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Climate Books of 2025
A few shimmering selections on humanity and our home
Brad Johnson
December 29, 2025
Seasons greetings from Hill Heat. Each day now there is more light. Even as the oil barons and lords of capital heat the globe, fueling biblical storm and drought, fire and flood, pestilence and plague, the rest of humanity seek to care for their neighbors, the refugee, the forgotten child, seeking to share the gifts of the world with each other.
I am truly grateful for the gift of a good book. Each represents a fellow seeker of truth’s toil for understanding, part of an ongoing conversation that extends thousands of years.
Here are a few of this year’s finest, in no particular order.
In the endless expanse of the universe, every living thing we know of exists within a thin layer, spanning just a few hundred meters, of a single planet—Earth. This space of life, sometimes termed the critical zone, is a large, relative to the Earth, as an apple’s skin to its flesh…
“Free Gifts is a deeply rewarding (and worrying) perspective on our ecological and political situation.” — Jordan Daniels
”Good books offer new arguments. Excellent books pose new questions. Alyssa Battistoni’s Free Gifts is an excellent book.” — Corey Robin
A high-altitude desert plateau traverses Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. I am on the Chilean side, in the passenger seat of a Jeep, along with two other researchers. The afternoon air is thin and brisk, but the sun is piercing—a combination I am familiar with from years of living and traveling in South America’s Andean range. The landscape is a study in contracts and contours: broad basins suddenly cut off by sweeping curves, flat expanses sliced by near vertical ascents. The Licancabur Volcano looms large above us. Vegetation and humidity levels change rapidly with the rising altitude, bringing cooler temperatures, wetter air, and densert plant life. We are driving from San Pedro, once a sall town but now a metastasizing tourist hub, to the Salar de Atacama, the vast salt flats that contain the largest lithium reserves in the world…
“Dragging us back to genuine terra firma, specific geographies, and the very real people who live in them, Riofrancos carefully points us at the titular phenomenon: extraction.” — Ajay Singh Chaudary
”We should not take it for granted that the green transition must maintain business as usual. We can imagine and fight for new, more sustainable, less extraction-reliant ways of life. We must end what has been called the imperial mode of living. We can demand supply chains organized around justice for everyone they touch, rather than profit for the few.” —Ashley Dawson
The original front of climate politics was called mitigation: the closing down of the sources of warming, first and foremost fossil fuels; the cutting of emissions; the shift to other kinds of energy. Fossil capital won an easy victory and progressive forces suffered a grievous defeat on this front. The result is the present conjuncture of too-lateness. What follows in an attempt to map the sprawling fronts opened up next…
“Malm and Carton unfold a history of our catastrophic present, explaining the unbreakable bond between capital and fossil fuels. They also map out the technological fixes being rolled out as the planet continues to heat and demonstrate how schemes to adapt to or reverse global heating are likely to spawn even greater disasters and could lock in a future of mass unfreedom and suffering that only large-scale eco-socialist movements can forestall.” — Alberto Toscano
“If The Long Heat sounds militant and pessimistic, that’s because it is. The authors’ visceral disgust for the trajectory of climate politics runs throughout the book. They say we are in the ‘excremental stage’ of capitalism, and that this system is so incapable of restraint that it ‘swims from one pool of its own shit into another and has to design new hazmat suits to keep going.’” — Joseph Winters
The biggest trees on my street weren’t yet sick and dying when I moved to the 7100 block of Willow Avenue in Takoma Park, Maryland…
”Tidwell, a former journalist, is a companionable narrator. His hopefulness and close attention to the natural world mitigate, to some extent, the stark truths he communicates.” — Sara Van Note
To secure a livable future, one thing we will need to do is dismantle and reframe the terms dominating the language of climate politics…
“A gifted explainer, Guenther backs her analyses with a persuasive grasp on the science and economics of climate politics.” — Chris Featherman
”Fossil fuel propaganda has created climate denial, which has been a major force in stopping the adoption of effective climate policy. This political battle is fought with words and, so far, the propaganda has been winning.” — Gerald Kutney
We’re quite suddenly at the moment where, as a species, we could and should break the habit of burning things…
”Here Comes the Sun proffers a bracing re-evaluation of the future of the climate fight. It refutes the notion that society can’t afford to stop burning fossil fuels, while emphasizing that the decisive question is how quickly those fuels get left behind.” — Mark Hertsgaard
Early morning in Manhattan: hushed in a blanket of quiet. But even that quiet is not a true quiet. Cars pass by in steady rhythm. Wind breathes through the sidewalk trees. A single siren sounds, disappears, and arrives again: the heartbeat of the city. And one lonely person walks to work before the world wakes up…
There is no flash of light, no crumbling, no quaking. Each person in New York wakes up on an unfamiliar block when the buildings all switch locations overnight. The power grid has snapped, thousands of residents are missing, and the Empire State Building is on Coney Island—for now. The next night, it happens again.
Esme Green and Arjun Varma work for the City of New York’s Emergency Management team and are tasked with disaster response for the Unmapping…
“Wittgenstein said don’t ask for meaning, ask for use,” Michael Russell of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory began, manically running fingers through sheaves of white hair. “So what use is life?” he demanded of a half-filled auditorium at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “That is the question…”
”I know that you have been promised the story of everything before, only to read an account of rice, or salt, or gunpowder, or cod, or some other interesting commodity. But carbon dioxide is the real deal. If you go back pretty much to the beginning of everything—and Brannen does—you find carbon dioxide lurking in the shadows, controlling events with a power that the Illuminati (or the cod) could only envy.” — Bill McKibben
“This is an ambitious and urgent addition, evocatively demonstrating how humanity’s history and precarious future has been continually connected with Earth’s much longer geochemical history.” — Ramin Skibba
Our friends at Heatmap have a list of many more excellent books of 2025.
Hill Heat’s U.S. Climate Politics Almanac is made available to the public thanks to our paid subscribers. Join their ranks today and grow the movement:
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