TaNIa Peitzker's eshop will be opening in Q1 2027 in Deutschland!
Interview with an Australian war correspondent...
Check it out in the "Cairns Local News" weekly publication!
ABOUT AI. CIVILITY. CLIMATE. WAYS TO MOVE FORWARD.AMERICAN FAMILYPEITZKER FARMS IN PRUSSIA, OHIO & TEXASMUNICH & BONN BOOK LAUNCHES 2026AMERICAN RELATIVES - GERMAN PEITZKERS (PRUSSIA & SUDETENDEUTSCHE)AMERICAN RELATIVES - BAVARIA & CANADA
PR Team
11/5/20264 min read
"Why Did I Write the Book? Because of Trump."
Cairns Author Gives Her First Interview for AI. Civility. Climate.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. CAIRNS, 5 November, 2026.
Tomorrow, Friday 6 November, Cairns Local News publishes the first interview Dr Tania Peitzker has given about her new book, AI. Civility. Climate. Ways to Move Forward. The interviewer: international war correspondent Hugh Bohane, a journalist who has reported from the front lines of Ukraine and who has also just written a book. His is called Under Siege in Ukraine: Witnessing Russia's Full-Scale Invasion (Big Sky Publishing, December 2026).
"Why did I write the book?"
That was Bohane's first question; the simplest one, and the best. Her answer, she admits, is counterintuitive: because of Trump.
The book was originally scheduled to come out in the European summer of 2025. But as the Trump administration's massive, and very often detrimental, impact on climate change policy became clear, and as that same policy shift came to determine the build-out of AI and what everybody now supposedly "knows" is necessary — mass numbers of data centers — Dr Peitzker went back to her New York publisher, Business Expert Press. She negotiated a near-total rewrite of both the book and the book proposal.
"I had to change the book almost entirely," she says. "The world the first draft was written for no longer existed."
Do we really need all those data centers?
Dr Peitzker is not so sure and she says so. In her latest Berliner Steady.page article, "Do We Really Need All These Data Centers for AI?", she challenges the assumption that the AI age requires an ever-expanding sprawl of energy-hungry server farms.
Her argument in one line: the next innovation is already here; putting human brain cells on silicon chips, with commercial pioneers like FinalSpark in Switzerland and Cortical Labs in Melbourne already demonstrating the way.
The book begins where the interview took place
There is a pleasing coincidence in where this first interview happened: Tropical North Queensland, the very place the book begins. AI. Civility. Climate. opens with photos and anecdotes of what it is like to live in the Far North tropics, where Dr Peitzker was born and grew up. [Please see the images and captions from an earlier draft of the manuscript above and below]. Meanwhile, pre-publication in late August, her signal book began selling via some of the world's biggest booksellers, prestigous bookstores and global retailers.
TNQ, or FNQ when Tania was going to school in Cairns, is where the book's three subjects intertwine in daily life: climate and the climate crisis, civility and public discourse. It's all about how to cope with AI as it is already being manufactured — and as it is yet to emerge.
A tribute to her American relatives — on both sides of the divide
The book's many case studies of the USA — of American education, civics and civil society under the Trumpian impact — are written with affection as much as concern. It is, in part, a tribute to Dr Peitzker's American relatives from New York to Montana, Seattle to Florida, who she notes, sit on both sides of the political divide. Some of them even emigrated to Canada and Australia, so the "migrant" and "founding, colonial families" stories get rewritten, over and over.
Her immediate American family came through her German great-aunt, who married an American army officer after World War II. And the genealogy stretches further: the famous, Hyatt hotel chain & Governor of Chicago Pritzkers are apparently related, via the Jewish ancestry from Ukraine, to the Peitzker line.
Meanwhile, other Peitzkers with whom the author is directly related emigrated from Prussia in the 1700s and 1800s to build new agricultural estates. These European ancestors emigrated in the "first wave to the America" from their German farms in what was once called "Prussia, Sudetendeutschland and Böhmen or Bohemia" to some of those early American, pioneering, farming enterprises in the newly named and formed Ohio and Texas.
Not a doomsday book
For all that, the book ends on a resolutely positive note: with a quote from Warren Buffett that is deliberately optimistic, and, she insists, only to be discovered by reading the final sentence yourself.
"You've got to buy the book to find out what he said," she laughs. "It's not a doomsday book. It's about ways to move forward."
The Cairns Local News article is out tomorrow, Thursday 5 November. "Enjoy it," says Dr Peitzker, from the Far North tropics where the book begins and where she is enjoying her last weeks of sabbatical before the European book tour (Munich premiere, 1 December, 2026).
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Media enquiries / interview bookings: in person in Cairns available until 17 November 2026, then the European book tour: Germany, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Italy, France — launches and keynotes including Bonn and Munich.
Book: AI. Civility. Climate. Ways to Move Forward. (Business Expert Press, New York, 2026) — ebook in colour and B&W paperback, stocked from the Harvard Bookstore to Oxford's Blackwell's and major retailers worldwide. Author Portal: https://www.taniapeitzker.com/aicivilityclimate-appliedai-strategies
Steady article: https://steady.page/en/ai-civility-the-climate-crisis-ways-to-move-forward/
