L.J. Turner is a rancher in Wyoming who lost the freshwater his grandfather bequeathed him to the strip mines of the big coal companies in the Powder River Basin. Bryan Latkanich can’t drink his well water anymore, and he is sure the fracking rigs he allowed on his property in rural Pennsylvania are to blame. Diane Eckhardt, a peach farmer in central Texas, has watched her crop fail in the warming climate, and her congressman denies the problem even exists.

And then there’s Bethel Brock, a coal miner from Virginia, who had to fight against company doctors and lawyers for 14 years to get the black lung benefits he was due under federal law. He needed the help of our reporting to secure them.

L.J., Bryan, Diane and Bethel don’t know each other, but they have all had their lives upended by the same force. They help us tell a series of large and complicated stories in simple, human terms. 

In one story, we traced the path of climate misinformation from the 1950s to the Oval Office today, how it was passed, like a baton, over decades. We came to the conclusion that it’s one of the longest and most expensive campaigns ever waged by industry against science in modern history. We created a narrative graphic to tell the story. One expert on climate denial said, “Your piece is now on the required reading list for all my staff.” Another climate expert emailed us to say, “This has to be one of the best articles ever written on the subject.”

In another story our reporting revealed for the first time how the U.S. government hid fracking’s risk to drinking water in 2004, handing industry broad exemptions from environmental regulations. The consequences of the regulatory loopholes built on censored science have rippled through the country ever since, and landed on Bryan Latkanich’s property. He can’t drink his well water anymore. He blames fracking. He has little recourse. Now we know why.

In L.J. Turner’s case in Wyoming, it’s the subsidies that are to blame for coal’s rapid expansion near the ranch his grandfather started. The bottom has fallen out of the water table and sometimes his cattle die of thirst.

We followed this method—explaining a macro story and showing its micro effects—and created a mosaic that tells a bigger story, too: how the industry’s choke hold has encouraged the unchecked acceleration of climate change and left the world with little breathing room to avoid catastrophic impacts.

In those places she became a fixture on Main Street and opened conversations to find the middle ground on climate change. She listened, questioned and listened again as she asked about the warming climate inside diners and orchards, gun shops and churches. She learned about the stuff of daily life—peaches and the winter’s chill, dogs and snow, floodwater and faith, the wind and the future. She examined what happens to ordinary people when the world they inhabit suddenly becomes unreliable—what they believe, and how they cope or seize opportunity. 

What is especially remarkable about her stories is that she writes them without casting judgment, fixing blame or asserting superiority—right from the middle ground of herself. It’s why she can see the middle ground in others, and as you read her stories you can’t help but recognize this territory in yourself.

Meera’s writing is not only healing, it is insightful and irresistible. Her storytelling catches you off guard. “For 120 years, the Dickeys have been producing peaches so juicy they demand to be eaten over the kitchen sink,” she writes. As you salivate, you’re compelled to keep reading about this family whose orchards won’t survive if temperatures continue to rise.

You learn from Meera, too, about James Beall, who escaped the path to jail he was walking because he became a wind technician. He often goes to work in a nacelle— the mechanical housing at the top of a wind turbine—and Meera makes sure you know how big that place is. “From here on the ground, the nacelle, perched on its 300-foot column, looked tiny. It was actually the size of a bus.” She knows because she rode up in an elevator with Beall, and walked into it.

And with her help, you walk into the shoes of Chad Dingess, an evangelical pastor, and catch a glimpse of the coming apocalypse through his eyes. “He could speak of the end of the world, but it was not his place to consider climate change.”

Meera captures the complicated connection that Americans have to the places that sustain them—and just how tangled their notions around climate change can be. Her stories are infused with rare talent and hard work that sets a high standard of fairness the public is hungering for in these uncertain times.

It describes how Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research decades ago and then pivoted to work at the forefront of climate denial, manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus that its own scientists had confirmed.

Available in a Kindle edition that can be read on any phone, tablet or desktop.

The book is based on in-depth interviews with all seven hikers as well as many of the world’s experts on polar bears and sea ice. It also includes first-hand reporting from the site where the hikers pitched their tents one fateful night next to a breathtaking fjord…

The book upends the national debate over the controversial pipeline, tracing its origins to energy policy decisions made by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in the first months of their administration, and to expectations about energy supply and demand that have turned out to be wrong.

Obama is now the decider on Bush-era energy policy, confronted by both a game-changing U.S. energy boom and accelerating climate impacts his predecessors did not anticipate.

