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Jeff Goodell Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Jeff Goodell
Photo: 2005 Jonathan Barber

Jeff Goodell

Jeff Goodell Biography

Jeff Goodell is a New York Times bestselling of author of seven books, including The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World, which was picked as a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2017, as well as one of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2017. Goodell's previous books include Sunnyvale, a memoir about growing up in Silicon Valley, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and Big Coal: the Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future. He is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he has covered climate change for more than a decade.



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Interview

A Conversation with Jeff Goodell about Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future which debunks the faulty assumptions underlying coal's revival and shatters the myth of cheap coal energy.

Why did you decide to write a book about coal?

In the spring of 2001, the New York Times Magazine sent me down to West Virginia to write about the comeback of the coal industry. Coal had played an important role in the election of George W. Bush in 2000 — West Virginia, an important coal state which hadn’t voted Republican in many years, was widely credited with giving Bush his margin of victory — and it was clear that coal would play an increasingly important role in America’s energy future. But visiting West Virginia was an eye-opening experience for me, in part because, like many Americans, I’d naively assumed that coal had gone out with top hats and corsets. I was astonished to learn that the United States burns more than a billion tons of coal a year, mostly to generate electricity. More than half our electric power comes from coal-fired power plants. In West Virginia, I got a close look at the high cost of our dependence on coal — not just the hundreds of square miles of mountains that have been decapitated by strip mines in the southern part of the state, but also the poverty and hardship that I witnessed in many coal-mining towns. I began to ask some obvious ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Jeff Goodell at BookBrowse
The Heat Will Kill You First jacket The Water Will Come jacket How to Cool the Planet jacket Big Coal jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Jeff Goodell but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Diane Ackerman

    Diane Ackerman

    Poet, essayist, and naturalist, Diane Ackerman is the author of many highly acclaimed works of nonfiction, including A Natural History of the Senses -- a book beloved by readers all over the world and the volumes Deep Play, A... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Water Will Come

    Try:
    The Human Age
    by Diane Ackerman

  • Dani Anguiano

    Dani Anguiano

    Dani Anguiano writes for the Guardian and was formerly a reporter for the Chico Enterprise-Record, where she covered Butte County, including Chico and Paradise. Having lived in Butte County for a decade, Anguiano now resides ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Water Will Come

    Try:
    Fire in Paradise
    by Dani Anguiano

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