy Luck Club author Amy Tan among them. She hasn't always been curious about her avian neighbors, however. That changed in 2016, when Tan was desperate for a distraction from the world. Soon, she was sketching the birds; next, she signing up to have 10,000 mealworms delivered each week for her new friends. “I have identified 56 species in my yard,” Tan told the Sierra Club, admitting “I went a little overboard” on the whole birding thing. But it’s because she went overboard that we get to enjoy The Backyard Bird Chronicles, which gathers Tan’s journal entries and original sketches. Preorder it here.
A longtime editor for the Times Literary Supplement, Roz Dineen is set to publish her debut novel, a dystopian tale of a mother raising three children while her husband is overseas. As things worsen in the city, Cass decides to take the children to her mother-in-law’s house in the country — and when that no longer seems safe, either, to a commune on the coast. The book description brings to mind Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible, with the publisher writing that “against a wider backdrop of a world imploding, [Briefly Very Beautiful] is an exploration of hope and fear, beauty and joy, as well as seismic betrayal.” Preorder it here.
Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam provide power for 5.8 million homes and businesses across seven states. But since 2000, the lake has been drying up. At a certain point, if the level falls too low, it will reach “dead pool,” a state when there is only a weak amount of water flowing through the dam — what Bob Martin, the deputy power manager at Glen Canyon, has called “a complete doomsday scenario” to The Washington Post. At the same time, activists are increasingly pushing to drain Lake Powell and restore the Colorado River. Journalist and passionate river rafter Zak Podmore explores the issue further in his forthcoming book, Life After Dead Pool, which is “not a dour story of climate disaster” but rather “an original account of Glen Canyon’s resurrection,” according to its publisher. Preorder it here.
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On a late-night House vote, Tesla’s slump, and carbon credits
Current conditions: Tropical storm Chantal has a 40% chance of developing this weekend and may threaten Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas • French far-right leader Marine Le Pen is campaigning on a “grand plan for air conditioning” amid the ongoing record-breaking heatwave in Europe • Great fireworks-watching weather is in store tomorrow for much of the East and West Coasts.
The House moved closer to a final vote on President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after passing a key procedural vote around 3 a.m. ET on Thursday morning. “We have the votes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after the rule vote, adding, “We’re still going to meet” Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline to pass the megabill. A floor vote on the legislation is expected as soon as Thursday morning.
GOP leadership had worked through the evening to convince holdouts, with my colleagues Katie Brigham and Jael Holzman reporting last night that House Freedom Caucus member Ralph Norman of North Carolina said he planned to advance the legislation after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, particularly for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version phases out more slowly than House Republicans wanted. “It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally ‘deal with’ tax credits already codified into law,” Brigham and Holzman write, although another Republican holdout, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, made similar allusions to reporters on Wednesday.
Tesla delivered just 384,122 cars in the second quarter of 2025, a 13.5% slump from the 444,000 delivered in the same quarter of 2024, marking the worst quarterly decline in the company’s history, Barron’s reports. The slump follows a similarly disappointing Q1, down 13% year-over-year, after the company’s sales had “flatlined for the first time in over a decade” in 2024, InsideEVs adds.
Despite the drop, Tesla stock rose 5% on Wednesday, with Wedbush analyst Dan Ives calling the Q2 results better than some had expected. “Fireworks came early for Tesla,” he wrote, although Barron’s notes that “estimates for the second quarter of 2025 started at about 500,000 vehicles. They started to drop precipitously after first-quarter deliveries fell 13% year over year, missing Wall Street estimates by some 40,000 vehicles.”
The European Commission proposed its 2040 climate target on Wednesday, which, for the first time, would allow some countries to use carbon credits to meet their emissions goals. EU Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero, and Clean Growth Wopke Hoekstra defended the decision during an appearance on Euronews on Wednesday, saying the plan — which allows developing nations to meet a limited portion of their emissions goals with the credits — was a chance to “build bridges” with countries in Africa and Latin America. “The planet doesn’t care about where we take emissions out of the air,” he separately told The Guardian. “You need to take action everywhere.” Green groups, which are critical of the use of carbon credits, slammed the proposal, which “if agreed [to] by member states and passed by the EU parliament … is then supposed to be translated into an international target,” The Guardian writes.
