Tim Williams

6^th January 2025

Greta Thunberg is extraordinary. The Climate Book is a major work in itself and a testament to her determination; but what is most surprising is the clarity and breadth of her own thought and writing, given that she was just 19 years old when the book was published in 2022.

The book contains a series of essays, most only three or four pages long, written by, seemingly, just about everyone she’s met in the firmament of climate change activists and scientists – and she seems to have met them all. These are linked together by her own introductory remarks for each section, and a finale called “What Next?”

The sections are, in order: How Climate Works, How Our Planet Is Changing, How It Affects Us, What We’ve Done About It, What We Must Do Now. If you want to know chapter and verse about the climate crisis without a deep dive into IPCC reports, this is where you will find it. She and her designers have also managed to source and include some stunning full-page photographs which illustrate each section, and which have a drama which the words sometimes struggle to convey.

The physical and biological aspects of planetary science are of course covered, but what also appear are considerations of growth economics, consumerism and the psychology of apathy. Not only this, but it is clear that her outlook has been informed by the concept of “climate justice”: that those who are most affected by the changing climate are also the least responsible for the crisis, so that the “developed” world bears the lion’s share of responsibility for action.

There are graphs and tables to support the discussion on many pages, but these run the risk of over-exposure to numbers: although there are some startling figures, such as China’s leading contribution to 2020 CO₂ emissions on p.268 compared to cumulative emissions on p.155 (below), the more important message has to do with what needs to be done.

And here there is no shortage of suggestions. In fact, it’s likely that if asked, Thunberg would not want you to just read the book. In a hard-hitting end piece she states with crystal clarity that any hope of overcoming the crisis now requires a complete, wholesale change in the habits of human society. To quote: “We cannot live sustainably in an unsustainable world, no matter how hard we try... If you are looking for answers to how we can fix the climate crisis without changing our behaviours, then you will be forever disappointed, because our leaders have left it far too late for that. However, that does not mean that we do not have solutions, because we do. We have lots of them. We just have to change our perspective about them... In order to create the necessary changes, we need a series of different layers of actions. We need both structural system changes and individual changes. And on top of that we need a cultural transformation when it comes to norms and discourse. All of this is entirely possible... Fundamentally changing an unsustainable society is not such a bad thing to do... Once we stop pretending that we can fix this without treating the crisis like a crisis and without fundamentally changing our societies, then action begins.”

The book came out only just after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and so the impact of the now-ongoing wars in Russia, Israel, Sudan and Myanmar on responses to the climate crisis, particularly on media priorities, is not covered to any great extent. But she does point out that the Ukraine invasion prompted a wholesale change in Europe’s attitude to its energy supply and uses this as an example that such change is not unthinkable. “We know what it means to treat something as a crisis, and we know – way beyond any doubt – that the climate crisis has never even once in any way been treated as such... The climate crisis is about time... we do not primarily need climate targets for 2030 or 2050. We need them now, for 2022, and for every month and year that follows.”

This book is a clarion call to action. Don’t just read it: act on it.