Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Energy Future

Publication date: May 9, 2024 (Island Press)

Available for pre-order: Island Press / Bookshop.org / Amazon / Barnes and Noble

Imagine one day you receive a letter in the mail that informs you that a large energy company is planning to build a massive pipeline through your property. That surveyors will be coming out soon. That they have the legal right to do so, whether you like it or not, because this project is in the "public interest"--because the pipeline will be carrying natural gas, the so-called "bridge fuel" that politicians on both sides of the aisle have been peddling for decades as the path to a clean, green energy future.

This was the gist of the letter that Dominion Energy sent to thousands of residents living along the path of its proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline in 2014, setting off an epic, six-year battle that eventually led all the way to the Supreme Court. That struggle's epicenter was in the mountains of Virginia, where communities stretching from the Blue Ridge foothills to the Shenandoah Valley and the Allegheny highlands became Dominion's staunchest foes. On one side was an archetypal Goliath: a power company that commands billions of dollars, the votes of politicians, and the decisions of the federal government. On the other, an army of Davids: lawyers and farmers, conservationists and conservatives, scientists and nurses, innkeepers and lobbyists, families who farmed their land since before the Revolutionary War and those who were not allowed to until after the Civil War.

At stake was not only the future of the communities that lay in the pipeline's path but the future of American energy. Would the public be swayed by the industry's decades-long public relations campaign to frame natural gas - a fossil fuel and itself a potent greenhouse gas - as a "solution" to climate change? Or would we recognize it as a methane bomb, capable of not only imperiling local property and upending people's lives, but of pushing the planet further down the road towards climate chaos?

Vivid and suspenseful, gut-wrenching and insightful, Gaslight is more than the chronicle of a turning point in American history. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the dark, overlooked story of America's "favorite fossil fuel," and the immense future stakes of the energy choices we face today.

Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity and Survival on the Roof of the World

Published in 2015 (St. Martin’s Press)

Buy here: Bookshop.org / Amazon / Barnes and Noble

High in the Himalayan valley of Zanskar in northwest India sits a village as isolated as the legendary Shangri-La. Long fed by runoff from glaciers and lofty snowfields, Kumik--a settlement of thirty nine mud brick homes--has survived and thrived in one of the world's most challenging settings for a thousand years. But now its people confront an existential threat: chronic, crippling drought, which leaves the village canal dry and threatens to end their ancient culture of farming and animal husbandry.

Fire and Ice weaves together the story of Kumik's inspiring response to this calamity with the story of black carbon. Black carbon from inefficient fires - the particulate residue that makes soot dark - is the second largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide. It's also a key ingredient of the air pollution that public health experts regard as humanity's greatest environmental health risk worldwide: soot-laden smoke from household hearth fires and outdoor sources combine to kill over seven million people around the world every year.

Combining cultural history, detailed reportage, climate and energy science and dramatic storytelling, Fire and Ice is a profound examination of the global challenges of averting climate chaos and lifting billions out of energy poverty and water scarcity.

“Fire and Ice is top-notch on the ground reporting on one more piece of the global environmental puzzle—a particularly tragic piece, and one that we should work hard to solve for so many profound reasons.”

— Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

Fire and Ice is a lyrical tale about life in the coldest places at a time when the earth itself is warming. Author Jonathan Mingle takes the reader to a hearth in the high Himalaya, to join one community within one ancient culture as its citizens respond to climate change. The villagers' story, not to mention the soot from their cookstoves, resounds through the mountains and encircles the world."

— Dava Sobel, author of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter