The Future We Choose

The book opens with the authors introducing themselves: Christiana Figueres was born in Costa Rica in 1956, Tom Rivett-Carnac in England in 1977. They present this as being children of two geological eras — the end of the stable Holocene and the start of the Anthropocene, in which humans reshape the planet. Figueres served as Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change from 2010 to 2016, and Rivett-Carnac worked as chief political strategist during the Paris talks. This background gives the book credibility: two people who saw climate politics from the inside are speaking.

The introduction's key thesis is two dates: 2030 and 2050. According to the authors, to have at least an even chance of holding warming to 1.5 degrees, global emissions must fall by at least 50% by 2030 and reach “net zero” by 2050 at the latest. The reason is that climate change is not linear: Arctic sea ice, the Greenland ice sheet, boreal forests and the Amazon can topple one another like dominoes. The introduction is also sharp about climate denial, comparing the rejection of climate science to not believing in gravity.

The two scenarios of part one are the most memorable pages. In “The World We Are Creating”, people in 2050 check the air quality on their phones before opening a window, coral reefs are only a memory, Arctic ice has melted and people are being moved away from coastal cities. In “The World We Must Create”, emissions have been halved every decade, city air is clean and forests have returned. This literary device works, but readers should remember it is not a forecast — it is the authors' science-based imagining, which they themselves acknowledge.

The heart of the book is the “Stubborn Optimism” chapter. It opens with the Buddha and its core idea is clear: optimism is not a temperament but a choice, and the mind can be consciously reprogrammed. The authors call the most common reaction to climate news “learned helplessness” and judge it not just mistaken but irresponsible. I liked the chapter's practical side: when the mind says “it's too late”, remind it that even a tenth of a degree matters; when it says “giving up fossil fuels is impossible”, remind it that more than half of the UK's electricity now comes from clean sources.

The strongest part of the chapter is a personal admission. After the 2009 Copenhagen fiasco, Figueres takes charge of the negotiations and, at the first press conference, answers a journalist's question — “Do you believe a global agreement is possible?” — with “Not in my lifetime.” The book presents that sentence as the problem itself and describes the road to Paris above all as a change of mood. Rebecca Solnit's line, “Hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency”, also appears here.

• A literary, vivid rendering of two possible futures
• Insider scenes from the Paris talks (the Copenhagen fiasco, a bomb scare at Le Bourget)
• Extensive notes and sources for every claim