Jonathon Porritt has been at this longer than almost anyone in Britain: director of Friends of the Earth in the 1980s, co-founder of Forum for the Future, chair of the government’s Sustainable Development Commission for most of the 2000s, a career built on working with ministers and corporations rather than shouting at them from outside. That biography is what gives this book its force, because its central admission is that the approach he spent decades on has not delivered at anything like the necessary speed.
The core argument
Porritt’s structure is straightforward: where the science says we are, what is likely to follow, what the solutions actually are, and what it would take politically to get them. His position on the first is that it is not too late to avoid runaway climate change, but that the window is narrow enough that this decade is decisive — hence the subtitle. He is careful to place himself between two failures he considers equally disabling. Complacency assumes someone will handle it. Doom assumes it is already lost. Both remove the reason to act, and he takes deliberate aim at the fatalism encouraged by the bleakest recent climate writing.
The technical chapters are the work of someone who has spent years in the detail. He is genuinely encouraged by the collapse in the cost of renewables and by the pace of change in China, and correspondingly unsentimental about the sectors where no easy answer exists — aviation, cement, agriculture and meat — where he argues that demand itself has to change rather than merely being made more efficient. But the book’s real subject is the politics. Porritt’s conclusion, striking from an insider of his standing, is that incrementalism has run out of road and that only sustained mass pressure will move governments fast enough. He endorses non-violent civil disobedience explicitly, writes admiringly of the school strikes and the new wave of youth activism, and connects the climate question to inequality, justice and the health of democracy rather than treating it as a standalone technical problem.
Key ideas
- Hope as a discipline, not a feeling. Hope is presented as something you act your way into, and is contrasted throughout with both optimism and despair.
- The decisive decade. The claim that the 2020s are the period in which the outcome is largely settled, which is what justifies the urgency of everything else.
- Incrementalism has failed. From someone who practised it at the highest level, an argument that negotiated, gradual reform has been outpaced by the physics.
- Civil disobedience as necessary. Mass non-violent pressure is treated as a requirement for political change rather than an unfortunate excess.
- The hard sectors. Flying, cement, meat and heavy industry are singled out as the places where technology alone will not close the gap.
- Intergenerational justice. The young activists are framed not just as a hopeful sign but as the people with the strongest claim in the argument.
Who it’s for
Best for readers who already accept the basic climate case and want a serious, well-informed account of what the response would actually involve — particularly the political and strategic question of how change gets forced, which most popular climate books handle vaguely. Porritt’s long insider record makes his conclusion harder to dismiss than the same argument from a lifelong activist would be.
He writes as a committed campaigner and is not attempting balance, which readers should factor in. The most frequent criticism is density: reviewers have noted that the volume of data and detail can swamp the narrative, and it reads in places more like a briefing than a book. Some environmental readers have argued he underweights specific solutions — the built environment among them — relative to their share of emissions, and his positions on contested questions within the green movement, such as which technologies deserve support, reflect long-held commitments that others in the field dispute. Sceptics of the activist turn would question whether mass disobedience actually shifts policy or hardens opposition to it, a question the book asserts more than it tests. Read alongside something arguing the technocratic or market-led case, if you want the disagreement rather than one side of it.