Brainstorm is a solid addition to Eric Maisel’s lifesaving body of work. 3 stars.

This is another contemporary must-read book. Fear grips our hearts when we contemplate mankind’s future on Earth (whoops, I must remember to call it Eaarth), so we need to let our rational minds read stories of the future, realistic stories. The tail end of Eaarth presents McKibben’s morsels of hope but they seem scant indeed – more productive, holistic, natural agriculture; distributed, small-scale energy; the Internet as a unifier. Yet the book is laced with the author’s irrepressible, instinctive call to action.

Passionate yet grim. 3½ stars.

Unusually for a scientist, Hansen is a smooth, engaging writer, and the book seamlessly meshes a fascinating glimpse into backroom climate change politics and a gentle yet deep story about global warming. If you want one broad brush introduction to climate science and how it has rapidly evolved into near certainty and quasi despair, this is the book for you. I was held spellbound. Ranging over physics, paleontology and glaciology, rigorous yet emphatically personal, Storms of My Grandchildren should be required reading for all secondary students (it seems to me adults either know or reject the truth by now, and the youth of today will wrestle with the issue far better than we seem to be able to).

There can be no excuse for not reading this. Incendiary yet inspirational. 4 stars.

Regrettably, The Swan Thieves becomes unmoored as a result of word bloat. Perhaps a different editor could have cut it down to the three-hundred-page novel it is at heart, but by the middle of the 564 pages, I grew dangerously restive. The central conundrum – why the painter seemingly went crazy – is intriguing, but Kostova stretches it out in the equivalent of a shaggy dog story, and several plot elements lack credibility. Rather than being a surprise, the ending is telegraphed eons earlier. And the other characters besides Marlowe lack special distinction.

With so much to offer, The Swan Thieves would have made a fine mystery or a lyrical literary novel; as a baggy mixture of both, it ends up as interesting but flawed. 2½ stars.

I remain convinced that the key to cutting out fossil fuel usage is to emphasize the far greater immorality of simply burning the stuff, to focus on the blighting of the lives of our children and grandchildren, and all humanity, due to global warming.

• The debut novel by Australian-born Evie Wyld, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, tackles the cascading effect of violence, the violence of men at war, through generations. Wyld is an evocative, sure-footed stylist, and her portrait of two Australians, one a Vietnam war soldier, the other an irresolute semi drunk, is compelling in small doses. If the plot is a little too light to make for a fully compelling book, the author’s rich writing carries the reader through. 3 stars
• Beg, Borrow, Steal by Michael Greenberg is subtitled A Writer’s Life, but is in reality reworked Times Literary Supplement columns over five years. Greenberg obliquely skates over the harsh life he adopted in order to write but his passion shines through. New York vignettes are presented in a most endearing pared-down style in which every word carries weight. Lacking a strong narrative thread, the articles are nonetheless a pleasure to read. 3 stars

• Books that change one’s life are rare (by definition!), so I’m privileged to report the second such in the month of April. Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change, by Australian author and think-tanker Clive Hamilton, is a tour de force of compression and analysis that cannot help but shift climate change thinking. For Hamilton argues, persuasively in my view, that while globally nations resist the required emissions reductions policies, the earth’s climate itself is not providing signals of an irreparably warmer future world. Recent science makes clear that +2º C is locked in, 4º is likely, and even higher is quite possible. Hamilton’s analysis of why humankind assiduously avoids corrective action is fascinating. The final call to action is muted, but so it should be after such an alarming yet rational prognosis. Required reading (but some foreknowledge would help). 4½ stars
• A physical book comprising many authors’ blog post? Sounds to me like a mismatch designed to fail to impress most readers. So I came to Miscellaneous Voices #1: Australian Blog Writing, edited by Karen Andrews, only because it contains a friend’s piece. Of the 36 posts of varied length, five – by Angela Meyer, Solid Gold Creativity, Damon Young and James Bradley (he has two) – proved to be interesting and well-written. And four of those five I’d read on the Internet. The remaining 31 were too ephemeral or eclectic (I avoid poems, for example) to hold attention. A beguiling concept but a flop. 1½ stars

As usual with Krugman, his article is also a call to act. He concludes:

. . . there has to be a real chance that political support for action on climate change will revive. If it does, the economic analysis will be ready. We know how to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. We have a good sense of the costs — and they’re manageable. All we need now is the political will.

My lack of a basic grasp of energy in my home state of Victoria, Australia was highlighted by April 14 news in The Age. As readers of this blog will know, I’m naively (but correctly) portraying coal as a modern moral issue: it’s the dirtiest technology in terms of carbon emissions, so it has to end as soon as possible, with any cost impacts being gladly borne by society. I’ve been reporting on an emerging de facto US moratorium on new coal plants and somehow I assumed Victoria was also experiencing such an informal moratorium. Not so, it seems.

Adam Morton in The Age reported that on April 22 Melbourne-based HRL (which owns a medium-sized 170 MWe coal plant in Morwell) will sign a contract with a Chinese company ‘to build a demonstration plant that would use new technology to run on low-grade coal’. According to the article, HRL tried unsuccessfully to get a ‘clean coal’ plant up previously, again with a Chinese partner; this was replaced late last year by a ‘dual gas’ (but still clearly coal) 550 MWe plant to be running by 2013. The article mentions possible national and state funding totalling $150m.

Don’t rely on this post for authoritative information on the HRL development; I need to do some research. It’s not clear to me, for example, whether this proposed new ‘demonstration’ plant is the 550 MWe plant previously proposed – 550 MWe is obviously not ‘demonstration’ size! My point is this: even with carbon pricing looming for Australia, even with public acceptance of the link between brown coal and the most harmful levels of carbon emissions, new coal plants continue to arise as possibilities.

Moratorium on new coal? Not here yet.