Whatever the Cost May Be

At this point, one should not have to set the scene for a review of Seth Klein’s A Good War, yet the notion of a “climate emergency” still has an empty rhetorical flavour for far too many. The reality: Massive wildfires in Australia, the Amazon, and North America. Increasingly powerful hurricanes, so numerous that meteorologists run out of names. The rapid melting of Arctic ice. A measurable rise in sea levels. Road-melting summer highs. Accelerating extinctions, including what’s been dubbed the insect apocalypse. These and other sobering developments are all now defining features of our planetscape. But no signal of crisis has been enough, so far, to make our government (and most others) shake off the political lethargy that’s preventing the forceful action required to reverse course.

As those who have been paying attention know, we have dangerously little time. A near-perfect consensus of climate scientists tells us that we have about a decade to act before...