Books about Political Responsibility and Climate Change
Note: Links to these categories are accessible at the next level up.
Economic Impacts
Energy Generation
Legality & Ethics
Mitigation Measuress
Panic Mode
Political Responsibility
Regional Aspects
Scientific Basis
Societal Acceptance
Renewables:
The Politics of a Global Energy Transition
Michael Aklin & Johannes Urpelainen
The MIT Press (March 23, 2018)
No Review
"In this book, Michaël Aklin and Johannes Urpelainen offer a comprehensive political analysis of the rapid growth in renewable wind and solar power, mapping an energy transition through theory, case studies, and policy analysis."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (20 ratings)
ISBN 978-0262037471
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The Burning Earth:
A History
Sunil Amrith
W. W. Norton & Company (September 24, 2024)
No Review
"Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University and professor at the Yale School of the Environment. He is the author of five books, most recently The Burning Earth, and recipient of multiple awards, including a MacArthur 'genius' fellowship, a fellowship at the British Academy, and the 2024 Fukuoka Prize. He grew up in Singapore and lives in Connecticut."
"A brilliant, paradigm-shifting global history of how humanity has reshaped the planet, and the planet has shaped human history, over the last 500 years.
"In this magisterial book, historian Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of an extraordinary expansion of human freedom and its planetary costs. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich diversity of primary sources, he reckons with the ruins of Portuguese silver mining in Peru, British gold mining in South Africa, and oil extraction in Central Asia. He explores the railroads and highways that brought humans to new terrains of battle against each other and against stubborn nature. Amrith's account of the ways in which the First and Second World Wars involved the massive mobilization not only of men, but of other natural resources from around the globe, provides an essential new way of understanding war as an irreversible reshaping of the planet. So too does this book reveal the reality of migration as consequence of environmental harm.
"The imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith relates in gorgeous prose, and on the largest canvas, a mind-altering epic—vibrant with stories, characters, and vivid images—in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.0 (18 ratings)
ISBN 978-1324007180
SJ0 1/14/2017
A Planet To Win:
Why We Need a Green New Deal
Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, & Thea Riofrancos
Naomi Klein (Foreword)
Verso (November 12, 2019)
No Review
"The age of climate gradualism is over, as unprecedented disasters are exacerbated by inequalities of race and class. We need profound, radical change. A Green New Deal can tackle the climate emergency and rampant inequality at the same time. Cutting carbon emissions while winning immediate gains for the many is the only way to build a movement strong enough to defeat big oil, big business, and the super-rich—starting right now.
"A Planet to Win explores the political potential and concrete first steps of a Green New Deal. It calls for dismantling the fossil fuel industry and building beautiful landscapes of renewable energy, guaranteeing climate-friendly work and no-carbon housing and free public transit. And it shows how a Green New Deal in the United States can strengthen climate justice movements worldwide. We don't make politics under conditions of our own choosing, and no one would choose this crisis. But crises also present opportunities. We stand on the brink of disaster—but also at the cusp of wondrous, transformative change."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (75 ratings)
ISBN 978-1788738316
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Oil, the State, and War:
The Foreign Policies of Petrostates
Emma Ashford
Georgetown University Press (June 1, 2022)
No Review
"Emma Ashford is a senior fellow with the New American Engagement Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, where her work focuses on questions of grand strategy, international security, and the future of US foreign policy. She is also a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and an adjunct assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University. Previously, she was a research fellow in defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Foreign Affairs, the Texas National Security Review, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and War on the Rocks, among others. She writes a biweekly column, 'It's Debatable,' for Foreign Policy. She is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and holds a PhD in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia."
"A comprehensive challenge to prevailing understanding of international implications of oil wealth that shows why it can create bad actors.
"In a world where oil-rich states are more likely to start war than their oil-dependent counterparts, it's surprising how little attention is still paid to these so-called petrostates. These states' wealth props up the global arms trade, provides diplomatic leverage, and allows them to support violent and nonviolent proxies. In Oil, the State, and War, Emma Ashford explores the many potential links between domestic oil production and foreign policy behavior and how oil production influences global politics.
"Not all petrostates have the same characteristics or capabilities. To help us conceptualize these differences, Ashford creates an original classification of three types of petrostates: oil-dependent states (those weakened by the resource curse), oil-wealthy states (those made rich by oil exports), and super-producer states (those that form the backbone of the global oil market). Through a combination of case studies and analysis, she illustrates how oil shapes petrostates' behavior, filling a major gap in our understanding of the international implications of oil wealth. Experts have too often treated oil-rich states as passive objects, subject to the energy security needs of Western importing states. Instead, this book highlights the agency and power enjoyed by petrostates.
"As the oil market undergoes a period of rapid change, Oil, the State, and War sheds light on the diversity of petrostates and how they shape international affairs."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (7 ratings)
ISBN 978-1647122379
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The Global Environment: (4th ed.)
Institutions, Law, and Policy
Regina S. Axelrod & Stacy D. Vandeveer (Editors)
CQ Press (March, 2014)
No Review
"The new edition of Regina S. Axelrod and Stacy D. VanDeveer’s award-winning volume The Global Environment: Institutions, Law, and Policy reflects the latest events in global environmental politics and sustainable development while providing balanced coverage of the key institutions, issues, laws, and policies. The volume has been reorganized to better highlight global environmental institutions, major state and non-state actors, and includes an expanded set of cases such as climate change, biodiversity, hazardous chemicals, ozone layer depletion, nuclear energy and resource consumption. Based on reviewer feedback, the new edition broadens coverage of the growing global environmental agenda and explores the relationships between states, NGOs, and international organizations."
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (2 ratings)
ISBN 978-1452241456
SJ7 K3585.4.G58 1999
Feeling the Heat:
The Politics of Climate Policy in Rapidly Industrializing Countries
Ian Bailey & Hugh Compston (editors)
Palgrave Macmillan (April 2012)
No Review
"With their massive and growing ecological footprints, China, India, Russia, and Brazil are crucial players in the politics of climate-change mitigation. This volume, with its extensive case studies and comparative analysis, will help scholars, students, journalists, and activists around the world to understand the political realities in these key countries." – Graeme Lang, Department of Asian and International Studies, City University of Hong Kong, China
Rating by Amazon customers: ? (0 ratings)
ISBN 978-0230280403
SJ eBook
Choke Hold:
The Fossil Fuel Industry's Fight Against Climate Policy, Science and Clean Energy
Neela Banerjee, David Hasemyer, Marianne Lavelle, Robert McClure, Brad Wieners, & Clark Hoyt
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (March 22, 2018)
No Review
"In a yearlong investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News chronicle the fossil fuel industry's fight to protect its central role in providing America's energy, and what happens to ordinary Americans who find themselves in its way: a rancher who lost his freshwater to the mines of big coal companies, a single father who let fracking rigs on his property and now can no longer drink his well water, a farmer whose peach crop is failing in rising temperatures as her congressman denies global warming exists, a miner with black lung disease who had to fight for 14 years to get the benefits he was owed under law. Each chapter is a case study of how the industry marshals its inordinate wealth and influence to stop action on climate change, block stronger environmental and health regulations and stymie the progress of alternative energy—its litigation fights, campaign contributions, persistent misinformation tax breaks and subsidies, and more. Together, these stories are an examination of the tight grip the industry holds over American society, in ways still invisible to many people."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.2 (3 ratings)
ISBN 978-1983710988
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The Domestic Politics of Global Climate Change:
Key Actors in International Climate Cooperation
Guri Bang, Arild Underdal, & Steinar Andresen (Authors, Editors)
Edward Elgar Pub (November, 2015)
No Review
"Why are some countries more willing and able than others to engage in climate change mitigation? The Domestic Politics of Global Climate Change compiles insights from experts in comparative politics and international relations to describe and explain climate policy trajectories of seven key actors: Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States."
