Climate Change Book Club
June 2025 Book Club
The task before us in the environmental movement has changed dramatically in the 21st Century. When the first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970 we lived in an era when the Cuyahoga River had caught on fire, and air pollution choked Los Angeles. Stopping the pollution of our air and water required us impose pollution standards on American businesses. It meant giving people the power to block the dumping of chemicals in Love Canal. It meant blocking the building of highways that destroyed Black communities.
In 2025 our challenge is different. With the climate crisis threatening drought, rising sea levels, more powerful storms, and increasing migration we need to build a new energy infrastructure that powers our civilization with renewable energy. To do this we need to deploy solar, wind, and batteries on a massive scale. We need to build a 21st Century grid that can move electricity from where wind and solar are abundant to where it is needed. In short we need to build.
Ironically the earlier generation of environmental initiatives created bottlenecks that make building difficult. Even worse, as many of us in GEO have experienced, fossil fuel companies and those who oppose renewable energy are now using the tools we created to protect the environment to destroy it.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have written a best selling guide to the roadblocks we have created, and what we can do to remove them. A better world is possible, but we have to build it. Join us on June 11th at 7pm for our next Green Energy Ohio book club meeting so we can discuss how to create the world we know we need to build.
Ezra Klein joined New York Times Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.”
Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the Work in Progress newsletter. He is also the author of the books Hit Makers and On Work: Money, Meaning, Identity and the host of the podcast Plain English.