As someone haunted by the climate crisis, I find it depressingly easy to stumble across relevant books and articles that send your optimism spiraling down into the bottomless black abyss. Gloom and doom may grab a reader's attention, but they're woefully ill-equipped to inspire hope, much less action. That's why I absolutely love Hannah Ritchie's new book, Clearing the Air: A Hopeful Guide to Solving Climate Change in 50 Questions and Answers. In this book, Ms. Ritchie unflinchingly confronts half a hundred of the most common "naysayer" questions about why it's a waste of time to combat climate change...and she succinctly, convincingly rebuts each one, presenting facts that demonstrate how achievable progress actually is, both now (based on current technology) and in the near future (based on trends and emerging tech).

I've read the book twice now (because it's pretty information-dense, and once wasn't enough for my senior-citizen brain ;-). It's a great read, front to back, but I also intend to use it as a reference when specific climate-related issues or questions arise. The fifty questions (and their answers) are organized into logical categories, as follows:

• The Big Questions (fundamental, span categories)
• Fossil Fuels
• Renewable Energy
• Nuclear Power
• Electric Cars
• Minerals
• Heating and Cooling
• Food
• Cement, Steel, and Other "Hard-to-Abate" Industries
• Carbon Removal and Solar Geoengineering

Ms. Ritchie does a wonderful job of debunking climate-denial disinformation, but she doesn't shy away from admitting where challenges exist or where climate-action critics raise legitimate concerns. To me, that makes her solutions that much more compelling. Here's an example, for instance, from her intro to the Cement, Steel, and Other "Hard-to-Abate" Industries section:

To stop warming, we need to get emissions to zero. Electricity and cars are the easy bit. Finding solutions for cement, aviation, shipping, fertilizers, and plastics is much harder, hence why they're often called "hard-to-abate" industries. But hard does not mean impossible.

She then goes on to present concrete (pun intended ;-) strategies for "greening" these challenging industries; not perfect, not yet fully baked, but doable given time, effort, and investment. This approach really resonated with me: not fanatical, not ideological, but pragmatic and grounded in science. Sometimes, when you finish a climate change book, you feel like crawling into a hole; this book shows you how to crawl out of the hole into the sunshine.

I cannot recommend this book enough. If climate anxiety smothers your optimism, if the problems seem too immense to solve, this book will make you feel empowered. It's become my new "Climate Action Bible," promising a path to salvation for all of us on Spaceship Earth.

Clarity can be sobering, but it's essential to finding one's way to a better place. I'm grateful that Ms. Ritchie is Clearing the Air!