Rating by Amazon customers: ? (0 ratings)
ISBN 978-1784714925
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A Global Green New Deal:
Rethinking the Economic Recovery
Edward B. Barbier
Cambridge University Press (June, 2010)
No Review
"Meeting the short run challenges of reviving the worldwide economy need not mean sacrificing long run economic and environmental sustainability. A Global Green New Deal (GGND) is an economic policy strategy for ensuring a more economically and environmentally sustainable world economic recovery. Reviving growth and creating jobs should be essential objectives. But policies should also aim to reduce carbon dependency, protect ecosystems and water resources, and alleviate poverty. Otherwise, economic recovery today will do little to avoid future economic and environmental crises. Part One argues why a GGND strategy is essential to the sustainability of the global economy. Part Two provides an overview of the key national policies whilst Part Three focuses on the global actions necessary to allow national policies to work. Part Four summarizes the main recommendations for national and international action, and discusses the wider implications for restructuring the world economy towards "greener" development."
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (2 ratings)
ISBN 978-9814355292
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Tipping Point for Planet Earth:
How Close Are We To the Edge?
Anthony D. Barnosky & Elizabeth A. Hadly
New York: Thomas Dunne Books, April 2016
"This husband-and-wife team of scientists lay out the litany of likely problems climate change is bringing: a grim but hopeful account, and a must-read.
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (22 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-250-05115-8
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Our Biggest Experiment:
An Epic History of the Climate Crisis
Alice Bell
Counterpoint (September 21, 2021)
No Review
"Our understanding of the Earth's fluctuating environment is an extraordinary story of human perception and scientific endeavor. It also began much earlier than we might think. In Our Biggest Experiment, Alice Bell takes us back to climate change science's earliest steps in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through the point when concern started to rise in the 1950s and right up to today, where the "debate" is over and the world is finally starting to face up to the reality that things are going to get a lot hotter, a lot drier (in some places), and a lot wetter (in others), with catastrophic consequences for most of Earth's biomes.
"Our Biggest Experiment recounts how the world became addicted to fossil fuels, how we discovered that electricity could be a savior, and how renewable energy is far from a twentieth-century discovery. Bell cuts through complicated jargon and jumbles of numbers to show how we're getting to grips with what is now the defining issue of our time. The message she relays is ultimately hopeful; harnessing the ingenuity and intelligence that has driven the history of climate change research can result in a more sustainable and bearable future for humanity.
"Alice Bell is a climate campaigner and writer based in London. She co-runs the climate change charity Possible, working on a range of projects from community tree planting to solar-powered trains. She has a PhD in science communication from Imperial College London and a BSc in the history of science from University College London, and has worked as both an academic and journalist, writing about everything from the radical science movement of the 1970s to plastic recycling in labs."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.2 (55 ratings)
ISBN 978-1640094338
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Reckoning at Eagle Creek
The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland
Jeff Biggers
New York: Nation Books, 2010
Extensive interviews with those involved, and accounts by responsible journalists like Andrew Revkin, enabled Mark Bowen to lay bare the ways in which NASA, evidently on orders from the Bush White House, tried to hush up or downplay the work of James Hansen and other climate scientists.
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.3 (36 ratings)
ISBN 978-0-525-95014-1
SJ3 363.7387
Global Warming and Political Intimidation:
How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists as the Earth Heated Up
Raymond S. Bradley
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, July 2011
Another member of the MBH99 "Hockey Stick" team of researchers describes his experiences with Congress.
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (13 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-55849-868-6
SJ3 577.276 Bradley
Against Doom:
A Climate Insurgency Manual
Jeremy Brecher
PM Press (April 15, 2017)
No Review
"Jeremy Brecher is the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements, including Save the Humans? Common Preservation in Action and his classic labor history Strike!, recently published in a revised fortieth anniversary edition by PM Press. He has been writing about climate protection since 1988, most recently in his book Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival (2015). He holds a PhD from the Union Graduate School and is a cofounder of the Labor Network for Sustainability. In addition to being awarded five regional Emmy Awards for his documentary film work, Jeremy was arrested in the early White House sit-ins against the Keystone XL pipeline."
"While the world's people suffer the apocalyptic torments of floods, fires, droughts, heatwaves, desertification, disease vectors, food shortages, forced migration, ecosystem collapse, extinction, and other effects of uncontrolled climate change, the world's governmental and political leaders continue to accelerate our wild ride to climate doom. Is there any way for the rest of us to put on the brakes?
