Odds Against Tomorrow (book response) (Updated!)

Unfortunately, my copy of this book still hasn't arrived, so I haven't had a chance yet to read any of it. I'll have to either update this blog once it comes in, or just make an entirely new one. For now, I'll post a short synopsis of the book from what I've read about it online.

Odds Against Tomorrow follows the story of a young postgraduate quantitative analyst named Mitchell Zukor. After a natural disaster levels the city of Seattle, firms are now concerned with disaster-induced losses, implying that huge natural disasters are to become the norm in the future. Zukor's job is essentially to forecast disasters and predict the fiscal damage companies will have to endure.

It seems like this book is presenting a parallel reality where huge natural disasters are commonplace events, causing severe damage to even first world countries like the United States and requiring people to plan their lives and businesses around them. The author might be arguing that this could very well be the future we're headed towards if we allow climate change to continue along its projected course. I'm curious where Odds Against Tomorrow will go with this idea, and if it can serve as an effective warning to readers.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My book finally came in this Friday so I've had a chance to read through it.

Odds Against Tomorrow is not a particularly difficult read. Its writing style reminded me of a lot of young-adult novels that are commonly read by High Schoolers these days, such as The Kite Runner, the Divergent series, etc. After the wordy, dense, heavily philosophical work of classic American literature that was Walden, this book was a nice, almost relaxing change of pace (despite its intense narrative). It's one of those books that you don't have to think very hard about while reading it.

Nathaniel Rich is really good at describing things. The New York Times describes him as a "first-class noticer," which shows in his writing style. Although at times his writing seems a little bit obvious (I guess that's how I'll describe it), he does well setting up characters and establishing their personalities and their actions in order for them to best fill their role in the novel.

When it comes to climate change, Rich honestly doesn't seem that concerned with the issue. While environmental disasters are one of the main plot points of the book, Rich sort of glosses over how unnatural it is for such huge disasters to hit so hard and so frequently, and makes no mention of humanity's role in creating them. To me, it seems that Odds Against Tomorrow is an accidental climate change novel. Although it seems like Rich's purpose was not to create a compelling narrative that concerns the topic of climate change, you can still examine this book as a realistic portrayal of how modern American society might react to large scale, climate change-induced natural disasters.

The setting of Odds Against Tomorrow could could easily be mistaken for an alternate 2016 where the only difference is that climate change has been accelerated, and major natural disasters are already hitting the continental U.S. It's noted that there's a deadly heat wave happening in New York in the first part of this novel, hinting that temperatures are already rising far beyond normal levels. Although this book is fiction, it's easy to imagine this kind of thing happening today. Odds Against Tomorrow is just hypothesizing how America would look if we were already at 4 degrees.

Walden (book response)

In Spring 1845, famous American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau decided to build a cabin on Walden pond in Massachusetts and live there by himself for a few years as a sort of personal experiment. In Thoreau's eyes, people work too hard at unfulfilling things and rarely give themselves the opportunity to live deliberately. He sees the world as too fast-paced, full of people who chase luxuries but fail to live luxuriously. Thoreau's choice to live alone with nothing more than the bare necessities (food, clothing, shelter) is his counterargument to the rapid lifestyle of his fellow Americans; he hopes to prove that one can live a happy and fulfilled life by escaping the "ruts of tradition and conformity."

There's something about Walden that makes you oddly disgusted with your own way of life as you read through it. Thoreau is very effective in making you almost feel guilty for living with modern luxuries. Lamps, headphones, charging cables, cell phones, bronco ID's, keurig coffee makers, laptops - it all feels so unnecessary as Thoreau describes his delight in hearing the birds chirp their tunes outside his cabin. Walden makes you long for a simpler life than we were born into, and encourages you to shed unnecessary luxuries in pursuit of peaceful living.

One interesting and relevant observation that Thoreau makes in Walden is that human beings can't seem to keep up with their own technological progress. Rather than shaping technology around our lifestyles, we shape our lifestyles based off of technology. The example the Thoreau uses is the railroad system (being the biggest technological breakthrough of his time), but the principle holds true for many modern things: cell phones, cars, etc. From Thoreau's perspective, these luxuries end up making us worse off overall since we inevitably end up spending more time on these items than we do focusing on ourselves as individuals.

Although I haven't finished Walden yet, I can tell Thoreau likely be a huge climate change advocate if he were alive today. It seems that mankind's unnecessary lust for technological progress and economic achievement is essentially the cause of global warming, and now our species and our planet are unfortunately destined to suffer the consequences of our actions. Rather than worsening an individual's quality of life (as Thoreau argues in Walden), climate change is essentially the same idea except on a global scale. Are we really better off with our modern technology if the planet is suffering because of it? Would we really be better off to abandon this way of life in favor of a Walden-esque lifestyle?

The Denial Machine (documentary response)

The Denial Machine is a documentary that explores the controversy surrounding climate change; particularly, why the issue has turned into a bipartisan political struggle in the last decade or so. The documentary focuses on a couple of factors that turned climate change from a fearful scientific discovery to a heated debate between environmentalists and "climate deniers." The Denial Machine blames this transformation on the use of language, political funding by large corporations, and well-spoken public climate deniers who aren't qualified to be denying climate change, among other things.  

For example, at one point when linguistic expert Frank Lutz is interviewed, he explains that he advised President Bush to abandon the phrase "global warming" in favor of the more friendly-sounding term "climate change," as the former indicates a worldwide catastrophe and the latter implies a natural, nonthreatening cycle. Such usage implies that climate change isn't as big of a deal as Bush's opponent, famous environmentalist Al Gore, was making it out to be.

 This is an example of a "denial machine:" that is, the intentional denying of a certain fact in order to achieve a certain goal. Another example this documentary presents is what it calls the first "Denial Machine:" the tobacco industry. For years, big tobacco companies campaigned to deny that smoking causes poor health, challenging the scientific research that backs up the anti-smoking claims in hopes of preventing a loss in sales. Eventually, however, the problem became so huge that even the tobacco companies had to admit that smoking can cause bad health effects. The Denial Machine argues that the climate change debate follows this same model, except instead of tobacco companies, now it's oil companies and other high-carbon producing industries.


This documentary reminded me of something that George Marshall talked about in Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change: strong story-telling is much more persuasive than simply presenting the scientific facts and letting people decide for themselves. A captivating story is one that has a cause, effect, a perpetrator and a motive. Greedy scientists are trying to fake global warming in order to get more government money. Big Oil Companies are funding climate denial in order to keep making money (the story that The Denial Machine tells). The truth is unfortunately much more complicated than this, and telling the story like that an oversimplification for the sake of captivating an audience.

The Denial Machine is an alright documentary. It's captivating and draws an interesting parallel between climate change and the tobacco industry. However, it can be overly dramatic at times, painting big oil companies as lying villains who pull tricks and fund liars in order to keep making as much money as possible. The truth is often too complex to fully tell in 45 minutes (the running time of the documentary), so it's somewhat distorted into an easy to tell and exciting to follow story of good vs evil. This documentary tells a captivating story, but after reading Don't Even Think About It, I'm somewhat suspicious of anyone who presents a "good vs evil" argument on climate change, knowing our tendency to internalize the information that confirms are views and disregarding anything that contradicts what we want to believe.