I have been searching for a long time for a book that articulates what I believe to be the core challenges of tackling climate change. Much of the literature I come across is relatively narrowly based on some normative analysis (What should happen, given how rational people should think about the world) or some engineering-economic modeling or perspective (showing that mitigating climate change is cheaper than not mitigating once we include the damages we anticipate, or the price we need to put on carbon to either reflect its social cost or to decarbonize over some period of time.
I haven't done any book recommendations so far, but Andreas Karelas has written a book (now a few years old but only now reaching my "horizon" that is the first one I have seen that recognizes that these normative or engineering-economic perspectives are not going to result in the progress we need. Instead, beyond from stating clearly that shaming people who disagree with those of us who believe that climate change is an existential threat and needs to be tackled with common sense legislation and incentives won't get us anywhere, he also offers some good ideas and examples of different approaches. They include, importantly, the search for "common ground" such as around themes of conservation (the name has much in common with conservatism), energy independence, national security, finding small scale solutions that limit the power of large corporations and monopolies etc. He also spends a fair amount of time discussing underlying issues related to how we lead a happy life and how the idea that anything we do to mitigate climate change may make our current lives less "happy" are based on potentially false perceptions, many of which likely driven by commercial desires to make us consume more. All of this sounds true to me and worthy of more exploration.
Even though sections of the book are a bit too much like "action lists" to me, I think the book is well worth a read and the ideas covered in it could be the foundation for a more productive discussion of how to change the foundations of a discussions around climate change in ways that would allow moving forward much faster and putting the fight against climate change on a much broader basis of support.
https://climatecourage.us/
