words matter. If we can intergrate a new phrase in our language, literature and awareness --- Cli-Fi --- a new subgenre -- then we can increase the prominence of the idea of "Climate Change" in our national consciousness. And, maybe, just maybe we can have the political will to slow that process down.''

A top literary agent that I am friends with for many years, we are the same age, same generation, he is strong supporter of the cli-fi term and he told me this today re the uphill struggle to get the publishing world to accept and start using the cli -fi term: (I think he should write this up as his own NYT oped. His said it better than I can.)

"Dan, words matter. If we can intergrate a new phrase in our language, literature and awareness --- Cli-Fi --- a new subgenre -- then we can increase the prominence of the idea of "Climate Change" in our national consciousness. And, maybe, just maybe we can have the political will to slow that process down.''

''What kind of lunatic would set out to introduce a new word into the language? Perhaps the ultimate in windmill jousting, only a fool would set out on such an impossible task. Dan Bloom is such a fool.''

NOTE: Cli-fi” movies and novels have the power to change minds. That's their mission. Have they sparked any change in society at large? Maybe not. But the potential of this genre is apparent in some of its storylines.

A scientist takes a moral stand against the way the media trivializes and misreports climate issues facing humankind in Barbara Kingsolver's novel "Flight Behavior."

The movie “Snowpiercer” gives a sense of climate change’s effects on the developing world when a pla...netary catastrophe plunges the world into an ice age and the last members of humanity live on a train with the haves separated from the have-nots.

***NOTE: As the novelist Sarah Stone wrote in a review of Edan Lepucki's post-apocalyptic novel "California”: If we survive, “it will be in part because of books like this one, which go beyond abstract predictions and statistics to show the moment-by-moment reality of a painful possible future, the price we may have to pay for our passionate devotion to all the wrong things."