In 1989, a young man by the name of Bill McKibben introduced much of the world to the concept of global warming with his groundbreaking debut book, The End of Nature. McKibben, who’s now 64, has written 20 books warning of the dangers of climate change. “If I have a literary reputation,” he writes in his latest book, “it’s for a kind of dark realism.” McKibben remains a realist—“we’ve already done fundamental damage to the planet’s physical systems,” he writes—but he’s also seen a glimmer of hope in recent years. As he explains in his new book, “Right now, really for the first time, I can see a path forward. A path lit by the sun.” That new book is Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization (Norton, August 19).
Like the Beatles song of the same name, Here Comes the Sun is refreshingly optimistic. In the book, McKibben describes much of the progress that’s been made in cutting back on fossil fuels. He writes, “Sometime in the early part of the 2020s, we crossed an invisible line where the cost of producing energy from the sun dropped below the cost of fossil fuel.” The book is full of facts that back up the author’s sunny outlook. For instance: “The solar cell was invented in 1954, and it took from then until 2022 to install the first terawatt [one trillion watts] worth of solar power on this planet.” By contrast, it took only two years to reach the second terawatt. China, which is poised to become the world’s first “electro-state,” produces a whopping 70 billion solar cells a year. Thanks to many of those cells, California now uses 44% less natural gas than it did two years ago.
Here Comes the Sun is one of many new books that celebrate scientific advances. Another is by the popular science writer Mary Roach: Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy (Norton, September 16) is “a lively treatise on the human body as an endlessly interchangeable set of parts,” says our starred review.
Despite disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, nuclear power has been embraced by many scientists of late. Isabelle Boemeke, a science influencer from Brazil, makes her case for the controversial power source in Rad Future: The Untold Story of Nuclear Electricity and How It Will Save the World (Thesis/Penguin, August 12). She argues that the world needs “a whole new era…of energy abundance for everyone” and that nuclear electricity has “the smallest environmental footprint” of any energy source.
Alan Lightman and Martin Rees are well suited to address scientific and technological advances—the scientists have written numerous books for general readers—and they’ve joined forces for their first collaboration, The Shape of Wonder: How Scientists Think, Work, and Live (Pantheon, September 2). The book is “a strong case for public involvement in science,” says our review, and it’s also a fascinating window into a world that might await us. Yes, expect robots, but likely not the kind looking to hunt you down, Terminator-style. In fact, the authors write, in half a century or less, what tiny robots might hunt down—once injected into our bodies—will be cancer cells and faulty DNA. As for any side effects? We’ll just have to wait and see.
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
