The problem with good news in the real world is that it's messy. Neat happy endings are for novels, not the real world, and that goes double for the climate emergency. But even though good climate news is complicated and nuanced, that doesn't mean it shouldn't buoy our spirits and fill our hearts with hope.
Pluralistic: The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it) (23 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I'm only a few chapters into Bill McKibben's stupendous new book Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization and I already know it's going to change my outlook forever:
Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View (Published 2022)
There's plenty of bad news. But thanks to real progress, we're headed toward a less apocalyptic future.
Pluralistic: The far right grows through “disaster fantasies” (25 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The core of the prepper fantasy: "What if the world ended in the precise way that made me the most important person?" The ultra-rich fantasize about emerging from luxury bunkers with an army of mercs and thumbdrives full of bitcoin to a world in ruins that they restructure using their "leadership skills."
Political Scenarios for Climate Disaster - Dissent Magazine
In the Global North we often act as if our future will be a warmer version of today: liberal capitalism, plus flood insurance, minus coral reefs. That future is a fantasy.
We asked our climate reporters to highlight one idea for positive change. We got a chronicle of global transformation
There are countless initiatives around the world that can inspire people and spur them into action. Amid the devastation of the climate crisis, our journalists strive to highlight these stories of hope
The climate crisis: a war on the world
The climate crisis is a self-destructive war, with aggressors and victims
Pluralistic: Marshmallow Longtermism (04 Sep 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
My latest column for Locus Magazine is "Marshmallow Longtermism"; it's a reflection on how conservatives self-mythologize as the standards-bearers for deferred gratification and making hard trade-offs, but are utterly lacking in these traits when it comes to climate change and inequality:
Natasha Walter: We’ve gone from climate denial to something worse – climate fatalism
The message in the western media, as global heating becomes undeniable, seems now to be that nothing can be done. That is unacceptable – especially for those in developing countries who are suffering so greatly from the crisis we created
Pluralistic: Model collapse (12 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
One of my favorite rhetorical and analytical moves is joining things together (showing that two different, seemingly unrelated ideas are aspects of the same phenomenon) and taking them apart (resolving a paradox by demonstrating that what appears to be one, contradictory thing is actually two different things that have been lumped together).
After the Deluge: What Future for Climate Fiction? - Public Books
Even in a world remade, the past defines the present.
Calamity Theory
What are the implications of how we talk about apocalypse? A new philosophical field has emerged. “Existential risk” studies any real or hypothetical hum...
Think Entangled, Act Spooky
I like the concept of the Anthropocene. It finesses or postpones at least some of the conflict around the idea of climate change, broadens the conversation to…
Disasters are Distracting but work has to continue
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention
The 86-year-old social scientist says accepting the impending end of most life on Earth might be the very thing needed to help us prolong it
Pluralistic: The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh (27 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Like you, I'm sick to the back teeth of talking about AI. Like you, I keep getting dragged into discussions of AI. Unlike you‡, I spent the summer writing a book about why I'm sick of writing about AI⹋, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in 2026.
Pluralistic: The moral injury of having your work enshittified (25 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening – in which all the digital services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit – did not result from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing: