NCSE is pleased to offer a preview (PDF) of Mark Hertsgaard's Hot: Living through the Next Fifty Years on Earth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). The preview consists of the first part of chapter four, "Ask the Climate Question," in which Hertsgaard reports on his 2008 interview with the chief executive of King County, Washington, about his "fresh, farsighted, effective response to climate change that local governments across the United States and around the world were beginning to copy. He had linked his climate policy to a larger agenda of advancing social justice and pro-business economic development. And he had done this while remaining strikingly popular with voters, winning three straight elections by comfortable margins."
The reviewer for The New York Times praised Hot for raising "the emotional stakes while keeping a clear head ... Hertsgaard, to his credit, refuses to sugarcoat these facts [of the effects of climate change] ... And yet Hertsgaard also knows that we cannot allow fear or despair, or even anger, to be our only response." And the reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle described Hot as "informative and vividly reported," adding, "Hertsgaard has traveled far, from Western Europe to Bangladesh, to Africa and China, and he has found clear evidence that the effects of climate change are already pervasive everywhere. ... Not all is hopeless, however, and Hertsgaard finds evidence that some nations are taking action, or at least planning for the future."