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The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis Kindle Edition

by Christiana Figueres (Author), Tom Rivett-Carnac (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.6 1,142 ratings

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A cautionary but optimistic book about the world’s changing climate and the fate of humanity, from two of the architects of the 2015 Paris Agreement. • "One of the most inspiring books I've ever read." —Yuval Harari

Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a regenerative world that has net-zero emissions. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can, and must, do to fend off disaster.

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242 pages
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English
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Vintage
Publication date

February 25, 2020
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Popular Highlights in this book

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Almost all tropical deforestation is driven by demand for four commodities: beef, soy, palm oil, and wood.
Highlighted by 384 Kindle readers
Anger that sinks into despair is powerless to make a change. Anger that evolves into conviction is unstoppable.
Highlighted by 358 Kindle readers
Complacency now will lock us into a future of guaranteed scarcity, instability, and strife.
Highlighted by 305 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

“This is one of the most inspiring books I have ever read.” —Yuval Harari

“The Paris Agreement was a landmark for humankind. In this timely and important book, two of the principal creators of that agreement show us why and how we can now realize its promise. I hope it is widely read and acted on.” —Jane Goodall

“Figueres and Rivett-Carnac dare to tell us how our response can create a better, fairer world.” —Naomi Klein

“There could not be a more important book.” —Richard Branson

“A book that shepherds climate activism from changing mental states to changing the world. . . . Th e authors recommend a mindset for climate activism that rests on three attitudes: radical optimism, endless abundance, and radical regeneration.” —Forbes

“Inspiring. . . . A practically minded manifesto for personal action in the face of climate change.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The book takes a hard look at the frightening realities of climate change but concludes that humanity can still deal with this threat. Moreover, the book presents the existential challenge of climate change as a unique opportunity to build a more just world and to make ourselves better people. Most importantly, the book adopts a very practical approach and suggests ten concrete actions that each of us can take in order to create a better future for all the residents of planet Earth. I hope we all take this message to heart.” —Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of Sapiens and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“This could be the most important wake- up call of our times.” —Klaus Schwab, CEO, World Economic Forum

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction to the Vintage Books Edition (2021)
The Critical Decade

We wrote this book before COVID-19 crashed into our world. In fact, we managed only the first three stops on a planned yearlong book tour before we rushed to our respective homes and into a global lockdown that has changed everything. Since then we have been shocked at how many aspects of both the dystopian and the desirable futures we describe in this book suddenly came into relief and stark contrast with each other.

More than ever, we are determined to play our part in ensuring our future is one that we deliberately choose, rather than one we stumble into blindly.

We have seen the world on fire, from the Amazon rain forest to California and from Australia to the Arctic. The hour is late, and the moment of consequence, so long delayed, is now upon us. Do we watch the world burn, or do we choose to do what is necessary to achieve a different future?

Who we understand ourselves to be determines the choice we will make. That choice determines what will become of us. The choice is both simple and complex, but above all it is urgent. The next decade will be the most consequential in human history. We are choosing between two utterly contrasting futures, one to be feared and the other to be proud of. This book presents three mindsets that are essential for making the wiser choice. We can do this.

We remember a twelve-year-old girl marching with her friends down Sixteenth Street in Washington, D.C., at ten a.m. on a Friday, holding up a hand-painted sign of the Earth enveloped in red flames. In London, grown-up demonstrators dressed in black and wearing riot-police headgear form a human chain blocking traffic at Piccadilly Circus, as others glue themselves to the pavement in front of the headquarters of BP. In Seoul, South Korea, the streets teem with elementary schoolchildren sporting multicolored backpacks and carrying banners that say CLIMATE STRIKE—in English, for the benefit of the media. In Bangkok, hundreds of teenage students take to the streets. With firm resolve and heavy hearts, they walk behind their defiant leader, an eleven-year- old girl carrying a sign: THE OCEANS ARE RISING AND SO ARE WE.

All over the world, millions of young people—inspired by Greta Thunberg, the teenage girl who began a lone protest in front of the Swedish parliament—are engaging in civil disobedience to draw attention to climate change. Students understand the scientific projections and are terrified about the diminished quality of life on their horizon. They demand decisive action now. They are helping to raise the level of outrage about the insufficiency of our efforts to address the crisis, and they have been joined by scientists, parents, and teachers. From the quest for independence in India to the civil rights movement in the United States, civil disobedience erupts when reigning injustice becomes intolerable, as we are now seeing with climate change. Unacceptable generational injustice and a deplorable lack of solidarity with the vulnerable have opened the floodgates of protest. Those who will be most affected have taken to the streets. Their anger is energy that we desperately need. It can propel a wave of defiance against the status quo and catalyze the ingenuity needed to realize new possibilities.

