How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

 by Liberty Mitchell Brock

‘How to Spend a Trillion Dollars’, captivated me. The concept of one trillion dollars is incomprehensible, but Hooper methodically lays out his thoughts and ideas about what we can achieve with this great sum. Rowan Hooper’s experience as both a writer and a scientist makes a convincing combination as an author on climate change, and he currently works as an editor at the New Scientist magazine. Hooper’s PhD in evolutionary biology proves that the author is an expert in this field, and this book should be taken seriously as a result. 

To understand the scale of what the book deals with, one trillion dollars is 1000 billion dollars - written out it appears vast, $1,000,000,000,000, but is only 1% of the world’s GDP, an amount that is nine times smaller than what the world spent to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. As Hooper states, much more is being spent on much less important issues, such as the US defence budget, which totals $1 trillion every year and a half. The budget is refreshed for each of the ten chapters as Hooper explains different avenues that could, and perhaps should, be pursued in the immediate future. Although this book is hypothetical and the costs could end up being more due to unforeseen circumstances, Hooper’s pioneering ideas are inspiring and well-explained. The least we can do is read his book. 

Times journalist Caitlin Moran said, ‘Will someone just give Rowan Hooper a mere trillion dollars and let him, very sensibly, save the world?’ and author Kim Stanley Robinson said, ‘I hope everyone on earth reads it’. These quotes have said it better than I could myself, but this is the reaction that I had when reading this book.

The chapters vary in goals from humanitarian issues like eradicating world poverty and curing all disease, to climate focused goals like going carbon zero, protecting biodiversity and turning the world vegan, to goals out of this planet (literally) like discovering a new reality, finding aliens and settling off-planet. Depending on your own personal views, you will have an opinion on which chapter should be completed first. For me, the most prevalent issues that need to be addressed imminently are eradicating world poverty and solving the climate crisis. $1 trillion could give the response to the climate emergency the kickstart it needs. The main issue with renewable energy sources at the moment is the cost, but we could transition to sustainable energy types much faster than the projected timeline with increased investment. This would buy us some time to solve the other global problems. 

Hooper’s researched ideas are thought-provoking and he presents solutions that I had never even imagined possible. He presents simple methods that can be put in place to tackle global problems all whilst demonstrating their financial possibility. This should be a guidebook for the next generation to follow.