Around half of oil executives say they expect to drill fewer wells in 2025 than they’d planned for at the start of the year, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey. Of the respondents at firms producing more than 10,000 barrels a day, 42% said they expected a “significant decrease in the number of wells drilled,” Bloomberg adds. The survey further indicates that Republican policy has been at odds with President Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric, as tariffs have increased the cost of completing a new well by more than 4%. “It’s hard to imagine how much worse policies and D.C. rhetoric could have been for U.S. E&P companies,” one anonymous executive said in the report. “We were promised by the administration a better environment for producers, but were delivered a world that has benefited OPEC to the detriment of our domestic industry.”
Fine-particulate air pollution is strongly associated with lung cancer-causing DNA mutations that are more traditionally linked to smoking tobacco, a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the National Cancer Institute has found. The researchers looked at the genetic code of 871 non-smokers’ lung tumors in 28 regions across Europe, Africa, and Asia and found that higher levels of local air pollution correlated with more cancer-driving mutations in the respective tumors.
Surprisingly, the researchers did not find a similar genetic correlation among non-smokers exposed to secondhand smoke. George Thurston, a professor of medicine and population health at New York University, told Inside Climate News that a potential reason for this result is that fine-particulate air pollution — which is emitted by cars, industrial activities, and wildfires — is more widespread than exposure to secondhand smoke. “We are engulfed in fossil-fuel-burning pollution every single day of our lives, all day long, night and day,” he said, adding, “I feel like I’m in the Matrix, and I’m the only one that took the red pill. I know what’s going on, and everybody else is walking around thinking, ‘This stuff isn’t bad for your health.’” Today, non-smokers account for up to 25% of lung cancer cases globally, with the worst air quality pollution in the United States primarily concentrated in the Southwest.
EPA
National TV news networks aired a combined 4 hours and 20 minutes of coverage about the record-breaking late-June temperatures in the Midwest and East Coast — but only 4% of those segments mentioned the heat dome’s connection to climate change, a new report by Media Matters found.
“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The foreign entities of concern rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill would place gigantic new burdens on developers.
Trump campaigned on cutting red tape for energy development. At the start of his second term, he signed an executive order titled, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” promising to kill 10 regulations for each new one he enacted.
The order deems federal regulations an “ever-expanding morass” that “imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness.” It goes on to say that these regulations “are often difficult for the average person or business to understand,” that they are so complicated that they ultimately increase the cost of compliance, as well as the risks of non-compliance.
Reading this now, the passage echoes the comments I’ve heard from industry groups and tax law experts describing the incredibly complex foreign entities of concern rules that Congress — with the full-throated backing of the Trump administration — is about to impose on clean energy projects and manufacturers. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar, as well as utility-scale energy storage, geothermal, nuclear, and all kinds of manufacturing projects will have to abide by restrictions on their Chinese material inputs and contractual or financial ties with Chinese entities in order to qualify for tax credits.
“Foreign entity of concern” is a U.S. government term referring to entities that are “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” any of four countries — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and most importantly for clean energy technology, China.
Trump’s tax bill requires companies to meet increasingly strict limits on the amount of material from China they use in their projects and products. A battery factory starting production next year, for example, would have to ensure that 60% of the value of the materials that make up its products have no connection to China. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 85%. The bill lays out similar benchmarks and timelines for clean electricity projects, as well as other kinds of manufacturing.
But how companies should calculate these percentages is not self-evident. The bill also forbids companies from collecting the tax credits if they have business relationships with “specified foreign entities” or “foreign-influenced entities,” terms with complicated definitions that will likely require guidance from the Treasury for companies to be sure they pass the test.
Regulatory uncertainty could stifle development until further guidance is released, but how long that takes will depend on if and when the Trump administration prioritizes getting it done. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a lot of other new tax-related provisions that were central to the Trump campaign, including a tax exemption for tips, which are likely much higher on the department’s to-do list.
