The 2084 Report - James Lawrence Powell
One word sums this book up: terrifying. TERRIFYING.
Written by geologist Dr James Lawrence Powell, this is a book of fiction, but reads as non-fiction. Set in the year 2084, it is an oral history of the devastation wreaked upon our planet by unchecked global warming. The narrator interviews different people in different areas of the world to see why we didn’t do enough to save our planet, what we could have done, and how global warming affected everyone, everywhere. The book is divided into different chapters that deal clearly with areas such as melting ice/rising sea levels, drought, fascism, immigration, war, extinction, and clean energy possibilities.
One could say that this is dystopian fiction, but I think we would be better off categorizing this as a red flag warning: in 2020 we are still not striving to reverse the effects of the damage that our nations are creating to the environment, and every year we are losing the chance to ensure that our children and grandchildren live in a world where they will thrive. This is really our last chance.
Just this August here in California we had a week of sustained temperatures over 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s not difficult to imagine this becoming the norm, to imagine losing power constantly, not being able to grow food… And so on. The 2084 Report provides a pretty terrible overview of what our world will look like in 2084, and a lot of it is based on hard scientific facts.
If you are going into this book thinking that you will be reading a novel, you may be a bit thrown off by the content. It reads as an oral history, and therefore as nonfiction. I personally think that this is the best way to deal with this topic: it is very real, and very terrifying, and the only way to make a change in what our next generations will face, is to make it now.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.