Includes bibliographical references and index.

1.0 How to be a Climate Optimist -- 1.1 A Better World Waits -- 1.2 Doom's Limits -- 1.3 Embrace Dark Euphoria -- 1.4 An Age of Offhand Miracles -- 1.5 Less Bad and Much Better -- 1.6 A Much Better World -- 2.0 The Long, Looping, "Less Bad" Learning Curve -- 2.1 A Quarter Century of Reckoning with a 200-Year Mess -- 2.2 The View from Svaneke -- 2.3 On Plausible Optimism -- 2.4 It's Okay to Not Be Okay About It -- 2.5 The UN Won't Make It Okay (and That's Okay) -- 2.6 War Footing and Magical Thinking -- 2.7 The View from Berlin -- 2.8 Epiphany at the Café Einstein -- 2.9 Political Will Is Not the Easy Part -- 2.10 Climate Politics 101 (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Politics and Then Hate Politics and Then Realize I Needed Politics No Matter How I Felt about It) -- 2.11 The Highly Qualified, Necessarily Compromised Thrill of Climate Victory -- 2.12 Memes Are Not Enough -- 2.13 Building Codes and the Necessary Process Grind -- 2.14 The Science of Not Listening to the Science -- 2.15 Hearts and Minds -- 3.0 The Much Better Decade -- 3.1 The View from Quarantine -- 3.2 Reality Check -- 3.3 Pledge Drives -- 3.4 Objects in Motion -- 3.5 The Green Marshall Plan -- 3.6 California Dreaming -- 3.7 The Good Life, Rebooted -- 3.8 Life in Energy-Transition Disneyland -- 3.9 The Better Urban Life -- 3.10 Much Better Blocks -- 3.11 Ode to Unsung Climate Heroes, Part 1: Density -- 3.12 Ode to Unsung Climate Heroes, Part 2: Efficiency -- 3.13 The Electric Age -- 3.14 The New Industrial Age -- 3.15 Power and Justice -- 3.16 Levers and Incentives -- 3.17 The Humming Twenties -- 3.18 Adventures in Necessary Sci-Fi -- 4.0 The Age of Transition.