It’s warming. It’s us. We’re sure. It’s bad. We can fix it.

I first heard these words on a sunny winter day at Stanford. Jon Krosnick was speaking at a memorial service celebrating the life of Steve Schneider, who first inspired me to study climate impacts and solutions. I’ve used this “climate haiku” (if you don’t count syllables too carefully) ever since: in my teaching, research, writing, and on a footnoted protest sign. Research shows understanding these key points drives support for strong climate policy.

In Solving Climate Change, Jonathan Koomey and Ian Monroe have focused on the most critical piece of the climate haiku: “We can fix it,” adding rightly, “But we’d better hurry!”

This book is a valuable guide for students and practitioners to understand the principles and crunch their way through the numbers behind how to “fix it”—how to stop global warming and start healing the damages it has caused.

Drawing from Jonathan and Ian’s extensive experience in practice, and in teaching these concepts to generations of students, Solving Climate Change offers clear guidance for how to eliminate emissions by using less fossil fuels (decarbonize), as well as practical milestones to aim for along the path to ending fossil fuels altogether.

After decades of inaction, the authors urge us to “move as quickly as we can” to retire polluting cars, factories, and ideologies. Rather than trying to map out the one perfect path to a fossil-free world (which doesn’t exist), it’s far better to focus on meeting our needs with the fossil-free options that are ready today. While a few of us can specialize in researching how to decarbonize the tricky last 10-20%, almost all of us should instead be focused on putting what already works, to work. This book will help you do that.

A key skill you’ll develop is to use systems thinking to understand where fossil greenhouse gases come from, what’s needed to eliminate them, and how to get started. Combining tools like emissions inventories and scenarios will help you prioritize, so that you focus on the most effective actions to reduce emissions fast and fairly. You’ll also understand how to align incentives and mobilize money to put those actions into practice. (Fortunately, since climate action offers so many co-benefits for health and equality, this work can go faster than many think!)

As the authors point out, we need many more climate solvers who can build simple spreadsheet models to quickly inform effective decarbonization decisions everywhere. The approach in this book will help equip you to roll up your sleeves and get to work, leading the way to make your home, school, company, industry, or city fossil free.

Alongside the unassailable case from physics for why fossil fuels must be left in the ground, Jonathan and Ian make a compelling moral case for elevating truth, and against continuing to rely on the fossil fuel industry to make the changes needed to avoid climate catastrophe.

We are alive at an absolutely critical moment for humanity and life on Planet Earth. Our task is to lead a transformation from our current world with a destabilizing climate and a fraying web of life, to a world where we succeed at halting warming, then go beyond net zero to climate positive, while benefitting people and nature.

We desperately need more citizens armed with the urgency, clarity, and skills to help build the bridge between these two worlds. This book can help you build that bridge. Thank you for picking it up. You are essential to doing the work that the world needs right now!

Kimberly Nicholas, PhD