How to Spend a Trillion Dollars: Saving the world and solving the biggest mysteries in science

How To Spend a Trillion Dollars is both original and ingenious. Rowan Hooper looks at the problems facing the world today - all the big ones - and presents solutions that are realistic and workable, if governments can wring the money out of giant corporations - and billionaires - that don't like paying tax. Hooper writes with great vivacity and persuasiveness and his book is an exhilarating, encouraging, and hopeful reminder that the solutions are there if we have the will to find them. I hope it sells a trillion. -- Philip Pullman Will someone iust give Rowan Hooper a mere trillion dollars and let him, very sensibly, save the world? -- Caitlin Moran ln a world of doom-scrolling, trembling on the brink of causing a mass extinction event that will devastate civilisation, it's crucially important to point out that we already have the abilities needed not only to avoid catastrophe, but to thrive. That's what Hooper does in fascinating and exciting detail. -- Kim Stanley Robinson At a moment when science is proving it can solve the most urgent of problems - given the right funding - Rowan Hooper asks a very interesting question. How much would it cost to solve all the world's other problems? ... Like any good game, this is deadly serious. What starts off seeming absurd ends up feeling obvious. Why would we not invest in our future? As Hooper says, "The world is full of extraordinary opportunities, and the vast majority are never undertaken" -- James McConnachie * Sunday Times * Brimming with exciting possibilities for a future in which the health and safety of the whole population becomes their responsibility -- Delia Smith What would you do with a trillion dollars? In this hopeful and very readable book, Rowan Hooper shows us how a thoughtful investment of financial capital could be used to solve the great challenges we face. None is more near and dire than the climate crisis, and Hooper provides reason for optimism here. The solutions-green energy chief among them-already exist. It's simply a matter of us investing in them. And a trillion dollars spent on climate solutions would payback several times over in avoided damage and destruction and new jobs. Read this book and be inspired to change the world. -- Michael Mann I've never before read a book which made me aspire to be a tax collector. But if I was, and if I could just get all the money which the greedy mega-Corps dodge paying, what Hooper so elegantly yet pragmatically shows is that we could so easily "save the world" and have so much fun too. I'll get my suit on! -- Chris Packham In a world in which everything seems to be going wrong, this is a refreshingly optimistic book about what real solutions to the world's biggest problems could look like - and cost. Beautifully positive, lucid and accessible. -- Angela Saini, author of Superior By assessing what it would take to tackle the world's biggest problems, Hooper finds that even huge investments pay for themselves many times over. In that sense, his book is like a new version of Brewster's Millions: spend now, win later, with more jobs, better health and, crucially, a better functioning biosphere. * New Scientist * Rowan Hooper shows that the world's most intractable problems might not actually be intractable, if we just devoted the resources to solving them. How to Spend a Trillion Dollars is a fascinating, thought-provoking work. -- Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sixth Extinction Full of lucid and transformative ideas -- George Monbiot