The Lost Cause
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
It's thirty years from now and we're making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But what about all the angry people who can't let go?
For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn't controversial, it's just an overwhelming fact of life. But so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programmes cannot be stopped in their tracks.
But there are still those Americans who cling to their red trucker caps, their grievances, their anger, their nostalgia for the golden age of assault rifles. Their 'alternative' news sources reassure them their resentment is right and pure and 'climate change' is a con.
They're your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. They're not going anywhere. And they're armed to the teeth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Doctorow (Red Team Blues) plausibly imagines a near future in which catastrophic climate change has made multiple coastal cities around the world uninhabitable. Though the passage of a Green New Deal in the U.S. has helped combat rising temperatures, it has also stoked political fury on the aging right. Brooks Palazzo became an orphan at nine years old after his environmentalist parents died while fighting wildfires and restoring habitats in Canada. He moved in with his grandfather Richard, an abusive, unrepentant MAGA supporter, in Burbank, Calif. Now 19 and about to finish high school, Brooks stumbles on an attempt to sabotage his school's solar panels—and recognizes the perpetrator as one of Richard's friends. Shortly after Brooks thwarts this terrorist, Richard dies and Brooks inherits his house. With newfound resources at his fingertips, he becomes an activist and unlikely hero as the impending arrival of a refugee caravan raises political tensions. Brooks's bravery and idealism are admirable and, though a romantic subplot feels like a distraction, Doctorow does a solid job of imagining how acting both locally and globally in the face of environmental catastrophe can make a difference. Fans of Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 will want to check this out.