To protect what we love from danger is a natural human instinct that, when we feel a lack of agency, can easily transform into anger. Anger that sinks into despair is powerless to make change. Anger that evolves into conviction is unstoppable.

These protests should come as no surprise. We have known about the possibility of climate change since at least the 1930s and have been certain since 1960, when geochemist Charles Keeling measured CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere and detected an annual rise.

Since then we have done little to counter climate change, the result being that greenhouse gas emissions, the cause of climate change, are increasing. We continue to pursue economic growth through the unbridled extraction and burning of fossil fuels, with a fatal impact on our forests, oceans and rivers, soil, and air. We have failed to manage wisely the very ecosystems that sustain us. We have wreaked havoc on them, unintentionally perhaps, but relentlessly and decisively.

Our negligence has catapulted climate change from an existential challenge to the dire crisis it is now, as we rapidly approach limits beyond which Earth as we know it will cease to be. And yet for many, these depredations are invisible. Despite the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters, we still have not connected the dots between the ongoing destruction of our natural habitats and our future ability to ensure our children’s safety, feed ourselves, inhabit coastlines, and uphold the integrity of our homes. If nothing else, the human tragedies of 2020 have shown us that our lives and livelihoods are entirely dependent on respecting nature. Moving beyond injustice, restoring nature, eliminating racism, and solving the climate crisis can only be achieved if we recognize that they are all fundamentally the same challenge of how humans live well together on this Earth.

Governments have taken incremental steps to address climate change, treating it as a singular issue when, in fact, it cuts across all the issues we need to tackle. The furthest-reaching eff ort is the Paris Agreement, which delineates a unified strategy for combating climate change. All governments of the world unanimously adopted it in December 2015, and most ratified it into law in record time. Since then many corporations, large and small, have set laudable emissions- reduction goals for themselves, many local governments have enacted effective policies, and numerous financial institutions have shifted significant capital from fossil fuels to alternative clean technologies. However, some governments have started to declare a climate emergency because, as essential as the current corrective actions are, taken together they still fall far short of what is necessary to stop the rise— and start the reduction— of emissions worldwide. Every day that passes is one day less that we have to stabilize our increasingly fragile planet, by now on its way to becoming uninhabitable for humans. We are running out of time. Once we hit critical thresholds, the damage to the environment, and consequently to our future on this planet, will be irreparable.

Over the years, public reactions to climate change have run the gamut. At one extreme are the climate deniers who say they don’t “believe” in climate change. Denying climate change is tantamount to saying you don’t believe in gravity. The science of climate change is not a belief, a religion, or a political ideology. It presents facts that are measurable and verifiable. Just as gravity exerts its force on all of us, whether we believe in it or not, climate change is already affecting us all no matter where we were born or where we live. The irresponsibility of not “believing” in climate change is becoming more apparent with every new catastrophic event. Climate deniers are shamelessly protecting the short-term financial interests of the fossil fuel industry to the detriment of the long- term interests of their own descendants.

At the other extreme are those who acknowledge the validity of the science but are beginning to lose confidence that we can do anything to address climate change. People feel real grief over the unspeakable loss of ecosystems and biodiversity and over how much more we are about to lose, including the future of human life as we know it. Those who are enveloped in this grief may have lost all faith in our collective capacity to challenge the course of human history. Every new documentary, every new scientific study, every report of disaster deepens the pain. Grief can be a powerful, transformative experience for some, and arguably a major reason climate change has continued largely unchecked for so long is that we have failed to truly feel what it will mean. It is important that we all allow ourselves adequate time and space to deeply feel our grief and to openly express it. As we tune in to the raw emotion, many of us will undergo a dark, unsettling period of despair, but we cannot allow it to erode our capacity to courageously mobilize for transformation.

A larger group of people, between these two extremes, understands the science and acknowledges the evidence but takes no action because they don’t know what to do or because it is far easier not to think about climate change. It’s scary and overwhelming. To a large extent, many of us stick our heads in the sand. Every time we see a report on extreme weather—hurricanes that used to occur once every five hundred years in a region now occur twice in a month, droughts that shrivel entire villages off the face of the Earth, heat waves that break record upon record, disasters that illustrate what is really going on—we feel a knot in our stomach. But then we turn off the news and distract ourselves with something likely to make us feel less hypocritical. Better to act as if nothing were happening or as if there were no way to stop it. That way we can delude ourselves that life will continue unimpeded. While this reaction is understandable, it is also a colossal mistake. Complacency now will lock us into a future of guaranteed scarcity, instability, and strife.