The book also details how in pursuit of energy security, the Bush administration turned its back on campaign promises to address climate change, and instead made growth in Canadian tar sands oil, with its huge carbon footprint, a central pillar of its strategy.

Using thousands of pages of official documents, studies by experts and advocates, and contemporaneous news reports, former New York Times reporter John Cushman Jr. shows how the pipeline that George W. Bush considered a “no brainer” is now seen as a test of President Barack Obama’s commitment to act on climate change.

Award-winning reporters reveal the dangers of releasing a toxic soup of chemicals into the air from oil and gas drilling and expose how little the Texas government knows about such pollution in its own state. They also show that the Texas legislature is intent on keeping it that way.

The project blends traditional and multimedia reporting—and our ebook includes an original video documentary, photographs, a slideshow and print and interactive graphics.

A must-read for anyone who lives anywhere that hydraulic fracturing is taking place. Download is free.

Bloomberg’s work in this area has been barely mentioned by many journalists who have analyzed his legacy as he leaves office after three terms, but experts say New York’s accomplishments rank among the best of any of the world’s leading cities.

The book is based on extensive, exclusive interviews with the key players on Bloomberg’s team, including Bloomberg himself, and illustrated with charts, diagrams, maps and photos, and in the ICN Books version, enhanced with audio and video.

The book contains key moments that help readers understand the human side of the massive urban rethink, with real people making tough decisions, facing sleepless nights, contending with resistance and disappointment, and still pushing ahead into uncharted territory.

Few if any of the hundreds of measures and dozens of initiatives that made up the city’s ongoing experiment with sustainability generated headlines. Only spectacular failures, like the bid to institute congestion pricing on drivers entering Manhattan, secured much public interest. Yet almost invisibly, the city’s fabric has changed in character.

New Yorkers might notice one thing or another – a new pedestrian plaza, or community gardens, or Brooklyn Bridge Park – but few to this day understand how sweeping and comprehensive Bloomberg’s ambition has been.  

His long term plan has decades of implementation ahead – if it continues – but already it has reduced energy use in large buildings and improved air quality, re-imagined and reconstituted the urban landscape, and set the city on a trajectory to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 30% by 2030 below 2005 levels.

The book will be of interest to anyone who cares about New York; to citizens and leaders of other cities interested in learning how to practically and incrementally confront climate change; and to those interested in Michael Bloomberg and his relationship to an issue that will likely remain one of his core concerns in public life.  

Why not? Because the underground pipeline that ruptured was carrying diluted bitumen, or dilbit, the dirtiest, stickiest oil used today. It’s the same kind of oil that the controversial Keystone XL pipeline could someday carry across the nation’s largest drinking water aquifer.

Written as a narrative, this page-turner takes an inside look at what happened to two families, a community, unprepared agencies and an inept company during an environmental disaster involving a new kind of oil few people know much about.

But Germany’s energiewende, or energy transformation, is really a very American story that revolves around self-reliant individuals in a responsive democracy forging a national can-do vision. 

“…..a riveting account of Germany’s energy revolution.” The Ecologist

“This book contains a nice combination of interviews, stories, and examples of how Germany is transitioning from a fossil fuel and nuclear infrastructure to a clean, renewable one. It is an important and eye-opening analysis that should be read by anyone interested in emulating this feat in other countries.”
Mark Z. Jacobson, Director, Atmosphere/Energy Program, Stanford University

In the US, we’re bombarded with messages about how renewables aren’t and will never be affordable or scalable. Davidson shows us how it is possible with a storyteller’s flair and a wonk’s eye for detail. 
–Kate Sheppard, reporter, Mother Jones

Like a solar tower in a field of mirrors Osha Gray Davidson shines an intense beam of journalistic competence on perhaps the greatest challenge of our time….while renewing a practical sense of hope that it’s not too late to move towards a literally brighter future.
David Helvarg, Author of ‘The Golden Shore – California’s Love Affair with the Sea.’

“…..a remarkable new book on how Germany became the undisputed green energy leader.” 
Bill McKibben, author, journalist, activist

While this is a book about policy from top to bottom, it often reads more like a travel book, a journal of discovery through a modernizing nation whose rapid progress was at times as startling to the author as it will be to you…..the Germans’ just-do-it attitude may be another key reason that their nation, so comparable to ours in living standard, industrial base, economic system and culture, has raced so far ahead in making the changes all Americans realize, in our heart of hearts, are ultimately inevitable. 
Ron Meador, MinnPost