Trump 2.0, the second presidential administration headed by Donald Trump, could pose unprecedented challenges not just for climate action but also for social justice and democratic governance. Successfully meeting these challenges will require the cultivation of distinctly different skills and practices – and critically reviewing what we think we know. Not unlike meeting the challenges of a changing climate.
To assist with this work, Yale Climate Connections has selected two shelves of new titles, one aimed at the general reader (see below) and the other aimed at academics and climate practitioners.
The 12 books selected for the general reader are focused on three different goals: contextualizing, connecting (with self/tradition and with nature), and communicating.
The first three titles, on contextualizing our current crises, are recent additions to three series of small books – “Object Lessons,” “Very Short Introductions,” and “Global Reports” – curated for the purpose of providing introductions or overviews for topical problems. The fossil fuel industry, climate hazards, and the dysfunctional state of our politics are the topics addressed by these three books.
Understanding ourselves as we attempt, with varying degrees of success, to mitigate and adapt to the changing climate is the challenge addressed by the next three titles. Each recognizes that there is no going back to the ways we were.
The three titles that follow collectively argue that connecting with nature is an important step in connecting with ourselves. But this, too, requires clear-eyed perceptions of the irrevocable changes already wrought.
Connecting with others is as vital to meeting the challenges of a changing climate as connecting with ourselves and with nature. But connecting with others requires the cultivation of another skill: communication.
The last three titles address this task from different disciplinary angles. In “Outrage,” psychologist Kurt Gray argues that we must recognize the role fear plays in our moral judgments and, as a consequence, in escalating our disagreements. In “The Power of Bridging,” veteran civil rights activist john a. powell offers practices and techniques for reaching across political and social divides. And in “Multisolving,” consultant Elizabeth Sawin starts from the premise that with climate change we are always dealing with, and talking about, more than one thing at a time. Solving multiple problems, simultaneously and together, may be easier than solving them separately.
Multisolving might provide the optimal way to approach Trump 2.0. The new problems his administration adds to the climate mix may catalyze unexpected solutions.
As always, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from copy provided by their publishers. When two dates of publication are listed, the first is for the original hardback, the second for the paperback edition.
Oil by Michael Tondre (Bloomsbury Publishing 2024, 208 pages, $14.95 paperback)
Black gold. Liquid sunlight. Texas tea. Oil remains the ur-commodity of our global era, having been distilled from ancient algae and marine life to turn modernity’s wheels. Wars are fought over it. Some communities are displaced by its extraction, so that others may reap its benefits. But despite its heated history, few will ever see oil on the ground. It tends to be known only through its magical effects. In Oil, Michael Tondre shows how hydrocarbon became today’s pre-eminent power. And amid the warming world unleashed by fossil fuels, Tondre sees in oil a rich resource for thinking about histories of globalization and technology and as providing the energetic underpinnings and metamorphic allure of everything from celluloid film to synthetic clothing & vinyl.
Geophysical & Climate Hazards: A Very Short Introduction by Bill McGuire (Oxford University Press 2024, 160 pages, $12.99 paperback)
In this Very Short Introduction Bill McGuire takes a fresh look at our sometimes perilous planet, and evaluates the causes and consequences of what used to be thought of as ‘natural’ hazards through the prism of planetary heating and the continuing destabilizing of our climate. Our damaged climate has driven an explosion of extreme weather, which has become ever more apparent via the super-charging of storms, floods, heatwaves and wildfires. The fingerprints of global heating can also be detected in individual events that would have been extremely unlikely to have happened in its absence. The changing climate even has the potential to magnify the occurrence and impacts of geophysical hazards like earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.
In Defense of Partisanship by Julian Zelizer (Columbia Global Reports 2024, 208 pages, $18.00 paperback)
If there is one issue on which almost everyone in our divided country seems to agree, it’s the belief that the intense loyalty in the electorate toward Democrats and Republicans is the source of our democratic ills—division, dysfunction, distrust, and disinformation. But the possibilities that responsible partisanship can offer were behind a sweeping set of congressional reforms in the 1970s and 1980s. In Defense of Partisanship reimagines what partisanship might look like going forward. A new era of party-oriented reforms has the potential to pay respect to the deep differences that divide us—simultaneously creating a more functional path on which two responsible political parties compete to shape policy while still being able to govern.
Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope by Catherine Coleman Flowers (Spiegel & Grau 2025, 240 pages, $28.00)
Catherine Coleman Flowers has dedicated her life to fighting for vulnerable communities deprived of the right to a clean, safe, and sustainable environment. From climate change to human rights, from rural poverty to reproductive justice, Flowers maps the distance and direction toward justice, examining her own diverse ancestry as evidence of our interconnectedness. Flowers’s faith shines throughout the collection, guiding her work and inspiring her vision of our responsibility to one another and to our shared home. Drawn from a lifetime of organizing, activism, and change-making, Holy Ground equips us with clarity, lights a way forward, and rouses us to action—for ourselves and for each other, for our communities, and, ultimately, for our planet.
Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul by Auden Schendler (Harvard Business Review Press 2024, 272 pages, $32.00)
Something’s gone badly awry with environmentalism. We faithfully separate our waste into different streams, but wonder whether it really makes a difference. Global companies announce their commitment to carbon negativity while simultaneously sponsoring oil conferences. The hard truth is that much of the modern environmental road map could have been written by the fossil fuel industry specifically to avoid disrupting the status quo. We somehow became complicit. Sustainability veteran Auden Schendler meets this profound contradiction with a bracing critique that moves from personal stories of parenthood to corporate emission accounts. Terrible Beauty shows us that the key to saving the planet is to tap into our own humanity.
This Sweet Earth: Walking with Our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse by Lydia Wylie-Kellermann (Broadleaf Books 2024, 173 pages, $18.99 paperback)
