World English Language rights have been acquired by Editorial Director Duncan Proudfoot for Ad Lib Publishers, for climate journalist and host of the ClimateGenn podcast ‘s COP OUT: HOW GOVERNMENTS HAVE FAILED THE PEOPLE ON CLIMATE.
This book will take a look at why, after 30 years of international climate negotiations to reduce carbon emissions, the UN process has failed to deliver a survivable outcome; from Paris to Egypt, finding out what on Earth is going on and exploring the widening gap between public concern and political leadership.
From an on-the-ground perspective at every COP from COP21 Paris in 2015 up until COP27 in Egypt, COP OUT takes us on a fast-paced tour of how the UN process has achieved the exact opposite of what it first set out to achieve as far back as the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.
Duncan Proudfoot: ‘People tend to turn away, perhaps understandably, from the key existential issue of the day: climate change, or collapse. Nick Breeze succeeds in engaging us in the very human narrative of successive COP conferences: a story of imperfection, failure even, but not yet defeat. He shows clearly that it is not Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil or other climate protesters who are the extremists; the true extremists are the
policymakers who undermine efforts to reduce emissions. Governments have failed the people on climate; Nick shows us how, why, and what we can do about it.’
Nick Breeze: ‘The story of COP OUT has emerged over the course of the last decade from my experience of attending the UN COPs, speaking with many experts and reflecting on the terrifying gap between scientific reality and political action. Thanks to my agent Tom Cull for believing in the project and teaming up with my editor, Duncan Proudfoot, both of whom got the story from day one.’
Breeze explores the widening gap between public concern and political leadership. An IPSOS poll in the UK was headlined ‘8 in 10 Britons concerned about climate change – half think net zero target should be brought forward’. In the United States, the Yale Programme on Climate Communication reported, ‘over 70 per cent of people are worried’. Despite this, global policy is still not taking the appropriate action that scientists have been prescribing since the 1980s.
Nick’s book is a personal story, less about the intricacies of science and more about the mainstream perception of how we are understanding and responding to the problem. It seems that, for the most part, society and governments regard protesters who glue themselves to roads or buildings as the lunatics; the truth, however, is that it is those in positions of power who are the true lunatics, failing to respond in the ways that we need to to save the biosphere that sustains us.
Nick Breeze has been interviewing climate scientists and related experts since 2009. In 2017, he co-founded the Cambridge Climate Lecture Series (CCLS) with Professor Hugh Hunt in Cambridge and also began a podcast series during the lockdown in 2020 and has an active YouTube channel that typically receives 30-60k views per month.
Prior to engaging with climate change in 2009, Nick was a wine journalist and soon after began mixing climate change and wine. In 2022, and now in 2023, Nick is the Sustainability Ambassador to the Wines of Alentejo (Portugal) Sustainability Programme (WASP).
Cull & Co. Literary Agency Ltd 