Climate’s impact on sports and a call to arms — a round-up of environment books

Global warming is no longer a distant problem. Rising temperatures are already changing the way people play sport, garden, run companies and learn at school, as a new batch of climate books show. But all is by no means lost, writes billionaire investor, Tom Steyer, in his punchy and admirably readable call to arms, Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War (Spiegel & Grau, $28).

Steyer is best known for lavishing millions of dollars on a bid to be the Democratic nominee in the 2020 US presidential election race. But his many years of climate activism have in total cost him “between three and 10 billion dollars — and probably a lot closer to 10”, he writes. That makes him what he calls a “climate person”, a rewarding way to live, by his account, that he thinks we can all pursue if we choose.

He highlights the work of others developing climate-friendly food, greener steel and clever techniques to measure carbon dioxide. But some of his most enjoyable sections are spiky revelations about people on the other side of the climate war. That includes an academic at his alma mater, Stanford, whom Steyer once confronted for resisting calls for the university to divest from fossil fuels.

“This professor with a PhD, helping to lead what might well be the premier university in the wealthiest country on earth, turned to me and said: ‘I’ll start listening to these kids on climate when they stop driving their cars’,” writes Steyer. Ouch.

Dharshini David, chief economics correspondent for the BBC, offers a much gentler assessment of environmental pressures in Environomics: How the Green Economy is Transforming Your World (Elliott & Thompson, £22)

Its 12 chapters cover the way green imperatives affect our daily lives. Chapter one looks at the moment we switch on a light, powered by cleaner electricity. Chapter two, “Getting Dressed”, is about clothes made by ever more eco-conscious fashion brands. Chapter three, “Checking Your Phone”, assesses tech waste, energy use and materials. And so on. By the time readers reach the final chapter, on the weekly shop, they should have got the drift of some of the questions raised by the need to decarbonise the global economy at speed, if not all the answers. As David writes, this book is intended to be more of a guide than a definitive list of solutions.

Plenty of solutions are suggested in Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sport (Bloomsbury, £20) by University of Toronto academic, Madeleine Orr. To begin with, she would make sure new sports facilities are only built in places that make climate sense, meaning no more winter sports venues in warm climates, or golf courses in deserts, or stadiums covering natural spaces.

The need for such measures is evident considering the number of athletes already succumbing to heatstroke in a warming world. Orr brings their stories to life with aplomb. She also charts the mounting financial woes confronting snow sports companies struggling with ever less reliable levels of snow.

That includes the “100-day rule” in skiing which says that, because of all its staffing, marketing and energy costs, a ski area needs to be open about 100 days per season to be financially viable. “We’re getting dangerously close to that number on both sides of the Atlantic, especially at low altitude resorts,” Orr reports.

There is more bad news in Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World (Princeton University Press, $29.95/£25.00) by the University of Pennsylvania’s R Jisung Park. Drawing on his own research, Park charts the subtle shifts being wrought by everything from wildfire smoke to rising temperatures.

Above average temperatures, for example, reduce the rate of learning in schools. Moreover, because Black and Hispanic students tend to live in places where heat during the school year is more frequent, and classrooms are less likely to be air-conditioned, there may be a widening racial academic achievement gap.

A more meditative tale unfolds in The Accidental Garden: Gardens, Wilderness and the Space in Between (Profile Books, £12.99) by Richard Mabey, a pioneer of British nature writing. In fewer than 160 pages, Mabey tells the story of the two-acre patch of land surrounding the 16th-century farmhouse in Norfolk that he and his partner, Polly, moved to in 2003.

She was a compulsive grower. He was an instinctive hands-off rewilder. Their garden forms the backdrop to a discursive, philosophical memoir about everything from the human desire to shape nature to what Mabey calls the ambiguous experience of gardening in the midst of an environmental emergency.

In a world of remorseless physical change, where the climate is impacting everything from a football game to a shopping trip, it is a calming reflection on the enduring resilience of nature.

Pilita Clark is an FT business columnist

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