To Save a Planet

The heating planet isn’t a distant abstraction: it’s a catastrophe unfolding right now, with disastrous consequences we’re only beginning to grasp. Even as eco-apocalyptic discourses and sobering statistics have predicted the end of the world as we know it, they haven’t yet inspired the individual behavioural or social change necessary to stop a species-wide suicide mission.

In response to the bleak and so far ineffective outlook that many label “doomerism,” some have turned to the rhetorical tool of hope to help people feel “unstuck”— and to spur them to actually do something. The journalist and activist Rebecca Solnit, for instance, has flipped the script of despair in her work, opting instead for a language of possibility. Similarly, the evangelical climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe emphasizes hope as a lever for human agency, a way of narrowing the gap between the solutions already at hand and the necessity for further action. This view is echoed by many others, from the Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres, who calls on us to channel trauma into stubborn optimism, to the science educator Elin Kelsey, who strives to rectify a “culture of hopelessness.”

Enter David Geselbracht’s Climate Hope: Stories of Action in an Age of Global Crisis, which examines how hope, though fragile, is an essential corrective to the pervasive paralysis that so many of us feel. Against a backdrop of widespread gloom and grief, Geselbracht spotlights stories of action, focused on resilience — both individual and collective. Through extensive research, interviews, and on-the-ground reporting across multiple countries, he weaves together pragmatic solutions that serve as another counter-narrative to tragic defeatism.

An environmental journalist and lawyer in British Columbia, Geselbracht traces the origins and impacts of global warming before diving into a wide array of strategies being developed to combat it. His book spans groundbreaking technologies, grassroots movements, and global forums; it takes readers to laboratories, courtrooms, and places of worship; and it profiles paleoclimatologists studying ancient climates, activists advocating for reparations at a United Nations climate change summit, and Indigenous communities in Canada directly affected by increased wildfire activity. Geselbracht visits sites like Oil Springs, Ontario — the birthplace of the North American petroleum industry — and a massive nuclear power plant in Sweden to unpack the history of energy and its role in climate change. He also highlights promising developments, such as the exponential growth of renewables and Denmark’s significant reduction of emissions.

Through these stories, Geselbracht positions climate hope not as a passive wish but as a clarion call to action. He acknowledges many of the intricacies, trade‑offs, and uncertainties that define the climate crisis and argues that, ultimately, human ingenuity and cooperation offer a path forward.

While Climate Hope is packed with informed insights, it is not without its shortcomings. The energy humanities scholar Imre Szeman rightly cautions against the use of hope as a “communicative practice” that tends to gloss over deep analysis and the entanglements of real-world problems. On this score, Geselbracht’s argument occasionally falters. He offers ample onsite reporting, but he sometimes delivers a techno-utopian take on the crisis, with relatively little commentary on the social and cultural conditions necessary for broader change.

In fact, Climate Hope unintentionally highlights a core flaw of overly bullish approaches: it downplays the difficult task of changing minds, building movements, and confronting entrenched systems of power. In his examination of the evangelical climate movement, for example, Geselbracht fails to fully address the stubborn link between climate denialism, evangelical Christianity, and Republican Party politics in the United States. Instead, he leans on Hayhoe and her somewhat unsatisfactory defence of hope: “We know that what gives us hope is action, whether it’s seeing others act, hearing about others acting, or acting ourselves.” This explanation falls short, as does Geselbracht’s analysis.

By centring his faith in science and policy rather than engaging with the challenging work of rethinking petrocultural beliefs and values, mobilizing the public, and addressing the need for radical political change, Geselbracht showcases solutions that — though appealing on paper and as individual case studies — remain disconnected from the realities of democratic action, especially in a committed oil state like Canada, where emissions just keep growing. His book overlooks the significant challenge of galvanizing citizens to act within a system resistant to meaningful environmental transformation — with at least two national political parties that implicitly or explicitly support expansion of fossil fuel production.

Geselbracht’s background in political communications — including his time as a senior special assistant to Catherine McKenna, when she was the federal minister of environment and climate change — is illuminating here. He alludes to this experience briefly in his final pages, when he celebrates the Liberal Party’s policy achievements, including historic investments in clean technologies and a federal price on carbon emissions. But he neglects to mention the Grits’ ongoing commitment to pipeline infrastructure or its broader extractivist politics. The omission is telling.

There has been remarkable progress toward a global energy transition, especially as prices plummet for renewables such as solar electricity and onshore wind power. Despite these advances, however, we remain deeply entrenched in fossil fuel dependency. Our consumption of oil in 2020 was ten times that of 1950 — and it has continued to rise over the past several years. This ongoing reliance reflects a troubling irony: while the very science that has contributed to the crisis holds potential solutions, it risks fostering a kind of wishful thinking that simply shifts focus away from the root issue. And as Geselbracht acknowledges, not all cutting-edge concepts are equally promising. Carbon capture and storage technologies are “expensive and complex, and always seem just out of reach — a mirage in the distance.”

Renewable technologies alone cannot dismantle the deeply ingrained petroculture that has shaped our lives for over a century. Tackling climate change demands a root-and-branch reset in our politics, personal priorities, and social expectations — one that requires not just solar panels and wind farms but a profound rethinking of how we engage with energy and the systems that govern our lives. This rethinking is conspicuously absent from Geselbracht’s book.

To his credit, Geselbracht does repeat Roz Foyer’s urgent call at COP26, the 2021 climate change summit in Glasgow, Scotland, for a just transition. The general secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, Foyer argued that society must fundamentally re-evaluate how we distribute wealth and power. After all, despite the prosperity that the fossil fuel age has given many of us in the West, it has dramatically disrupted life for countless others around the world. To actually address climate change — and to ensure that those most affected by the crisis are prioritized in any response — we need innovative energy solutions as well as a profound commitment to social equity and justice.

In the end, Geselbracht advocates for a “restrained form of hope,” which underscores the vital roles that various tools and technologies — like electric vehicles — play in this work. Importantly, he clarifies that these are not comprehensive solutions on their own. EVs may “represent one arrow in a large quiver,” but meaningful impact will require multiple arrows hitting the emissions target set by the Paris Agreement nearly ten years ago. Without far-reaching mobilization for radical environmental and economic change, our odds are slim.

Although Climate Hope presents a wealth of ideas that can inform and inspire readers, while steering clear of pessimism, it lacks the necessary critical insight into how we can truly make a just transition to a post-oil world — and soon. We already have extensive information about energy innovations and their climate implications, much of it now delivered with the optimistic stridency of writers and journalists like Geselbracht. Yet nothing much seems to change. A pressing question remains: How do we move beyond the binary of doomerism and hopefulness to finally take climate action — a truly radical overhaul of a system built on vast inequalities, uneven development, and violent extraction?