Losing Earth

A Recent History

By: Nathaniel Rich

Narrated by: Matt Godfrey

Length: 5 hrs and 17 mins

Publisher's summary

"This is an important, infuriating, enlightening, engaging, and engrossing audiobook...Anyone wishing to learn how the world has gotten to the point of almost inevitable climate disaster will be well served by listening to Godfrey's measured but emphatic reading." — AudioFile Magazine

By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change—including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours.

The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich’s groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon—the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight.

Now expanded into book form, Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The audiobook carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves.

Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here, and how we must go forward.

©2019 Nathaniel Rich (P)2019 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"An eloquent science history, and an urgent eleventh-hour call to save what can be saved." —Barbara Kiser, Nature

“How to explain the mess we’re in? Nathaniel Rich recounts how a crucial decade was squandered. Losing Earth is an important contribution to the record of our heedless age.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

“This deeply researched, deeply felt book is an essential addition to the canon of climate change literature. Others have documented where we are, and speculated about where we might be headed, but the story of how we got here is perhaps the most important one to be told, because it is both a cautionary tale and an unfinished one. Reading this book, I could not help but imagine my children one day reading a future edition, which will include the story of my generation's response to what we knew." —Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Great book!

This book is really good. I enjoyed listening to it. I listened to it all in one sitting.

Timely and important history of Climate Change

losing Earth: recent history is a timely book for all to read particularly those who are skeptical of whether there is consensus that the globe is warming in the climate is changing rapidly. has an environmental scientist in the air pollution feel for over 20 years whose responsibilities in part was to analyze and question the emerging consensus on behalf of a state environmental agency In order to develop balanced state level environmental policy, I can attest that the summarized history of the players and information in this book is largely accurate. This book also, in my professional judgment, accurately lays out the near term future of the effects of Climate change and shifts in attitude by the public on this critical existential threat to humans.

Inspiring!!!!

It lays out in succinct detail where we are and how we got here. The final chapter is a sobering and inspiring call to action, an action that we can all embrace and practice. The most compelling book I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.

One of the best I've read about climate change

I had no idea how important understanding the history of this subject was. A main point is that for a long time, there were no "skeptics," and some of the main people studying the issue were oil companies.

What the science revealed several decades ago was correct; and the people involved at the time knew that it was correct. Now we are experiencing firsthand their predictions coming true.

Highly recommended.

A must listen!

the best audio book I ever listened to. the content is most important, the story is riveting, and the narration was the absolute best. thank you!

Earth is not lost, but if we don’t learn these lessons from past policy struggles, it will be...

Losing Earth chronicles the process by which an agreement on limiting CO2 emissions almost came to pass, but was de-railed by various interests at the last minute. This book helps one understand the playing field around various IPCC meetings and even the history of how the world’s scientists came to recognize that CO2 was an issue. Hopefully, from this timeline of a past failure, we can learn from the mistakes and make sure the next chance is not lost, because it may be our last opportunity to stave off even more catastrophic damage.

Amazing look at our delusions regarding climate change

This book is a good and comprehensive reminder that we have known about the effects of petroleum combustion on our environment and society since at least the 1950, that we knew with high confidence in the 1970s about the climate events that happen with increasing frequency today, and that politicians in the 1980 - particularly an engineer who had a deeply obscured sense of his own bloated expertise on computer modeling and climate - had the opportunity to slow global warming and did nothing to stop it. I’m walking away from this book with renewed commitment to making changes to my own daily footprint, and to writing and calling my legislators to encourage action on the Green New Deal.

Quick but powerful

Enjoyed listening to the book- stunned by much of the history. Ending was very powerful.

An account of our checkered environmental past

This is a hard history to walk back through for anyone serious about our planet's current environmental challenges. The people in power both politically and in industry knew the extent of the problem we were facing from fossil fuel emissions and instead chose to perpetuate the status quo. Profit ahead of people.

Rich does a great job of exposing this history in a clear and concise way. It ends on a positive note with an optimistic eye to the future. I only hope that we all wake up in time to save the only planet we have.

Not lost yet

For such a dark and cynical topic, this was a surprisingly engaging and compelling listen. I was shocked to learn that global warming was a fairly bipartisan and undisputed issue for a time. The book offers a glimmer of hope that we can mitigate this disaster, but it requires overcoming strong political and corporate resistance. Our best weapons as individuals are to educate ourselves, vote with climate in mind, and talk with our friends, family, and neighbors about the urgency of the problem.