Jeff Goodell


Jeff Goodell is an American author and contributing editor to Rolling Stone magazine. Goodell's writings are known for a focus on energy and environmental issues. He was a 2016-2018 Fellow at New America and a 2020 Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Youth and education

Jeff Goodell was born in Palo Alto, California. He grew up in Sunnyvale and worked briefly at Apple Computer in the early 1980s. He graduated from University of California, Berkeley, in 1984, then helped edit Zyzzyva, a literary magazine in San Francisco. He moved to New York City and attended graduate school at Columbia University, where he received an M.F.A. in 1990.

Career

Goodell started his journalism career at 7 Days, a Manhattan weekly founded and edited by Adam Moss. He covered cops, crime, AIDS, and politics. In 1990, 7 Days won a National Magazine Award for General Excellence. After freelancing for a few years, Goodell became a Contributing Editor at Rolling Stone in 1995. Since then, he has written hundreds of pieces for the magazine, including cover stories about climate politics, Steve Jobs, and President Barack Obama.
Goodell has published six books, including Sunnyvale a personal memoir about growing up in Silicon Valley and the breakdown of his family; Our Story: 77 Hours That Tested Our Friendship and Our Faith, about the Pennsylvania Quecreek Mine Rescue of nine trapped coal miners in 2002, which was a New York Times Best Seller; and Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future, which the New York Times called "a compelling indictment of one of the country's biggest, most powerful and most antiquated industries...well-written, timely, and powerful."
In 2010 he published How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate about geoengineering, global warming, and climate change mitigation. The book discusses ideas by Ken Caldeira, James Lovelock, David Keith, Raymond Pierrehumbert, Stephen Salter, and Lowell Wood among others. In 2011, How to Cool the Planet won the Grantham Prize.
His most recent book, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World, which describes visits to places likely to be inundated by rising sea levels, was published by Little, Brown in October 2017. It was a New York Times Critics Top Book of 2017 and selected by the Washington Post as one of the 50 best non-fiction books of 2017.
As a commentator on energy and climate issues, Goodell has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, ABC, Fox News and The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Awards and honors

Books
Anthologies'