In any event, the subtitle of the book is "An Illustrated Guide to the Climate Crisis" and it's setup as a dialogue between Blain and noted climate change expert Jean-Marc Jancovici. Blain puts himself in the everyman position and lets Jancovici walk through all the the hows, whys, and wherefores about climate change. Though Jancovici does explain things largely in layman's terms, Blain does frequently offers practical examples as he begins to understand things, frequently borrowing Jancovinci's metaphor of modern machines effectively making every person a kind of Iron Man type of superhero.
(In fact, the original version of this has Blain wear actual Iron Man armor throughout much of the book to emphasize this point. You can see this in many of the French language previews online. I suspect that to avoid litigation he's gone back and re-drawn all of those instances with a more generic "Armor Man" for at least the US publication. That might explain part of the multi-year delay between the French and US publications.)
Now, you might think, "Well, yeah, I know the gist of things here... fossil feuls released CO₂, which traps heat on the Earth, and everything gets hotter, so we should use more solar power, yadda yadda yadda... I don't need someone else to explain all that." But that's not what this book is.
In the first place, while Jancovici does use a portion of the book to explain where greenhouse gasses come from, he also spends a fair amount of time explaining how and why we started using them in the first place. And not just the technical reasons, but the social and economic ones as well. He makes it very clear that, unlike a lot of climate activists who might come across as upset that anyone has ever burned an ounce of gasoline, there are a lot of valid and justifiable reasons why it made -- and in many ways continues to make -- sense. He's also very candid about using "green" power sources like wind and solar, noting the current limitations of how much power they generate relative to the amount of resources they use in their creation.
One aspect of the book that I quite liked was that Jancovici seemed to really try to take a holsitic, nuanced approach to the topic. Frequently, things get simplified to little more than "fossil fuels are bad" but Jancovici's look at the economic reasons for how and why they're still used (again, in a more nuanced discussion than "oil companies are greedy") is insightful. It feels more honest and less judgemental. Indeed, he seems to make a point of using statistics from all over the world and not saying "the US is worse than everybody else" or "China has the most blame" or anything. He does call out the US and China on multiple occasions, but he also calls out France and England and India and Russia and Japan and...
That also means he recognizes the practicalities of things as well. He doesn't say, "never drive anywhere" or "never eat meat" or anything. His biggest suggestion is really to reject the "growth at all costs" mentality that has become very part and parcel to capitalism any more. That doesn't mean growth by itself is evil -- yet again, it's a nuanced discussion -- but that it's not a failure if you're not increasing revenue all the time.
It's a solid and informative book; one that I wish I could've read a decade or two ago. If I had, I might be more optimistic than I am now. Not that Jancovinci isn't optimistic, but personally I find it difficult in light of where we are collectively right now. Neither Jancovici or Blain claim to have all the answers. There's some suggestions and ideas that will probably help, but mostly at an individual scale. Will it help more globally if enough people adopt those ideas? Probably. It certainly won't hurt! It's definitely an insightful look at climate change, regardless, and it's a book I wish more people would read.
As I said, the book came out in the US last week, published by Zando. It's retails in hardcover for $32 US. I believe it's been available in the UK since October and in France for a couple years now, so you should basically be able to pick it up at your bookstore of choice pretty readily. Well worth the read.
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