Tax credit implementation was a top priority for the Biden administration, and even with much higher staffing levels than the department currently has, it took the Treasury 18 months to publish initial guidance on foreign entities of concern rules for the Inflation Reduction Act’s electric vehicle tax credit. “These things are so unbelievably complicated,” Rachel McCleery, a former senior advisor at the Treasury under Biden, told me.
McCleery questioned whether larger, publicly-owned companies would be able to proceed with major investments in things like battery manufacturing plants until that guidance is out. She gave the example of a company planning to pump out 100,000 batteries per year and claim the per-kilowatt-hour advanced manufacturing tax credit. “That’s going to look like a pretty big number in claims, so you have to be able to confidently and assuredly tell your shareholder, Yep, we’re good, we qualify, and that requires a certification” by a tax counsel, she said. To McCleery, there’s an open question as to whether any tax counsel “would even provide a tax opinion for publicly-traded companies to claim credits of this size without guidance.”
John Cornwell, the director of policy at the Good Energy Collective, which conducts research and advocacy for nuclear power, echoed McCleery’s concerns. “Without very clear guidelines from the Treasury and IRS, until those guidelines are in place, that is going to restrict financing and investment,” Cornwell told me.
Understanding what the law requires will be the first challenge. But following it will involve tracking down supply chain data that may not exist, finding alternative suppliers that may not be able to fill the demand, and establishing extensive documentation of the origins of components sourced through webs of suppliers, sub-suppliers, and materials processors.
The Good Energy Collective put out an issue brief this week describing the myriad hurdles nuclear developers will face in trying to adhere to the tax credit rules. Nuclear plants contain thousands of components, and documenting the origin of everything from “steam generators to smaller items like specialized fasteners, gaskets, and electronic components will introduce substantial and costly administrative burdens,” it says. Additionally the critical minerals used in nuclear projects “often pass through multiple processing stages across different countries before final assembly,” and there are no established industry standards for supply chain documentation.
Beyond the documentation headache, even just finding the materials could be an issue. China dominates the market for specialized nuclear-grade materials manufacturing and precision component fabrication, the report says, and alternative suppliers are likely to charge premiums. Establishing new supply chains will take years, but Trump’s bill will begin enforcing the sourcing rules in 2026. The rules will prove even more difficult for companies trying to build first-of-a-kind advanced nuclear projects, as those rely on more highly specialized supply chains dominated by China.
These challenges may be surmountable, but that will depend, again, on what the Treasury decides, and when. The Department’s guidance could limit the types of components companies have to account for and simplify the documentation process, or it could not. But while companies wait for certainty, they may also be racking up interest. “The longer there are delays, that can have a substantial risk of project success,” Cornwell said.
And companies don’t have forever. Each of the credits comes with a phase-out schedule. Wind manufacturers can only claim the credits until 2028. Other manufacturers have until 2030. Credits for clean power projects will start to phase down in 2034. “Given the fact that a lot of these credits start lapsing in the next few years, there’s a very good chance that, because guidance has not yet come out, you’re actually looking at a much smaller time frame than than what is listed in the bill,” Skip Estes, the government affairs director for Securing America’s Energy Future, or SAFE, told me.
Another issue SAFE has raised is that the way these rules are set up, the foreign sourcing requirements will get more expensive and difficult to comply with as the value of the tax credits goes down. “Our concern is that that’s going to encourage companies to forego the credit altogether and just continue buying from the lowest common denominator, which is typically a Chinese state-owned or -influenced monopoly,” Estes said.
McCleery had another prediction — the regulations will be so burdensome that companies will simply set up shop elsewhere. “I think every industry will certainly be rethinking their future U.S. investments, right? They’ll go overseas, they’ll go to Canada, which dumped a ton of carrots and sticks into industry after we passed the IRA,” she said.
“The irony is that Republicans have historically been the party of deregulation, creating business friendly environments. This is completely opposite, right?”