Cory Doctorow presents THE LOST CAUSE, with Dr. Sarah Taber at Flyleaf Books

For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn’t controversial. It’s just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programs cannot be stopped in their tracks.

But there are still those Americans, mostly elderly, who cling to their red baseball caps, their grievances, their huge vehicles, their anger. To their “alternative” news sources that reassure them that their resentment is right and pure and that “climate change” is just a giant scam. And they’re your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. And they’re not going anywhere. And they’re armed to the teeth.

The Lost Cause asks: What do we do about people who cling to the belief that their own children are the enemy? When, in fact, they’re often the elders that we love?

Cory Doctorow(craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently THE LOST CAUSE, a solarpunk science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency. His most recent nonfiction book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, a Big Tech disassembly manual. Other recent books include Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller; Chokepoint Capitalism, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the Little Brother series for young adults; In Real Life, a graphic novel; and the picture book Poesy The Monster Slayer. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Dr. Sarah Taber is a farm coach that helps people launch vegetable greenhouses and indoor farms. This is a competitive, low-margin trade, and most of her clients had never farmed vegetables before. All are still in business and now worth over $4 billion. Dr. Taber is now running for North Carolina’s Commissioner of Agriculture in 2024. Her mission is to grow North Carolina’s farms in three ways: what we farm, who makes a livelihood from agriculture, and how we do business. Dr. Taber is based in Fayetteville, where her husband teaches at Fayetteville State University.