Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now

This books is accessible and smart. I'm trying to read everything on climate and found this to be the best overview of the problems with specific action-items that invite the reader to feel a sense of agency and direction. Highly recommend

This book is supposedly directed to our climate crisis but it starts with the strange title "Speed & Scale"!!! What that title means or what it has to do with the book is not clear to me. The world is faced with a climate crisis and a better title would have been CLIMATE CRISIS ACTION PLAN Chapters 1-6 did not feature such a plan but I thought they are a review of where to go and Chapters 7 through 10 would detail how to get there. Not! Instead, the last 4 chapters just continue to talk of a plan rather than come up with one. What they do provide (along with the initial chapters) are about 20 "conversations" with people such as Bill Gates, John Kerry and Henrik Paulsen. These also talk of plans without ever getting around to originating one. To a prospective reader I would warn "the strange title is an indication of failed purpose within".

It is hard to give a poor review for a book about such an important issue. The review is about the book and not the issue. I really wanted to like this book. On the surface it promises sharing a “speed and scale” plan for addressing climate change based on leading executives and technology investors. I do not doubt John Doerr’s, or the other people featured in the book’s sincerity or commitment to resolving the climate crisis. Doerr’s treatment of the climate crisis is the reason for not recommending the book. Doerr organizes Speed and Scale into 10 chapters outlining 55 statements of Objectives and Key Results (OKR’s). Using this approach Doerr treats the climate crisis as a management problem rather than the existential crisis it is. Breaking down the big problem into smaller chunks makes sense, however it does not drive action as individual companies, leaders and human beings can say I am taking care of this part without addressing the root causes. I believe Doerr is sincere but treating climate change with the same tools and mindset as investing in start-ups makes the issue feel more remote than it should. It is not that Doerr’s OKRs are wrong, it is just that such goals are covered by others and a discussion of goals seems rather late in the game, it is time for execution. Doerr does break down a response to the climate crisis into logical chunks that become the chapters. But each chapter does more to admire the problem than it does to provide actionable and practical things we can all get behind. I was looking for a book about how we as a species mobilize and take real action, rather than further detailing the problem. Doerr’s organization of the causes of climate change into big chunks: 41% due Energy 20% due to Industry 15% due to Agriculture 14% due to Transportation 10% due to Nature These chunks make it seem that the challenge is clear and 61% of it is in the hands of industry and business leaders. Great. The book features various business leaders from Mary Barra to Jeff Bezos to many others, I was expecting a rallying cry a level of coordinated action, an idea that business leaders were mobilizing together across companies, industries and geographies to make change. Instead, the book is more of a who’s who recounting the individual efforts individual leader’s and their companies were making. I am not criticizing these leaders nor what the companies are doing, but the book highlights how independent these actions are and how many work at the edges of the problem. My concern is that the book will garner attention without encouraging the next round of action, mostly at the leadership levels of government, industry, religion, and society. Each of us can and many of us do work to limit our environmental impact, but individual action will not be enough. <br...