The Carbon Diaries 2015

Do teenagers take climate change and global warming seriously? They can be forgiven if they don’t, given the endless so-called ‘wake-up calls’ that their elders first announce and then ignore. Do they truly consider the impact that effective emergency action would have on their lives? Probably not, given the obstinate reluctance of world governments to take any action at all. Scientists have warned that climate disaster could come soon and suddenly. In The Carbon Diaries 2015 it does. This powerful and impressive novel is a ‘wake-up call’ for teenagers. They should read it, and decline to press the snooze button.

This is the 2015 diary of 16-year-old Laura Brown, youngest of an ordinary if ill-assorted family in London. She has grown up with a family car, holidays abroad, and everyday electronic gadgetry. Then in January 2015 the British Government becomes the first to pass draconian laws to limit carbon emissions, with everyone restricted to a meagre ration of damaging indulgences. This coincides (improbably but effectively) with the sudden onset of catastrophe: extremes of cold and then heat, drought and then rain, culminating in an east coast storm surge that floods London. There is nothing in this dire scenario that could not happen in the next two decades. The novel overplays its hand only by piling all events, political and climatic, into a single year.

Not everything (to borrow a cheap dismissive phrase) is ‘doom and gloom’. Laura is a wilful, brave and resilient girl, and the fact that the sky is falling doesn’t stop her from falling in love (twice), observing her crackpot parents cracking up, or enjoying music with her radical anti-capitalist band, the dirty angels. Life goes on (just). There is comedy and even farce among the mayhem, and some good jokes. For instance, Laura’s sister is co-entrepreneur in a changed-world dating agency called Carbon Dating. And when their Dad, getting back to basics, acquires a pig, they honour the author of a famous poem about shambolic parenting by naming the porker ‘Philip Larkin’. There is backs-to-the-wall fun in this novel. But it is also intensely serious, a daunting vision of global chaos hitting the domestic scene. And except for over-telescoping all the coming dangers, it is entirely plausible. Read it, and then stay awake.