"Climate insurgency is a strategy for using people power to realize our common interest in protecting the climate. It uses mass, global, nonviolent action to challenge the legitimacy of public and corporate officials who are perpetrating climate destruction.
"A global climate insurgency has already begun. It has the potential to halt and roll back the fossil fuel agenda and the global thrust toward climate destruction.
"Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual tells how to put that strategy into action—and how it can succeed. It is a handbook for halting global warming and restoring our climate—a how-to for climate insurgents."
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.8 (6 ratings)
ISBN 978-1629633855
SJ0
Copout:
How governments have failed the people on climate—An insider's view of Climate Change Conferences, from Paris to Dubai
Nick Breeze
Ad Lib Publishers (June 25, 2024)
No Review
"Nick Breeze has been interviewing climate scientists and related experts since setting out in 2009 with a film crew to interview Professor James Lovelock for a proposed documentary with the working title A Hitchhiker's Guide to Gaia. In 2017, he co-founded the Cambridge Climate Lecture Series (CCLS), which brings world-renowned experts to Trinity College for livestreamed lectures on a range of climate issues. Nick is a wine journalist, and the UK Ambassador for the Wines of Alentejo Sustainability Programme."
Why, after thirty years of international climate negotiations to reduce carbon emissions, has the UN process failed to deliver a survivable outcome? Nick Breeze goes behind the scenes at the UN COPs, from Paris to Dubai, to find out what on Earth is going on.
"Most people tend to turn away, perhaps understandably, from the key existential issue of the day: climate change or, some would say more accurately, climate collapse.
"Nick Breeze tells the engaging, very human story of successive COP conferences over the past decade: it is a tale of imperfection, failure even, but not yet defeat. So far, the UN process has achieved almost the exact opposite of what it first set out to achieve at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.
"Nick shows clearly that it is not Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil nor any other climate protesters who are the extremists; the true extremists are the policymakers who consistently undermine faltering efforts to reduce emissions. Repeatedly claiming to be saving us whilst allowing carbon emissions to continue rising, governments have failed their people on climate.
"Nick shows us how, why and what we can do about it. The public remains largely uninformed about climate change and, for the most part, those who seek to draw attention to the issue are seen as 'crazy'. There remains a terrifying gap between scientific reality and political action.
"Packed with his own experiences and insights from expert interviewees, this page-turning account is less about the intricacies of the science and more about the mainstream perception of how we are understanding and responding to the problem."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.8 (6 ratings)
ISBN 978-1802472059
SJ0
Climate Change and American Policy:
Key Documents, 1979-2015
John R Burch Jr (Author & Editor)
Oxford University Press (October, 2011)
No Review
"Climate change has long been a contentious issue, even before its official acknowledgment as a global threat in 1979. Government policies have varied widely, from Barack Obama's dedication to environmentalism to George W. Bush's tacit minimizing of the problem to Republican officials' refusal to acknowledge the scientific evidence supporting anthropogenic climate change. Presented chronologically, this collection of important policy-shaping documents shows how the views of both advocates and deniers of climate change have developed over the past four decades."
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (1 rating)
ISBN 978-1476665276
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The National Environmental Policy Act:
An Agenda for the Future
Lynton Keith Caldwell
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998
No Review
"This book has been written in the belief that the National Environmental Policy Act offers a set of goals that could guide the nation toward an economically and environmentally tolerable, sustainable future." – page ix
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (1 rating)
ISBN 978-0-253-33444-2
SJ7 KF3775.C35 1988
Power in a Warming World:
The New Global Politics of Climate Change and the Remaking of Environmental Inequality
David Ciplet, J. Timmons Roberts, & Mizan R. Khan
The MIT Press (September, 2015)
No Review
"After nearly a quarter century of international negotiations on climate change, we stand at a crossroads. A new set of agreements is likely to fail to prevent the global climate's destabilization. Islands and coastlines face inundation, and widespread drought, flooding, and famine are expected to worsen in the poorest and most vulnerable countries. How did we arrive at an entirely inequitable and scientifically inadequate international response to climate change?