We are already too far down the road of destruction to be able to “solve” climate change. The atmosphere is by now too loaded with greenhouse gases and the biosphere too altered for us to be able to turn back the clock on global warming and its effects. We, and all our descendants, will live in a world with environmental conditions that are permanently altered. We cannot bring back the extinct species, the melted glaciers, the dead coral reefs, or the destroyed primary forests. The best we can do is keep the changes within a manageable range, staving off total calamity, preventing disaster that will result from the unchecked rise of emissions. Thtis, at least, might usher us out of crisis mode. It is the bare minimum that we must do.

But we can also do much more. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07Y7HZLX8
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (February 25, 2020)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 25, 2020
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3269 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 242 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0593080939

Best Sellers Rank: #174,236 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #22 in Utopian Ideology
- #120 in Environmental Policy
- #219 in Climatology

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4.6 1,142 ratings

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Tom Rivett-Carnac
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Tom Rivett-Carnac is a leader in the fields of international diplomacy, energy policy, and climate change. From 2013 to 2016 Tom was Senior Strategy Advisor to the Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres.
He was responsible for political strategy to build a new type of collaborative diplomacy that broke the political deadlock on climate policy and finance through new partnerships and approaches. Leading a strategy team inside the Office of the Executive Secretary, he held this position up to and during the successful negotiations in Lima (COP 20) and Paris (COP 21), which resulted in the unanimous signing of the Paris Agreement.
Together with Christiana Figueres, he is a Founding Partner at Global Optimism, a purpose driven enterprise focused on social and environmental change and co-host of the podcast, Outrage and Optimism. ‘The Future We Choose’ is their first co-authored book.
Find him on Twitter or Instagram as @tomcarnac
More at: www.globaloptimism.com
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Christiana Figueres
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Christiana Figueres is an internationally recognized leader on climate change. She was Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 2010-2016.
Assuming responsibility for the international climate change negotiations after the failed Copenhagen Conference of 2009, she was determined to lead the process to a universally agreed regulatory framework. Building toward that goal, she successfully directed the international negotiations from 2010, culminating in the historic Paris Agreement of 2015, signed unanimously by 195 countries.
Together with Tom Rivett-Carnac she is a founding partner of Global Optimism, a purpose driven enterprise focused on social and environmental change and host of the podcast Outrage & Optimism. "The Future we Choose" is their first co-authored book.
Follow Christiana Figueres on Twitter @CFigueres
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K. Strand

PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF the.......AND PLEASE READ THIS BOOK

Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2022

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I am a voracious reader and have belonged to a bookclub for about 28 years. I admit I was apprehensive about reading any book having to do with climate change; too scary. Then someone in my bookclub picked this book. I read it twice and am so happy I did . It provides a balanced view of this issue, written by two people who were architects of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. I found their information fact based and credible. They present two possible future scenarios, hence the book title, one if we don't enact personal and political polices to mitigate CO2 emissions and one if we do. The target being zero CO2 emission by 2050 with a half reduction by 2030. The two future scenario's are startlingly different. Many associate the changes we will have to make as negative changes, but this book shows how mitigation measures can have positive economic and cultural/social impacts. The other thing I loved about the book is that it doen't leave us all hanging out as victims. Climate change is not going to just "happen" to us whether we like it or not. This book sets out concrete steps each of us can adopt to do our part. I found this hopeful. Many people think, myself included before I read this book, that they are powerless and there is nothing they can do...not true. A good start would be buy and read this book. I bought 4 copies and have given them away and put copies in our neighborhood Little Library. Everyone needs to read this book, let's pull our collective heads out of the sand!! Then pass it along before it is too late. I want to leave my Grandson a livable world.

5 people found this helpful

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J. Rodeck

A strong and shocking first chapter details how the Earth is being destroyed by global warming.

Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2023

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A strong and shocking first chapter details how the Earth is being destroyed by global warming. After that it becomes a brag book and goes too woo woo. They briefly mention onshore wind but not much else about alternative energy; ex. nuclear power plants.

Quotables:

Twitter lies spread on average six times faster than truth, and that truth never reaches the same level of penetration.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Social media is an engine for the production and dissemination of lies.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Since the dawn of agriculture, humans have cut down approximately 3 trillion trees, or half the trees on Earth.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[Clearing the] Amazon rain forest providing land for beef cattle to graze on is directly responsible for more than 80 percent of the deforestation.

