Background

Jeff Goodell was born in 1959, in Palo Alto, California, United States.

Education

Jeff Goodell was raised in Silicon Valley as four generations of his family before him.

In 1984, he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in English at the University of California, Berkeley. Then, he came to New York City where he attended graduate school at Columbia University. He completed his studies in 1990 with a Master of Arts in Fiction Writing.

Career

Jeff Goodell started his professional journey in the early 1980s working for a while at Apple Computer as a technical writer. In the middle of the decade, he tried his hand as an editor serving at a literary San Francisco magazine titled Zyzzyva.

Goodell pursued his career of a journalist in New York City writing for 7 Days weekly magazine under the guidance of Adam Moss. His subject matters included cops, crime, AIDS, and politics. After earning his life by freelancing for some time, Goodell joined the staff of Rolling Stone in 1995. He has written articles on climate issues, politics, and computer geniuses. He has also contributed to such periodicals as The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and Wired.

Since 2000, Jeff Goodell has written six books. He debuted with a memoir about his life in Silicon Valley called ‘Sunnyvale’. In a couple of years, he published an edition called ‘Our Story: 77 Hours That Tested Our Friendship and Our Faith’ covering the 2002 Pennsylvania Quecreek Mine Rescue. In his next book, ‘Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future’, issued four years later, Goodell explored the field of the coal industry and the problems related to the use of the energy.

The global environmental issues were the main subjects of his book ‘How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate’ published in 2010. The writer has covered such topics as geoengineering, global warming, and climate change mitigation. ‘The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World’ of 2017 has touched the question of global warming and its possible consequences.

The most recent book of Goodell, ‘Goodbye Miami: Rising Sea Levels will Turn the Nation’s Urban Fantasy Land into an American Atlantis’ saw the print in 2018.

The writer has performed as an analyst of energy and climate issues on NPR, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News, and The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Nowadays, Jeff Goodell regularly writes for The New York Times Magazine and Yale University’s Environment 360. He also works at the McHarg Center of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.

Achievements

• Jeff Goodell is an accomplished journalist and writer whose investigations of environmental and energy issues are praised by experts, critics, and average readers.
  
  The author has been a recipient of such awards as Grantham Prize, and The David R. Brower Conservation Award from Sierra Club.
  
  Goodell’s article for Rolling Stone, ‘Down and Out in Silicon Valley’, was named one the best business stories of the year by the editorship of BusinessWeek. ‘Sunnyvale’ was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book. The writer’s publication, ‘The Water Will Come’, was proclaimed a New York Times Critics Top Book of 2017 and included in the list of the 50 best non-fiction books of the year by the Washington Post.
  
  From 2016 to 2017, Goodell was a fellow of the New America Foundation.

Works

More photos

• book

  • How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate

    (Jeff Goodell points out that the economic crisis, combine...)

    2010
  • Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future

    (In this eye-opening call to action, Goodell explains the ...)

    2006
  • The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

    (The book is the definitive account of the coming water ca...)

    2017
  • Our Story: 77 Hours That Tested Our Friendship and Our Faith

    (The complete story of the nine Pennsylvania coal miners w...)

    2002
  • Sunnyvale: The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family

    (Affecting and personal, Sunnyvale is a portrait of one fa...)

    2000
  • The Cyberthief and the Samurai 1996

Views

Quotations: "The greatest danger we face is not technological hubris, but human apathy."

"The idea that human beings have taken a few steps closer toward asserting control over the Earth's climate is likely to strike you as a really bad idea."

"One of the big questions in the climate change debate: Are humans any smarter than frogs in a pot? If you put a frog in a pot and slowly turn up the heat, it won't jump out. Instead, it will enjoy the nice warm bath until it is cooked to death. We humans seem to be doing pretty much the same thing."

"Geoengineering - the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the earth's climate to offset global warming - is a nightmare fix for climate change."

"The relevant questions now are: How do we move beyond coal? How do we bring new jobs to the coal fields and retrain coal miners for other work? How do we inspire entrepreneurialism and self-reliance in people whose lives have been dependent on the paternalistic coal industry?"

"One of the pillars of backward thinking in America is the idea that you can have jobs or you can have clean air and water, but you can't have both. That myth has been busted a thousand times, but still it lives on."

"Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution - warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain - are even more deadly here."

"Today, we're very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted - all the things you have in the house, the way industry works."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Once you’ve read an excellent book about climate change, you can never unremember the facts… Goodell has been writing about climate change for many years…he’s the real deal, committed and making house calls." Jennifer Senior, author at the New York Times
  
  "[Goodell] achieves a fine balance between the inventor’s enthusiasm and the scientist’s skepticism." Publishers Weekly
  
  "Without overloading the reader with scientific jargon or overwhelming statistical information, Goodell does a first-rate job of balancing environmental concerns with interviews from the human faces." Library Journal
  
  "Jeff Goodell helps readers explore the audacious question of whether humans can use technology to fix the very problem technology has created." The Washington Post