mikerickson reviewed The 2084 Report by James Lawrence Powell
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2 stars
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Which is to say: a book warning me about the dangers of ignoring global warming should not make me feel so demoralized that I no longer feel motivated to combat it.
Conceptually I should've liked this. Speculative fiction presented and formatted as nonfiction is intriguing when done well, and a series of interviews with survivors in the future talking about how they got to that point with respect to climate change is a promising concept. It got a tad repetitive though when each interviewee was yet another climate scientist from a different part of the world giving some variation of, "it doesn't feel good to say, 'we told you so,' but here we are." For a work set in a world where there has been so much suffering endured by common folk, it's odd that we don't hear from any …
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Which is to say: a book warning me about the dangers of ignoring global warming should not make me feel so demoralized that I no longer feel motivated to combat it.
Conceptually I should've liked this. Speculative fiction presented and formatted as nonfiction is intriguing when done well, and a series of interviews with survivors in the future talking about how they got to that point with respect to climate change is a promising concept. It got a tad repetitive though when each interviewee was yet another climate scientist from a different part of the world giving some variation of, "it doesn't feel good to say, 'we told you so,' but here we are." For a work set in a world where there has been so much suffering endured by common folk, it's odd that we don't hear from any of them.
A recurring thread of scorn for previous generations (read: our current generation) for "letting this happen" isn't explored sufficiently. Every time it comes up, it's just explained away like: they knew about the science and either didn't believe it or didn't care because they didn't want to. It felt unfair to not mention this isn't a uniformly held belief by people living in the 2020's, to say nothing of the role of disinformation on social media or the influence of billionaires. Also curiously absent are potential solutions; the last chapter interviews two professors who are asked what could have been done to stop climate change at the turn of the century and the only answer was that every nation should have built more nuclear power plants. No discussion about ICE vehicles, the airline or marine shipping industries, animal agriculture, cryptocurrency mining, commercial over-fishing, waste management, deforestation, etc. Just nope, shoulda built more nuke plants and everything would've been alright!
I get that this was meant to be a what-if scenario where we get worse than the expected worst-case outcome, but some of these vignettes bordered on unbelievable. I don't think a handful of Uighur terrorists could destroy the Three Gorges Dam. I don't think a weakened Egypt dealing with a rising Mediterranean that floods its major population centers would be able to project force in an extended war with Ethiopia over control of the Nile dams. I don't think Israel would be defeated by Iran in a four-day war over the Golan Heights reservoirs and not go scorched earth with their nukes. If you want future geopolitical fanfiction, read The Next 100 Years by George Friedman; at least that was entertaining.
Just an overall condescending, defeatist work that does itself no favors in browbeating the reader into feeling shame over something that hasn't happened yet. There's got to be a better way to convey a call to action without being depressing.
