.com Review
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An Best Book of the Month, January 2014: In
addition to having one of the cooler author names, Funk has
written one of the more fascinating accounts of the coming
economic impact of climate change. Rather than exploring the
science or politics of an alarmingly warming world (a la An
Inconvenient Truth ( http://www..com/Inconvenient-Truth-Planetary-Emergency-Warming/dp/1594865671/ )), the author has focused exclusively on the economics and
rtunism developing around climate change. The result is part
eco-thriller, part adventure story, part investigative exposé.
There’s a wildly speculative and entrepreneurial game being
played out there by some forward-thinking risk takers. Not a
hand-wringer among them, these are the gamblers who see profit
where others see doom. Impressively researched over six years,
Windfall takes us to the front lines: to the deck of a Canadian
battleship, where the author blasts a machine into the ice
cap; to formerly frozen Siberian lands, which investors envision
as future mega-farms; to the Sudan, Greenland, Wall Street, and
beyond. Like a mashup of Michael Lewis and Mark Twain, Funk is an
intrepid investigator and a lively, smart writer. From eco hedge
funds to dam building to desalination s, he shows how
climate change is creating new rtunities and a potential boon
for cowboy entrepreneurs. This is the rare book that’s both
important and highly readable. --Neal Thompson ( http://www..com/gp/feature.html?docId=1001046421 )
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Review
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Honorable Mention for the Rachel Carson Environment
Book Award
The Wall Street Journal:
“In Windfall McKenzie Funk, an intrepid American journalist,
reports on the lesser-known victims and profiteers of climate
change brings a dizzyingly abstruse phenomenon down to a more
human scale. Mr. Funk leads us away from the rarefied air of Al
Gore and his lethal PowerPoint slides, to mingle with the
militiamen, inventors, politicians and activists trying to find
their way through an era of turmoil.”
The Associated Press:
“Funk has written a fun book humanizing the problems of climate
change, focused on the colorful entrepreneurs who see in an
increasingly inhospitable world golden rtunities.”
Nature:
"This exposé of the powers and people that view global warming
as an investment rtunity is darkly humorous and brilliantly
researched. Journalist McKenzie Funk looks at the impacts deemed
a windfall for 'climate capitalists': melting ice, drought,
sea-level rise and superstorms. He reports far and wide, on the
oil-rich far north, where nations jostle as the ice retreats;
blaze-prone California and its burgeoning band of firebreak
spets; water-rich South Sudan, where large tracts of
foreign-owned farmland could become a gold mine as other regions
dry up; and beyond."
Men’s Journal:
"The idea that, when it comes to climate change, the meaningful
divide isn't between believers and doubters but winners and
losers is at the heart of McKenzie Funk's immersive and startling
Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming."
Mother Jones:
"Most writings on climate change are tedious or polemical. This
fabulous book is neither. Journalist McKenzie Funk travels the
globe, mingling with the characters who are cashing in (or
preparing to) on global warming: Wall Street land and water
speculators, Greenland secessionists, Israeli snowmakers, Dutch
seawall developers, geoengineering patent trolls, private
firefighters, mosquito-abating scientists, Big Oil scenario
planners, and African officials overseeing the first phase of a
quixotic 4,7000-mile-long foliage barrier against the encroaching
Sahara. Rather than waste our time on a settled question (duh,
it's real!), Funk offers an up-close-and-personal glimpse of
climate change's likely winners—and inevitable losers."
Wired:
“Some Like it Hot: Forget bitcoin—savvy investors bet on
water....In his new book, Windfall: The Booming Business of
Global Warming, McKenzie Funk investigates the profiteers cashing
in on the planet's woes."
GQ:
“In Windfall, McKenzie Funk introduces us to people betting
money on our dear planet's decimation. Spoiler: They're rich.”
Outside Magazine:
“There have been plenty of books documenting the myriad ways
that climate change will take us all down. McKenzie Funk takes a
contrarian approach, reporting on the people—and, in the case of
Greenland and Canada, countries—that are poised to profit
handsomely from the coming chaos.”