"In Power in a Warming World, David Ciplet, J. Timmons Roberts, and Mizan Khan bring decades of combined experience as negotiators, researchers, and activists to bear on this urgent question. Combining rich empirical description with a political economic view of power relations, they document the struggles of states and social groups most vulnerable to a changing climate and describe the emergence of new political coalitions that take climate politics beyond a simple North-South divide. They offer six future scenarios in which power relations continue to shift as the world warms. A focus on incremental market-based reform, they argue, has proven insufficient for challenging the enduring power of fossil fuel interests, and will continue to be inadequate without a bolder, more inclusive and aggressive response."
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.7 (8 ratings)
ISBN 978-0262527941
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The Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal:
The Political Economy of Saving the Planet
Noam Chomsky, Robert Pollin, & C.J. Polychroniou (Contributor)
Verso (August 18, 2020)
No Review
"The environmental crisis under way is unique in human history. It is a true existential crisis. Those alive today will decide the fate of humanity. Meanwhile, the leaders of the most powerful state in human history are dedicating themselves with passion to destroying the prospects for organized human life. At the same time, there is a solution at hand, which is the Green New Deal. Putting meat on the bones of the Green New Deal starts with a single simple idea: we have to absolutely stop burning fossil fuels to produce energy within the next 30 years at most; and we have to do this in a way that also supports rising living standards and expanding opportunities for working people and the poor throughout the world. This version of a Green New Deal program is, in fact, entirely realistic in terms of its purely economic and technical features. The real question is whether it is politically feasible. Chomsky and Pollin examine how we can build the political force to make a global Green New Deal a reality."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (358 ratings)
ISBN 978-1788739856
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Agile Energy Systems:
Global Lessons from the California Energy Crisis
Woodrow W. Clark III & Ted Bradshaw
Elsevier Science (December, 2004)
No Review
"Due to the recent catastrophic energy system failures in California along with those in the North-Eastern US and Southern Canada, London, and Italy, the time has come to proclaim the failure of deregulation, privatization or liberalization and propose a new energy system. Agile Energy Systems shows in the first section, how five precipitating forces led to the deregulation debacle in California: (1) major technological changes and commercialization, (2) regulatory needs mismatched to societal adjustments, (3) inadequate and flawed economic models, (4) lack of vision, goals, and planning leading to energy failures, and (5) failure and lack of economic regional development.
"The second half of the book examines how 'civic market', new economic models, and planning for a sustainable economic environment counteracted these five forces to create an "agile energy system". This system is based on renewable energy generation, hybrid or combined and distributed generation technologies. Such an agile system can be a new paradigm for both energy efficiency and reliability for any region or country, in contrast to the brittle centralized energy grid systems created by deregulation. Furthermore, the book overviews how the future of energy systems rests in the emerging 'clean' hydrogen economy."
Rating by Amazon customers: ? (0 ratings)
ISBN 978-0080444482
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Petro-Aggression:
When Oil Causes War
Jeff D. Colgan
Cambridge University Press (March 25, 2013)
No Review
"Jeff Colgan is an Assistant Professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC, where his research focuses on international security and global energy politics. He has published work in several journals, including International Organization, the Journal of Peace Research, the Review of International Organizations and Energy Policy, and his article on petro-aggression in International Organization won the Robert O. Keohane award for the best article published by an untenured scholar. Dr Colgan has previously worked with the World Bank, McKinsey and Company, and The Brattle Group."
"Oil is the world's single most important commodity and its political effects are pervasive. Jeff Colgan extends the idea of the resource curse into the realm of international relations, exploring how countries form their foreign policy preferences and intentions. Why are some but not all oil-exporting 'petrostates' aggressive? To answer this question, a theory of aggressive foreign policy preferences is developed and then tested, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Petro-Aggression shows that oil creates incentives that increase a petrostate's aggression, but also incentives for the opposite. The net effect depends critically on its domestic politics, especially the preferences of its leader. Revolutionary leaders are especially significant. Using case studies including Iraq, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, this book offers new insight into why oil politics has a central role in global peace and conflict."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.9 (5 ratings)
ISBN 978-1107029675
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Private Empire:
ExxonMobil and American Power
Steve Coll
Allen Lane (July, 2012)
No Review
"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of Ghost Wars and The Achilles Trap, an extraordinary exposé of Big Oil. Includes a profile of current Secretary of State and former chairman and chief executive of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson.
