The Planet Remade

Oliver Morton examines geoengineering, the planned human intervention in the climate system that a small group of scientists, growing in influence, has been studying as a response to global warming. His starting point is that the risks of warming are pressing while giving up fossil fuels is daunting and possibly insurmountable. Proposals include a stratospheric veil against the sun, cultivated photosynthetic plankton and fleets of unmanned ships seeding clouds. Morton holds that ignoring such technologies would be irresponsible, and treating them as a simple fix foolish. He covers their history, politics and science, and places them in the wide context of the past century's changes to clouds, soils, winds, seas and the nitrogen and carbon cycles.

A reader of The CEO Library named it, through an anonymous form, as one of the three best books they read in 2019.