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Shoshana R.

Excellent antidote to climate hopelessness

Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2020

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<I>"When it comes to climate change, the vast majority of us have a learned reaction of helplessness. We see the direction the world is headed, and we throw up our hands. Yes, we think, it’s terrible, but it’s so complex and so big and so overwhelming. We can’t do anything to stop it. This learned reaction is not only untrue, it’s become fundamentally irresponsible. If you want to help address climate change, you have to teach yourself a different response."</I>

<I>”Two dates should now be seared in everyone’s mind: 2030 and 2050. By 2050 at the latest, and ideally by 2040, we must have stopped emitting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than Earth can naturally absorb through its ecosystems (a balance known as net-zero emissions or carbon neutrality). In order to get to this scientifically established goal, our global greenhouse gas emissions must be clearly on the decline by the early 2020s and reduced by at least 50 percent by 2030.”</I>

This book was SO GREAT and I can't recommend it enough, especially to those who (like me) may be inclined to feel hopeless when faced with the monumental shift our species must make to meet the challenges of the global climate crisis. Figueres and Rivett-Carnac present specific visions of the disparate futures that await our planet depending on how we respond to this crisis: one awesome; one really, really scary. I really appreciated the chapter on the importance of optimism, an essential self-care trait for climate activists. The authors go on to present concrete steps we can all take to reduce our carbon footprint and work to create the kind of world we want our children to live in. Very accessible and well structured. Inspiring. I wish I could give more than 5 stars.

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Terrific, life-changing book

Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2020

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If you care at all about the future of humanity and the rest of life on earth, READ THIS BOOK! And then give your copy to your local library or school so that others can read it. It is truly life-changing - and in a positive way, which is an impressive achievement on the part of the authors. Because let's face it, the news about climate change is not that good. While I see what the upvoted negative review was getting at, with respect to the lack of scientific detail about issues such as exactly what to eat to reduce your carbon footprint, I think the reviewer misunderstood what the book is trying to do. This book is not a review of the scientific evidence with resulting recommendations for best practice. There are plenty of other sources that do that already. For example, the site Our World in Data has an excellent section on the carbon footprints of various foods, as well as on carbon emissions generally. Rather, the purpose of Figueres' and Rivett-Carnac's book is to effect change in people's minds - to change how people think, how they see the world and their role in it. And they do a spectacular job of this. Again, in a positive way - which is so much more powerful than the doom and gloom message that often accompanies the writings of professionals in environmental fields (and I can say that because I am one; I teach environmental science at a major university). Bottom line: I have bought dozens of books from Amazon over the years and have never taken the time to write a review until now, because no book has struck me as being as important as this one.

22 people found this helpful

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Judith C Stark

Just what we need now

Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2023

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Excellent information about the current climate situation along with practical guidance.

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Filippo Perna

Il libro fornisce ottimi spunti ma...

Reviewed in Italy on October 28, 2022

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E' il primo libro che leggo in inglese. Devo dire che è davvero molto comprensibile. Harari lo aveva consigliato durante un'intervista e devo dire che vale la pena leggerlo.

Il libro fornisce spunti molto interessanti, purtroppo la questione climatica non dipende solo dall'essere umano, ma soprattutto dalle politiche dei vari paesi che troppo spesso la snobbano mettendogli avanti argomenti spesso futili.

Prima o poi, purtroppo la natura ci presenterà il conto (se non ha già iniziato a farlo).

One person found this helpful

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WF van der Hart

Must read for people who care about our planet

Reviewed in Germany on May 21, 2022

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Nice angle on climate change and the urgency to take steps now, but keeping the positive note that we all can do something about this immense problem.

One person found this helpful

London Dan

Inspirational

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 5, 2023

Verified Purchase

This book convinced me to be optimistic about humanity's climate challenge.
Not just because there are solutions around every corner - but also because it's the ONLY rational attitude to have. Pessimism and fatalism would be self-fulfilling.

One person found this helpful

Susan J.

Beaten up copy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 21, 2023

Verified Purchase

The book was going to be a present but pages were turned over and the back cover was dirty. Couldn’t clean it.
Wanted to send it back but the instructions were too complicated.

Rossi

Ottimo libro

Reviewed in Italy on June 17, 2022

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Libro completo e articolato, leggerlo mi ha dato una visione completa dell'argomento e una gran soddisfazione

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