Rowan Hooper's Reading List

"Well… even if we’re not technically in a mass extinction event like the one that did in the dinosaurs, it’s clear we are in the midst of a crash in species diversity and population size that is so devastating as to influence the operation of the Earth system as we know it. We’ve heard this quite a lot over the years, but Kolbert’s book brought it home in a more intimate, and a more damning way. There’s a calmness, and a detachedness in her writing that makes it that much more powerful and affecting (the same is true in her most recent book too, Under a White Sky ). She paints a picture of the global catastrophe but focuses on the stories of a handful of individual species, such as the golden frog and the Sumatran rhino, and this really drives home the message: we are on the brink here. I could also have chosen EO Wilson’s Half Earth , or the epic and compelling Adventures in the Anthropocene by Gaia Vince. Huge. A monstrous amount of the planet is now given over to making food for us, and most damagingly, making meat for us. A quarter of the ice-free land on the planet is used to rear animals for us to eat. But the process of making beef is so inefficient that raising cattle takes up 83 per cent of global farmland. The Climate Focus think tank found that 26,700 square kilometres of forest are cleared each year to graze cattle and grow crops to feed livestock. This means that in terms of land-clearance, cattle are the single biggest destroyer of the planet’s ecosystems. It’s all down to the insatiable demand for beef. In the US, people on average eat 120 kg of beef per year. That figure is 4kg in India and 17kg in Kenya, but is growing and is predicted to rise by 70 per cent in the next 30 years. It’s crazy numbers. Meat production is already completely unsustainable, it can’t possibly grow more. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Plus food wastage. If ‘food waste’ was a country, it would be in third place in the list of worst contributors to greenhouse gases. It’s shocking, disturbing and under-appreciated, I think. The whole problem is very complex and tricky—not least because no one likes being told what they can and can’t eat. It’s why we need to invest in plant-based meat substitutes and lab-grown animal products. People can then happily—and sustainably—sate their desires for meat, fish and cheese."

"Yes, it does cover a lot! I’ve picked this book because it covers two of the most important areas of innovation: artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. These are going to be responsible for gigantic changes in our society in the future, and I’m spending a lot of money on them in my book. Winterson’s book helps me think about the dangers of corporate monopolisation of the technology of artificial intelligence, and about the ethical responsibilities of creating and tinkering with life. But it also prompts questions about what it means to be human, about the creation of life, about what life is, about the future of humanity, about transhumanism , about the people now who freeze bodies and heads in liquid nitrogen to try and preserve them for future resurrection. Other books might more comprehensively cover some of these subjects, and Toby Ord’s The Precipice and Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence spring to mind, but Frankissstein has more, and is frankly a lot more fun, too. He may be right – which is why I want to spend money on trying to make research into AI more transparent and open and subject to interrogation. That said, I would spend a lot more of my trillion dollars on mitigating climate change, if I could."

"Kim Stanley Robinson always writes with great insight about his subjects, and it is clear he does a mass of research. He’s looked at climate change before, particularly in another piece of speculative fiction, New York 2140 (about a flooded New York in that year), and what I like about his work is the plausibility—the plausible optimism—of it. Having said that, The Ministry for the Future starts with a truly shocking set piece about the horrors that may await us as global temperatures continue to creep up. The book then goes on to detail the work of the titular ministry in galvanising action on climate change. As with all his work, his future seems very possible—certainly it has many things to aim for. So what I find strong is his solution-based approach to telling stories about the future: we need some of those solutions in our own future. Yes—the adoption of a new global currency tied to carbon emissions. From speaking with various people in the writing of my book, such as the economist Dieter Helm at the University of Oxford, I understand that we have to put a price on carbon if we are ever going to tame it. I’m not an economist by any means but it does seem that economists have failed us so far in shying away from the problem of climate change. And economic approaches to reining in emissions, be it a carbon tax or a price on carbon or a carbon currency have been under-researched, and their importance underappreciated. This feeds into another of my five books…"

"As a scientist, the whole subject of economics is mysterious to me, and I really had my eyes opened by Less is More . Certainly I was educated about the history of capitalism and the meaning of GDP . Jason Hickel charts how humans have historically prospered by destroying ecosystems, and how using GDP, which doesn’t ‘care’ that resources are destroyed as it increases, is such a dangerously flawed way of assessing our civilisation. What we need instead of a focus on relentless growth, Hickel says, is degrowth. Fortunately, the idea of spending a trillion dollars to fix the world’s problems is compatible with degrowth because of the concept of something called depense . Basically this means we take some of the money created by our capitalist economy and instead of allowing it to just pile up in assets, we spend it on projects for the public good. Spending it, of course, is easy—it’s getting hold of that money that’s the difficult thing. Hickel says degrowth is the downscaling of the amount of resources we use, in order to get to a sustainable state. It sounds very reasonable when you put it like that but God knows how we go about getting to that place. Perhaps one way is by somehow galvanising those billions of people in the world who suffer from inequality , and recognising that the inequality in the world is by far the worst it has ever been, and that is not a happy place to be. Degrowth is also about smoothing out this inequality. I examined this in chapter one of my book, when I looked at whether you can eliminate extreme global poverty by giving away the trillion dollars. From what we know from studies on cash transfers to the poorest people in the world, giving money away in one-off handouts really can lift them sustainably out of extreme poverty. This actually blows my mind."

"I’ve talked about how much I respect and admire the solutions-based approach in some of the books in my list, and it’s something that very much infuses the whole spirit of my book How to Spend a Trillion Dollars , but definitely one of the greatest examples of this is Project Drawdown, which lays out in detail dozens of different strategies for getting to zero carbon emissions and meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement of 2015. It’s an incredible piece of work, with the input of hundreds of scientists, and an incredible inspiration. Every politician around the world should read this, and every policy maker and CEO and teacher. It shows how not only is it possible to get to net zero, but that it saves us money . This is the surprising thing I found in my book too – in many cases, spending hundreds of billions of dollars, even when you give that money away, pays for itself a few years down the line. Nowhere is that more striking that in paying now for climate solutions. Since Drawdown was published it has been updated and there is a detailed resource at drawdown.org ."