Product Description
Global warming’s physical impacts can be separated into three broad categories: melt, drought, and deluge. Funk travels to two dozen countries to profile entrepreneurial people who see a potential windfall in each of these forces.
The melt is a boon for newly arable, mineral rich regions of the Arctic, such as Greenland—and for the man-made snow trade. Drought creates opportunities for private firefighters working for insurance companies as well as for fund managers backing south Sudanese warlords who control local farmland. The deluge—rising seas, surging rivers, and superstorms—has been our most distant concern, but for Dutch architects designing floating cities and American scientists patenting hurricane defenses, the race is on.
By letting climate change continue unchecked, we are choosing to adapt to a warming world. Containing the resulting surge will benefit some, but much of the planet will suffer. McKenzie Funk has investigated both sides, and what he has found will shock us all.
The melt is a boon for newly arable, mineral rich regions of the Arctic, such as Greenland—and for the man-made snow trade. Drought creates opportunities for private firefighters working for insurance companies as well as for fund managers backing south Sudanese warlords who control local farmland. The deluge—rising seas, surging rivers, and superstorms—has been our most distant concern, but for Dutch architects designing floating cities and American scientists patenting hurricane defenses, the race is on.
By letting climate change continue unchecked, we are choosing to adapt to a warming world. Containing the resulting surge will benefit some, but much of the planet will suffer. McKenzie Funk has investigated both sides, and what he has found will shock us all.
Reviews/Praise
—AudioFile
“Original, forthright . . . unsettling.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Smart, daring, and darkly funny, Windfall offers a new take on perhaps the world’s most intractable problem. McKenzie Funk is a gifted storyteller.”
—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe
“Funk . . . delights in the absurd details of business as unusual. The result is a meticulously researched romp through the back rooms of the climate change industry, by turns thrilling and appalling, and ultimately rather important. . . . Perhaps the only fun book on global climate change you’ll ever read.”
—Charles Graeber, author of The Good Nurse
“A gripping account of how banks, energy companies, engineers, and entrepreneurs have turned a global crisis into a golden opportunity, harvesting short-term profits while sowing the seeds of future ruin. It’s an engaging, infuriating, and important story about the way the world works now and about the reasons it may not work at all tomorrow.”
—Eric Klinenberg, author of Heat Wave and Going Solo
“Funk travels the globe like some sort of journalistic special agent. . . . The result is a wonder, a nonfiction eco-thriller that is disturbing, yes, revelatory, yes, but also a lot more fun than books about ecological catastrophe are supposed to be.”
—Donovan Hohn, author of Moby-Duck
“A searing ride into the maw of the apocalypse.”
—Eliza Griswold, author of The Tenth Parallel
“McKenzie Funk has traveled around a planet that’s melting, flooding, and drying out all at once to meet the peculiar characters who are making the biggest amoral hedge of our time: finding the value and opportunity hidden in all this ecological upheaval.”
—Jon Mooallem, author of Wild Ones