Scientific American:
"Funk's reporting brings him face-to-face with individuals who
are investing in planetary crisis. Far from vilifying these
rtunists, he attempts to see the warming world through their
eyes. "
Canadian Business:
"The business of climate change is growing, in other words, at
least somewhat because political action on climate change has so
overwhelmingly failed."
Barnes & Noble:
"The bad news is that we're not cutting our carbon emissions.
The 'good' news, according to McKenzie Funk's Windfall is that
greedy banks and ambitious entrepreneurs are making billions of
dollars on global warming. Much of these new frontiers of
money-making derive from calculated bets on continued failure and
warming, not on corrective measures. Funk's modern day muckraking
lends new perspective and detail to mainstream media coverage and
the ongoing debates about climate change. Definitely a
conversation starter."
The New Yorker’s Page-Turner:
"Funk's take on global-warming profiteering is as entertaining
as it is disturbing."
Kirkus Reviews (STARRED):
“A shocking account of how governments and corporations are
confronting the crises caused by global warming… A well-written,
useful global profile emphasizing concrete solutions rather than
ideological abstractions.”
Publishers Weekly:
"For most of the planet, the specter of global warming is
ominous, but as journalist Funk reveals in this startling book,
there are those who view the Earth's dangerous meltdown as a
golden rtunity...Funk's original, forthright take on this
little-discussed profit-taking trend in the climate change
sweepstakes is very unsettling."
Eliza Griswold, author of The Tenth Parallel:
"Funk's talent shimmers from the pages of Windfall. Here is a
brilliant young stylist at work, pushing the boundaries of
investigative journalism and literary non-fiction. With grace,
humor and hard-nosed reporting on the startling business of
climate profiteering, he takes us along on a searing ride into
the maw of the apocalypse."
Charles Graeber, author of The Good Nurse:
“Funk is a first-rate storyteller who packs adventure and humor
in his journalist's bag, and delights in the absurd details of
business as unusual. The result is a meticulously researched romp
through the backrooms of the climate change industry, by turns
thrilling and appalling, and ultimately rather important. There's
money under the melting ice, and Funk follows it. Perhaps the
only fun book on global climate change you'll ever read.”
Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe:
"Smart, daring, and darkly funny, Windfall offers a new take on
perhaps the world's most intractable problem. McKenzie Funk is a
gifted storyteller."
Eric Klinenberg, author of Heat Wave and Going Solo:
"Climate change may well be humanity's greatest challenge, but
here McKenzie Funk offers definitive evidence that it's also a
great way to make a buck. Windfall is a gripping account of how
banks, energy companies, engineers, and entrepreneurs have turned
a global crisis into a golden rtunity, harvesting short-term
profits while sowing the of future ruin. It's an engaging,
infuriating, and important story about the way the world works
now, and about the reasons it may not work at all tomorrow."
Donovan Hohn, author of Moby-Duck:
"Exploring the profitable frontiers of climate change, Funk
travels the globe like some sort of journalistic special agent,
patrolling the melting Arctic on a Canadian battleship one
minute, breakfasting with the son of a Sudanese warlord the next.
His secret weapons: a highly sensitive irony detector and a
satirist’s eye for vanities and vices that Twain would have
admired. The result is a wonder, a nonfiction eco-thriller that
is disturbing, yes, revelatory, yes, but also a lot more fun than
books about ecological catastrophe are supposed to be."
Jon Mooallem, author of Wild Ones:
"McKenzie Funk has traveled around a planet that's melting,
flooding and drying out all at once to meet the peculiar
characters who are making the biggest, amoral hedge of our time:
finding the value and rtunity hidden in all this ecological
upheaval. Windfall is a shocking and important book that reads,
at times, like dystopian science fiction written by Michael
Lewis. But this unrecognizable world is our world, of course.
Funk argues that the people he meets merely see it more clearly
than the rest of us do."
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