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While this book starts off really sad (why was I reading it in public?) it comes around to being a narrative about how being true to yourself will lead to finding yourself and community. Like with Heartstopper on Netflix, your worst fears are never manifested. We really did need a queer elder Heartstopper that celebrates surviving through times when being gay would lead to job loss, prison, or worse. Whether they had to live in the closet or were willing and able to take on the challenges of being out at the time, they survived when many people didn’t. If you are looking for a challenging queer narrative or one focusing on the issues queer people face today, you might be disappointed. If you want a fuzzy and easy book (after crying for the first 50 pages) you might fall in love with Albert and Nichole. I forgot to mention ton her, but as a young black single mother, she too goes on a similar journey opening herself up to the people around her and standing up for her needs. She could have easily slipped into a shallow stereotype, but her characterization felt well done to my eyes.

I picked this up because I was looking for works that espoused the ideas of Abundance but did a better job at either making the case for "build the stuff we want", or being a rallying cry for the idea as a political framework. That's not the premise for this book, nor does it really touch on the idea. The only thing he mentions doing more of is pumped-storage hydroelectricity in the context of one prong of his thesis. So what is it?

Harris promises that he'll show the way through the climate crisis, and it turns out he means by putting forward three-plus frameworks for exercising political power to do things that the book assumes we need to do to get off fossil fuels. His frameworks: marketcraft, public power, and communism. Marketcraft is basically really strong regulation of market forces (rather than just nudges). Public power is state ownership of key industries; he gives the example of building pumped-storage hydroelectricity. And by communism he means bottom-up pseudo anarchist revolution, such as the Zapatistas. He also makes the claim that if he does his job right, his favored strategy of those three won't be favored.

For each of the strategies, he states how they might work, and what might prevent them from working. Except he devotes nearly 2/3 of the book to communism and his criticism of it is that capitalism is probably more successful at violence than communists are.

And in the last 7-ish percent of the book, he puts forward that it'll really be a mix of 2 or more of the strategies and gives surface level examples of how the strategies might mesh. And his final flourish, the one concrete organizing thing he thinks people should do, is establish "disaster councils" that work across all three strategies, but devotes only a couple of sentences to how these could work. None of what the disaster councils would do (as described) really deals with the climate crisis.

About the only thing he says won't work is laissez faire capitalism or other pure market forces. And dismisses it with a wave of his hand that it's already failed. I agree, actually, but that is easy.

Is he actually wrong? Hell if I know, but it's nearly impossible to be wrong with such a broad position. The whole thing comes across as "here's what I like and don't like about three kinds of leftism." I just wasn't very impressed, but I'm just a cranky dude on the internet. What do I know?