Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth

By Mark Hertsgaard and Eban Goodstein (Editor)

On December 7, 2011, Mark Hertsgaard participated in The National Climate Seminar, a series of webinars sponsored by Bard College’s Center for Environmental Policy. The online seminars provide a forum for leading scientists, writers, and other experts to talk about critical issues regarding climate change. The series also opens a public conversation, inviting participants to ask questions and contribute their own thoughts.
 
Hertsgaard has spent the last two decades reporting on climate change for media outlets including The New Yorker, NPR, Time, Vanity Fair, and The Nation, where he is the environment correspondent. His lecture focused on political movements and how environmental advocates can provoke change in public attitudes and on Capitol Hill. Hertsgaard sees 2011’s Occupy movement as a sign of real hope and discussed what climate activists can learn from Occupy’s tactics. 
 
This E-ssential is an edited version of Hertsgaard’s talk and the subsequent question and answer session. While some material has been cut and some language modified for clarity, the intention was to retain the substance of the original discussion. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Feb 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781610914147

Mark Hertsgaard

Mark Hertsgaard is the author of seven nonfiction books, including On Bended Knee:  The Press and the Reagan Presidency and Hot: Living through The Next Fifty Years on Earth.  As a journalist, Hertsgaard has reported from around the world for the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, TIME, The Nation, The Guardian, Scientific American, and more. He is the co-founder and executive director of Covering Climate Now (www.coveringclimatenow.org/).

Book preview

Introduction

On December 7, 2011, Mark Hertsgaard participated in The National Climate Seminar, a series of webinars sponsored by Bard College’s Center for Environmental Policy. The online seminars provide a forum for leading scientists, writers, and other experts to talk about critical issues regarding climate change. The series also opens a public conversation, inviting participants to ask questions and contribute their own thoughts.

Hertsgaard has spent the last two decades reporting on climate change for media outlets including The New Yorker, NPR, Time, Vanity Fair, and The Nation, where he is the environment correspondent. His lecture focused on political movements and how environmental advocates can provoke change in public attitudes and on Capitol Hill. Hertsgaard sees 2011’s Occupy movement as a sign of real hope and discussed what climate activists can learn from Occupy’s tactics.

What follows is an edited version of Hertsgaard’s talk and the subsequent question and answer session. While some material has been cut and some language modified for clarity, the intention was to retain the substance of the original discussion.

HOT

Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth

Seminar by Mark Hertsgaard

There have recently been a lot of notable developments concerning climate change. The Durban Climate Conference is underway right now. And here in San Francisco, where I live, the American

Reviews for Hot

[lindap69 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

just skimmed the beginning of this book before it was due - the beginning might be all that is needed for the naysayers about what we are doing to ourselves with our dependence on oil, gas and coal and the fact that depending on our age either we or our immediate families will feel the impact. Oh if only we could get big oil to use all of the lobby money for alternate energy rather than supporting them and increasing their profits.

[satyridae · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There's a LOT of meat here, a lot of very important information. It's presented in a fairly dense format and is not terribly well-written. From a journalistic standpoint, it's well-done, but it's too dense for a book, in my opinion.

This book also tips into the bathetic on more than one occasion as Hertsgaard talks about fatherhood and the fact that his own personal, perfect, adorable princess of a child will be dealing with climate change. And though he does admit that there are other children in the world, one gets the sense that he doesn't find them nearly as important as his own princess. And, sure, we all feel that way to some degree, but journalistic integrity demands we at least try to suppress it a little whilst reporting on a topic we are trying to present as universal.

I'm perhaps focusing on the negatives so I can avoid talking about the primary message of this book, which seems to be that we are screwed as a planet. Deeply, irremediably screwed. Unless we all wake up by noon tomorrow and change our ways- and somehow I'm doubting that the corporations who now own my country are going to be cooperating with that.

Hertsgaard offers some crumbs of hope, but they are merely crumbs. I can't imagine my grandchildren's world, but life seems to be heading back towards "nasty, brutish and short" in a big hurry.

So: 4 stars for content, 3 for writing and 1 for sentimentality. Averaged out.

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An intensely troubling view of the future, and a survey of what damage has already been done. A vital book for understanding our future.

[jefware · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh shit! We've messed up our grandchildren's planet. I'm taking a pledge not to fly anymore.

