How to Stop a Revolution — Chapter 12 Summary and Analysis

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

In 2029, advertising executive Jackie is at her mother's farmhouse in Amber, Iowa, helping sort through her late father's belongings. She receives a call from colleague Linda Holiday in Chicago: their agency has lost the Procter & Gamble account. The news reopens her grief. Her mother sits at the kitchen table packing her father's clothes into garbage bags for donation, while the den remains cluttered with his hoarded agricultural magazines. Jackie reflects on the eight hundred acres of corn and soy her father was forced to sell, unable to compete with industrial agriculture giants like Cargill. She also recalls learning from her sister Allie that her father had been seeing a woman from church even at the end of his life.

Jackie flies to New York for a pitch to the Sustainable Future Coalition (SFC), a consortium of major corporations—including oil, gas, coal, automotive, agribusiness, utilities, railroads, real estate developers, and private security firms like Sentry and Xuritas. The meeting takes place at Palacio-Wimpel, the PR firm run by Fred Wimpel, a charismatic fixer with a reputation for crisis management. Tom Duncan-Michaels, the former Exxon chief who leads the Coalition, is present, along with Emii Li Song, a tight-lipped Asian woman Jackie suspects is a hidden power broker.

Jackie and her team—including Beth McClann and art director Gruber—present a strategy of strategic accommodation. Rather than fighting climate legislation, they argue, the Coalition should claim the Green New Deal as its own. The pitch contends that denialism has failed, that Kate Morris and Fierce Blue Fire have shifted public opinion, and that the