GREEN READS

Sometimes -- most of the time, actually -- the battle against climate change seems hopeless. The human family's addiction to cheap coal and oil only gets worse as hundreds of millions of people in India, China and elsewhere emerge from poverty into lifestyles that affluent countries take for granted, with lights, heat, air conditioning, cars and the freeways to drive them on. China is now the world's second-largest car market, its air so polluted that Olympic athletes are wondering if they'll be able to breathe in Beijing this summer. Behind the scenes, battles large and small are being waged by scientists, environmentalists, little guys, big companies and politicians. Here are recent publications that capture these conflicts -- and offer some hope. Take time as Earth Day (Tuesday) approaches to read and reflect.

EARTH: THE SEQUEL

by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn Norton, 256 pages, $24.95

An admirably pragmatic organization on the green side is the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit run for more than two decades by Fred Krupp. The fund has distinguished itself by developing least-cost public-policy solutions to such complex environmental problems as acid rain. So one would expect Krupp's book, written with journalist Miriam Horn, to offer practical solutions to global warming, and it delivers.

Krupp and Horn introduce us to the next generation of energy sources -- gee-whiz technologies certain to be common knowledge in coming decades -- and the people who invent and finance them. The authors convincingly document a "new industrial revolution," eagerly bubbling away in laboratories and start-up companies in Palo Alto and Minneapolis, demonstration projects in Phoenix and Seattle, and venture capital firms, mostly in Silicon Valley, that are betting big. We learn of magical new approaches to harnessing the sun, wind, algae, ocean energy, the Earth's core heat and even plentiful coal -- if the complex problem of sequestering waste carbon dioxide can be accomplished safely, a dubious proposition. Instead, how about genetically engineered "bugs" that make oil the way spiders make silk and termites convert wood to energy, potentially producing gasoline for $2 per gallon by 2010!

The creativity of the capitalist marketplace will turn these start-ups into future Apples and Intels in enough time to control climate change, Krupp and Horn argue, if lawmakers make the one right policy choice: a "cap and trade" law that would reduce carbon waste while businesses pick and profit from their solutions. Some of us remember when rivers and lakes were used as free sewers; capping the use of the atmosphere as a free sewer is the fastest, cheapest way to bring clean energy to the electrical outlet nearest you.

One big quibble: Krupp and Horn include only a few sentences on nuclear power. Love it or hate it, fission is a proven energy source that is carbon-free and deserves an honest, not cursory, look.

THE GREAT WARMING

by Brian Fagan Bloomsbury, 304 pages, $26.95

Fagan's many "we don't knows" nevertheless do not prevent him from making a host of suppositions in this book. That it is meandering and repetitious is too bad, because he has something important to say about the "possible" effects of a previous warming period in about 1100-1300 AD and what that history might mean for us as we face the "Great Warming" underway.

Fagan, the author of popular histories including "The Little Ice Age," a climatological thriller from the 14th to 19th centuries when the Thames in London froze, gamely attempts a similar task for the Great Warming. Taking advantage of an explosion in paleoclimatological data (from cores in glaciers, ancient lake beds and coral reefs, plus advances in tree-ring dating) he describes what happened to civilizations around the world as a result -- maybe. As the massive "water mountains" of the Maya and the extensive reservoir system of Cambodia's Khmer empires failed, so did their civilizations. Others adapted, such as the Mongols, whose horse armies rode from the drought-plagued steppes to conquer much of the world. Climate as a force in history certainly needs to be better understood. Many civilizations thought they were smart enough to rule over their corner of the planet forever. Some of them are in ruins.

COAL RIVER

by Michael Shnayerson Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 336 pages, $25

Shnayerson, a Vanity Fair contributing editor, has penned a John Grisham novel, full of beleaguered small-time lawyers and simple rural folk vs. suited villains in corporate helicopters. Except the story is real, the heroes true Davids with legal-brief slingshots up against Goliath coal companies leaving permanent 100-acre footprints of flattened mountaintops across Southern Appalachia. Shnayerson has uncovered a national scandal -- the ruthless exploitation of the Appalachian landscape through the modern practice of blasting entire mountaintops to extract the coal below, filling nearby valleys and streams with rubble. Not to mention the exploitation of the people who have lived in these mountains for generations and the miners whose unions are broken as Wall Street-backed Big Coal gets its way, state and federal laws be damned.

Minnesotans have little to be smug about. We import our coal from 80-foot-high seams in the Dakotas and Montana, one reason Appalachian low-sulfur coal has to blast and fill to compete, essentially copying the methods of flatland strip-mines. Except these aren't flatlands, but some of the oldest, most diverse forests and mountains in America, blasted to rubble at the astonishing rate of 22,000 acres a year. Coal provides the cheapest electricity in the United States. "Coal River" reveals the hidden costs on landscape and people, not counting the Inuit and polar bears in an Arctic that's melting, partly because of coal's carbon-dioxide emissions. Read this book and fume.

NIGHT FIRE

by Ronnie Green Amistad, 288 pages, $24.95

Another against-all-odds thriller, this one featuring a four-street-wide neighborhood in Louisiana that is scratching the fence of a giant Shell Oil refinery. Margie Richard, a schoolteacher, watched her sister die of a rare lung disease and her friends and grandchildren get sick while she survived several plant explosions and batches of unbreatheable air. Having had enough, she organized to document the perceived wrongs and petitioned to have her tiny African-American community moved out of harm's way. Green, a prize-winning investigative journalist, tells Richard's story well, taking us on a tour down Chemical Corridor, the 80-mile strip of petrochemical facilities between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that the locals call "Cancer Alley." Richard's determination, which won her the Goldman Environmental Prize, helped a reluctant Shell clean up its refineries, too. In the end she was featured in Shell's 2004 Annual Report.

AMERICAN EARTH: ENVIRONMENTAL WRITING SINCE THOREAU

edited by Bill McKibben, foreword by Al Gore Library of America, 900 pages, $40

In his introduction, Gore reminds us of Teddy Roosevelt's admonition: "We have gotten past the stage, my fellow citizens, when we are to be pardoned if we treat any part of the country as something to be skinned for two or three years for the use of the present generation." McKibben puts that vision to good use, defining environmental writing not as nature writing but as "the collision between people and the rest of the world." He delivers a solid brick of a book full of practical and metaphorical fuel for a generation faced with unprecedented risks of climate change. Discover here Rhodes Scholar David Quamman and wonky physicist Amory Lovins, among other prescient scientists, gifted writers, naturalists, foresters and activists. It's a pleasure to find Janice Ray, discovered by Minneapolis' Milkweed Editions, alongside Wisconsin's Aldo Leopold and Minnesota's Sigurd Olson, among many others. "American Earth" is a bountiful harvest not only of good green writing, but also of good sense, for the most part. And when you finish, you can recycle it as a doorstop.

THE BILL MCKIBBEN READER

by Bill McKibben Holt, 464 pages, $18

McKibben cut his writing cuticles at the New Yorker and it shows. His reports from the underbelly of civilization are laced with passion tempered by grace buttressed by facts. These 44 bite-size essays are a good way to get inside a great environmentalist's head, and under our planet's fragile skin.

James P. Lenfestey is a former Star Tribune editorial writer.