"In this, the first hard-hitting examination of ExxonMobil—the largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States—Steve Coll reveals the true extent of its power. Private Empire pulls back the curtain, tracking the corporation's recent history and its central role on the world stage, beginning with the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989 and leading to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The action spans the globe—featuring kidnapping cases, civil wars, and high-stakes struggles at the Kremlin—and the narrative is driven by larger-than-life characters, including corporate legend Lee 'Iron Ass' Raymond, ExxonMobil's chief executive until 2005, and current chairman and chief executive Rex Tillerson, President-elect Donald Trump's nomination for Secretary of State. A penetrating, news-breaking study, Private Empire is a defining portrait of Big Oil in American politics and foreign policy."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (809 ratings)
ISBN 978-1846146596
SJ6 HD9569.E95 C65 2012
Green Planet Blues:
Critical Perspectives on Global Environmental Politics (5th Ed.)
Ken Conca & Geoffrey D Dabelko
Westview Press (July, 2014)
No Review
"Revised and updated throughout, this unique anthology examines global environmental politics from a range of perspectives (contemporary and classic, activist and scholarly) and reflects voices of the powerless and powerful. Paradigms of sustainability, environmental security, and ecological justice illustrate the many ways environmental problems and their solutions are framed in contemporary international debates about climate, water, forests, toxics, energy, food, biodiversity, and other environmental challenges of the twenty-first century."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.3 (7 ratings)
ISBN 978-0813349527
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The Green New Deal and Beyond:
Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can
Stan Cox
Noam Chomsky (Foreword)
City Lights Publishers (May 5, 2020)
No Review
"The prospect of a Green New Deal is providing millions of people with a sense of hope, but scientists warn there is little time left to take the actions needed. We are at a critical point, and while the Green New Deal will be a step in the right direction, we need to do more—right now—to avoid catastrophe. In The Green New Deal and Beyond, author and plant scientist Stan Cox explains why we must abolish the use of fossil fuels as soon as possible, and how it can be done. He addresses a host of glaring issues not mentioned in the GND and guides us through visionary, achievable ideas for working toward a solution to the deepening crisis. It's up to each of us, Cox writes, to play key roles in catalyzing the necessary transformation."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (16 ratings)
ISBN 978-0872868069
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Crime, Violence, and Global Warming
John P. Crank & Linda S. Jacoby
Anderson (September, 2014)
No Review
"Crime, Violence, and Global Warming introduces the many connections between climate change and criminal activity. Conflict over natural resources can escalate to state and non-state actors, resulting in wars, asymmetrical warfare, and terrorism. Crank and Jacoby apply criminological theory to each aspect of this complicated web, helping readers to evaluate conflicting claims about global warming and to analyze evidence of the current and potential impact of climate change on conflict and crime.
Beginning with an overview of the science of global warming, the authors move on to the links between climate change, scarce resources, and crime. Their approach takes in the full scope of causes and consequences, present and future, in the United States and throughout the world. The book concludes by looking ahead at the problem of forecasting future security implications if global warming continues or accelerates. This fresh approach to the criminology of climate change challenges readers to examine all sides of this controversial question and to formulate their own analysis of our planet's future."
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (1 rating)
ISBN 978-0323265096
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Grassroots Rising:
A Call to Action on Climate, Farming, Food, and a Green New Deal
Ronnie Cummins
Chelsea Green Publishing (February 11, 2020)
No Review
"Grassroots Rising is a passionate call to action for the global body politic, providing practical solutions for how to survive—and thrive—in catastrophic times. Author Ronnie Cummins aims to educate and inspire citizens worldwide to organize and become active participants in preventing ecological collapse. This book offers a blueprint for building and supercharging a grassroots Regeneration Movement based on consumer activism, farmer innovation, political change, and regenerative finance—embodied most recently by the proposed Green New Deal in the US. Cummins asserts that the solution lies right beneath our feet and at the end of our forks through the transformation of our broken food system. Using regenerative agriculture practices that restore our agricultural and grazing lands, we can sequester massive amounts of carbon in the soil. Coupled with an aggressive transition toward renewables, he argues that we have the power to not only mitigate and slow down climate change, but actually reverse global warming.