[melmore_10 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Upsetting but necessary reprting on the implacable disaster we're facing unless something dramatic is done in the very near future about our use of fossil fuels and other sources of greenhouse gases. Hertsgaard uses speculation about the future his young daughter will face as a effective, and moving, pivot for his reporting on the current state of climate research. Most hopeful moment: the aggressive 200-year Dutch government (and people) to mitigate and adapt to cliamte change. Most depressing: Hertsgaard's account of the disappointingly tepid actions of the Obama administration and the criminal resistance of the Bush administration to any action at all.

[karieh_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book took me quite a while to read. Not because of its length or complexity, but because of the subject matter. Climate change is one of the most important issues facing our planet, but because of the enormity of the consequences, it is also one of the scariest.

“In triggering climate change, humanity has unwittingly launched a planetary experiment. Because this experiment has never been run before, and because it involves extremely complicated systems, knowing exactly how it will turn out is impossible.”

All of the science and scientific predictions in “Hot” agree that the results will be far from good. There is no disagreement that climate change is here and that it means dire things for many parts of Earth, the only thing that remains to be seen is how dire.

Because of all of this, I had to read “Hot” in parts. I could only take bits at a time…and some bit were easier than others. I am lucky enough to live in an area where one of the people profiled as being a positive force regarding climate change is laying good groundwork for our region going forward. I could focus on those successes and the things that the author outlined that individuals could do as I read the parts about what would occur if nothing was done.

I liked that Hertsgaard puts his daughter and another child at the forefront of this book. Because climate change is a gradual occurrence, it easier for many people to take the “I’ll think about that tomorrow” approach. But when again and again, Hertsgaard reminds the reader that tomorrow is alive in the children of today, it makes it harder and harder to push the reality away. We save mementoes, heirlooms and money for our children’s future – it’s hard to disagree that we need to make sure that the world they will inhabit shouldn’t be saved for them as well.

I was very interested to read that, “Bangladesh has done more over the past twenty years to understand and adapt to climate change than any other country in the world except for Great Britain and the Netherlands.” Which is amazing to me as well as ironic because, “There is a terrible injustice at the heart of the climate problem: climate change punishes the world’s poor first and worst, even though they did almost nothing to bring it on.”

Though there are some very hard and necessary truths in “Hot”, Mark Hertsgaard does a good job in walking the reader close to the ledge, but then showing them there is a ladder there. He deftly shifts the focus between the science of what will probably happen in the next fifty years to the actions that are being taken around the world to minimize and deal with the impacts. He does not let the reader off the hook or pretend that everything will be fine – but leads them to the blueprints of how things can be better.

I applaud the author for taking this subject on, especially with the concerted and highly funded campaign of lying with which climate change deniers are assaulting the world. This is about us, but more importantly, it is about our children. Not the children of tomorrow, but the children we are raising and protecting and loving today. “We are responsible for laying the foundations that future generations will build on, somewhat like the mason’s who laid the foundation of the European cathedrals that took several centuries to complete. They knew they would not live to see the final product of their work, but they also knew they needed to do very solid, precise work because of all the weight that was going to be placed on top of their work.”

We, too, need to take this long world view. We need to understand that tackling climate change is not only our most important challenge as a people but also possibly our greatest triumph.

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mark Hertsgaard's book Hot is written much in the same style as Bill McKibben's Eaarth, wide ranging popular journalism with a mixture of science, history, current affairs, argumentation and autobiography.

Hot differs from Eaarth in being slightly more upbeat by focusing on positive examples and trends already underway towards mitigation of the effects of global warming. This is an important distinction, between efforts to stop/slow global warming, and efforts to mitigate the effects of global warming. For example he looks at Dutch plans for keeping the ocean at bay - for the next 200 years! Though he says if it rises more than 6 feet, even the vaunted Dutch engineers will throw up their hands and swim away.

Some things I learned include: "100 year flood" doesn't mean once in 100 years, but a 1 in 100 chance of happening every year (a big difference). Lloyd's of London has been told by an internal science report to expect 3 feet of sea-level rise by 2050. 80% of CO2 comes from the richest 20%. In a hotter future, the best places to live in the USA, Hertsgaard recommends New York City, Chicago and King County, Washington - because of current leadership and mitigation efforts already underway.

This isn't a canonical book because much will be outdated in a few years, but for those wanting to keep up with some of the latest developments at the local government and corporate level (ca. 2005-2009), it has some great reporting. Since Hertsgaard is based near San Francisco, there are a bunch of California examples, a coda to McKibben's Vermont-focus in Eaarth.