McKenzie Funk is a journalist whose work has appeared inHarper's,National Geographic,Rolling Stone,GQ,Outside, andThe New York Times. A National Magazine Award and Livingston Award finalist and the winner of the Oakes Prize for Environmental Journalism, he was a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he studied economics and systems thinking. He lives in Seattle with his wife and son.
Honorable Mention for the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award
The Wall Street Journal:
“In Windfall McKenzie Funk, an intrepid American journalist,
reports on the lesser-known victims and profiteers of climate
change brings a dizzyingly abstruse phenomenon down to a more human
scale. Mr. Funk leads us away from the rarefied air of Al Gore and
his lethal PowerPoint slides, to mingle with the militiamen,
inventors, politicians and activists trying to find their way
through an era of turmoil.”
The Associated Press:
“Funk has written a fun book humanizing the problems of climate
change, focused on the colorful entrepreneurs who see in an
increasingly inhospitable world golden opportunities.”
Nature:
"This exposé of the powers and people that view global warming as
an investment opportunity is darkly humorous and brilliantly
researched. Journalist McKenzie Funk looks at the impacts deemed a
windfall for 'climate capitalists': melting ice, drought, sea-level
rise and superstorms. He reports far and wide, on the oil-rich far
north, where nations jostle as the ice retreats; blaze-prone
California and its burgeoning band of firebreak specialists;
water-rich South Sudan, where large tracts of foreign-owned
farmland could become a gold mine as other regions dry up; and
beyond."
Men’s Journal:
"The idea that, when it comes to climate change, the meaningful
divide isn't between believers and doubters but winners and losers
is at the heart of McKenzie Funk's immersive and startling
Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming."
Mother Jones:
"Most writings on climate change are tedious or polemical. This
fabulous book is neither. Journalist McKenzie Funk travels the
globe, mingling with the characters who are cashing in (or
preparing to) on global warming: Wall Street land and water
speculators, Greenland secessionists, Israeli snowmakers, Dutch
seawall developers, geoengineering patent trolls, private
firefighters, mosquito-abating scientists, Big Oil scenario
planners, and African officials overseeing the first phase of a
quixotic 4,7000-mile-long foliage barrier against the encroaching
Sahara. Rather than waste our time on a settled question (duh, it's
real!), Funk offers an up-close-and-personal glimpse of climate
change's likely winners—and inevitable losers."
Wired:
“Some Like it Hot: Forget bitcoin—savvy investors bet on
water....In his new book, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global
Warming, McKenzie Funk investigates the profiteers cashing in on
the planet's woes."
GQ:
“In Windfall, McKenzie Funk introduces us to people betting money
on our dear planet's decimation. Spoiler: They're rich.”
Outside Magazine:
“There have been plenty of books documenting the myriad ways that
climate change will take us all down. McKenzie Funk takes a
contrarian approach, reporting on the people—and, in the case of
Greenland and Canada, countries—that are poised to profit
handsomely from the coming chaos.”
Scientific American:
"Funk's reporting brings him face-to-face with individuals who are
investing in planetary crisis. Far from vilifying these
opportunists, he attempts to see the warming world through their
eyes. "
Canadian Business:
"The business of climate change is growing, in other words, at
least somewhat because political action on climate change has so
overwhelmingly failed."
Barnes & Noble:
"The bad news is that we're not cutting our carbon emissions. The
'good' news, according to McKenzie Funk's Windfall is that greedy
banks and ambitious entrepreneurs are making billions of dollars on
global warming. Much of these new frontiers of money-making derive
from calculated bets on continued failure and warming, not on
corrective measures. Funk's modern day muckraking lends new
perspective and detail to mainstream media coverage and the ongoing
debates about climate change. Definitely a conversation
starter."
The New Yorker’s Page-Turner:
"Funk's take on global-warming profiteering is as entertaining as
it is disturbing."
Kirkus Reviews (STARRED):
“A shocking account of how governments and corporations are
confronting the crises caused by global warming… A well-written,
useful global profile emphasizing concrete solutions rather than
ideological abstractions.”
Publishers Weekly:
"For most of the planet, the specter of global warming is ominous,
but as journalist Funk reveals in this startling book, there are
those who view the Earth's dangerous meltdown as a golden
opportunity...Funk's original, forthright take on this
little-discussed profit-taking trend in the climate change
sweepstakes is very unsettling."
Eliza Griswold, author of The Tenth Parallel: "Funk's
talent shimmers from the pages of Windfall. Here is a brilliant
young stylist at work, pushing the boundaries of investigative
journalism and literary non-fiction. With grace, humor and
hard-nosed reporting on the startling business of climate
profiteering, he takes us along on a searing ride into the maw of
the apocalypse."
Charles Graeber, author of The Good Nurse:
“Funk is a first-rate storyteller who packs adventure and humor in
his journalist's bag, and delights in the absurd details of
business as unusual. The result is a meticulously researched romp
through the backrooms of the climate change industry, by turns
thrilling and appalling, and ultimately rather important. There's
money under the melting ice, and Funk follows it. Perhaps the
only fun book on global climate change you'll ever read.”
Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a
Catastrophe:
"Smart, daring, and darkly funny, Windfall offers a new take on
perhaps the world's most intractable problem. McKenzie Funk is a
gifted storyteller."
Eric Klinenberg, author of Heat Wave and Going
Solo:
"Climate change may well be humanity's greatest challenge, but here
McKenzie Funk offers definitive evidence that it's also a great way
to make a buck. Windfall is a gripping account of how banks, energy
companies, engineers, and entrepreneurs have turned a global crisis
into a golden opportunity, harvesting short-term profits while
sowing the seeds of future ruin. It's an engaging, infuriating, and
important story about the way the world works now, and about the
reasons it may not work at all tomorrow."
Donovan Hohn, author of Moby-Duck:
"Exploring the profitable frontiers of climate change, Funk travels
the globe like some sort of journalistic special agent, patrolling
the melting Arctic on a Canadian battleship one minute,
breakfasting with the son of a Sudanese warlord the next. His
secret weapons: a highly sensitive irony detector and a satirist’s
eye for vanities and vices that Twain would have admired. The
result is a wonder, a nonfiction eco-thriller that is disturbing,
yes, revelatory, yes, but also a lot more fun than books about
ecological catastrophe are supposed to be."
Jon Mooallem, author of Wild Ones:
"McKenzie Funk has traveled around a planet that's melting,
flooding and drying out all at once to meet the peculiar characters
who are making the biggest, amoral hedge of our time: finding the
value and opportunity hidden in all this ecological upheaval.
Windfall is a shocking and important book that reads, at times,
like dystopian science fiction written by Michael Lewis. But this
unrecognizable world is our world, of course. Funk argues that the
people he meets merely see it more clearly than the rest of us do."
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