"In synergy with the Sunrise Movement and the growing support of a Green New Deal, Grassroots Rising will impact millions of conscious consumers, farmers, and the general public during the crucial 2020 election year and beyond. This book shows that a properly organized and executed Regeneration Revolution can indeed offer realistic climate solutions while also meeting our everyday needs. If you're wondering what you can do to help address the global climate crisis, joining the Regeneration Revolution might be the best first step."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.0 (47 ratings)
ISBN 978-1603589758
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The Age of Global Warming:
A History (reprint edition)
Rupert Darwall
Interlink Pub Group (April, 2014)
No Review
"Rio launched rounds of climate change meetings and summits, with developing nations refusing to countenance any agreement restraining their greenhouse gas emissions — their blanket exemption from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol leading to its rejection by the United States that year, and again twelve years later in Copenhagen. This therefore marked not just the collapse of the climate change negotiations, but something larger — an unprecedented humiliation for the West at the hands of the rising powers of the East." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (127 ratings)
ISBN 978-0704373396
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Green Tyranny:
Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex
Rupert Darwall
Encounter Books (October 3, 2017)
No Review
"Acid rain swept all before it. America held out for as long as Ronald Reagan was in the White House, but capitulated under his successor. Like global warming, acid rain had the vocal support of the scientific establishment, but the consensus science collapsed just as Congress was passing acid rain cap-and-trade legislation. Rather than tell legislators and the nation the truth, the EPA attacked a lead scientist and suppressed the federal report showing that the scientific case for action on curbing power station emissions was baseless." – by the author?
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (226 ratings)
ISBN 978-1594039355
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Will Big Business Destroy Our Planet?
Peter Dauvergne
Polity (June 6, 2018)
No Review
"Walmart. Coca-Cola. BP. Toyota. The world economy runs on the profits of transnational corporations. Politicians need their backing. Non-profit organizations rely on their philanthropy. People look to their brands for meaning. And their power continues to rise.
Can these companies, as so many are now hoping, provide the solutions to end the mounting global environmental crisis? Absolutely, the CEOs of big business are telling us: the commitment to corporate social responsibility will ensure it happens voluntarily.
Peter Dauvergne challenges this claim, arguing instead that corporations are still doing far more to destroy than protect our planet. Trusting big business to lead sustainability is, he cautions, unwise — perhaps even catastrophic. Planetary sustainability will require reining in the power of big business, starting now."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.2 (24 ratings)
ISBN: 978-1509524006
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The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism:
The Left's Plan to Frighten Your Kids, Drive Up Energy Costs, and Hike Your Taxes!
James Delingpole
Regnery Publishing (November 2013)
No Review
"Written in A to Z format and printed on guaranteed un-recycled paper made from the pulp of a thousand rare hardwood trees using nothing but the purest cruel-harvested baby squid ink, The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism is your pocket guide to everything that's wrong, funny, and downright crazy about the green movement." – author
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (193 ratings)
ISBN 978-1621571612
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Watermelons:
The Green Movement's True Colors
James Delingpole
Publius Books (July 2011)
No Review
"Delingpole is the bestselling British writer who helped expose the Climategate scandal in his Daily Telegraph blog. He also writes a column for The Spectator. His other books include 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy (Regnery, 2010) and Welcome to Obamaland (Regnery, 2009)."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (124 ratings)
ISBN 978-0983347408
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Population Bombed!:
Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Change
Pierre Desrochers & Joanna Szurkmak
GWPF Books (September 27, 2018)
No Review
"Many scholars, writers, activists and policy-makers have linked growth in population to environmental degradation, especially catastrophic climate change. In the last few years, however, a number of writers and academics have documented significant improvements in human wellbeing, pointing to longer lifespans, improved health, abundant resources and a general improvement in the environment. Population Bombed! addresses the main shortcomings of arguments advanced by both population control advocates and optimistic writers, explaining how economic prosperity and a cleaner environment are the direct results of both population growth and humanity's increased use of fossil fuels and showing how campaigns against the spread of fossil fuels will cause misery in the developing world, fuel poverty in advanced economies, and will inevitably wreak havoc on the natural world."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (37 ratings)
ISBN 978-0993119033
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Climate Extremes and Society
Henry F. Diaz & Richard J. Murnane (Editors)
Cambridge University Press (June, 2008)
No Review
"Climate Extremes and Society focuses on the recent and potential future consequences of weather and climate extremes for different socioeconomic sectors. The book also examines actions that may enable society to better respond to climate variability." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.1 (2 ratings)
ISBN 978-0521870283
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Alligators in the Attic and How To Avoid Them:
Science, Economics and the Challenge of Catastrophic Climate Change
Peter Dorman
Cambridge University Press; New edition (July 28, 2022)
No Review
"Peter Dorman is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington."
"Climate change is a matter of extreme urgency. Integrating science and economics, this book demonstrates the need for measures to put a strict lid on cumulative carbon emissions and shows how to implement them. Using the carbon budget framework, it reveals the shortcomings of current policies and the debates around them, such as the popular enthusiasm for individual solutions and the fruitless search for 'optimal' regulation by economists and other specialists. On the political front, it explains why business opposition to the policies we need goes well beyond the fossil fuel industry, requiring a more radical rebalancing of power. This wide-ranging study goes against the most prevalent approaches in mainstream economics, which argue that we can tackle climate change while causing minimal disruption to the global economy. The author argues that this view is not only impossible, but also dangerously complacent.
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (1 rating)
ISBN 978-1316516270
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Climate Wars:
The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats
Gwynne Dyer
Oneworld Publications (June, 2010)
"Gwynne Dyer is one of the few who are both courageous enough to tell the unvarnished truth, and have the background to understand, not misrepresent the inputs. This book does a superb job of detailing the emerging realities of Climate/Energy. These realities are not pretty." – Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist at NASA
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (99 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-85168-718-3
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Climate Change and Order:
The End of Prosperity and Democracy
Beth Edmondson & Stuart Levy
Palgrave Macmillan (October, 2013)
No Review
"Beth Edmondson and Stuart Levy examine why it is so difficult for the international community to respond to global climate change. In doing so, they analyse and explain some of the strategies that might ultimately provide the foundations for appropriate responses."
Rating by Amazon customers: ? (0 ratings)
ISBN 978-1137351241
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A Century of War:
Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order
F. William Engdahl
Progressive Press; New - Revised - Unabridged edition (January 1, 2012)
No Review
"F. William Engdahl writes on issues of oil, finance, economics, and geopolitics for more than thirty years. His books have been translated into more than nine languages, and the present book is regarded as a classic on the subject of contemporary geopolitics and power politics. He has contributed regularly to numerous international publications including Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun, China Business News, Asia Inc., Grant's Interest Rate Observer, European Banker, Eurasia and other publications. His most recent books are entitled Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century and Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. He lives in Germany and is active as a consulting political risk economist."
"This is a story about power, power over entire nations and continents. The story describes the vehicle to that unparalleled power over nations, oil, and the vital role it has played in peace as well as wars in the past century. Henry Kissinger, the former American Secretary of State put it succinctly during the first oil shock of the early 1970's. He declared, 'Control the oil and you control entire nations.' A thin red line runs through the history of the world since Fashoda, and that is covered in oil and blood. This book is not for the faint of heart, but it is meant to provoke reflection and discussion among those who can see beyond the daily media manipulation of reality that is called news."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (215 ratings)
ISBN 978-1615774920
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The Future We Choose:
Surviving the Climate Crisis
Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac
Knopf (February 25, 2020)
No Review
"Climate change: it is arguably the most urgent and consequential issue humankind has ever faced. How we address it in the next thirty years will determine the kind of world we will live in and will bequeath to our children and to theirs.
"In The Future We Choose, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac—who led negotiations for the United Nations during the historic Paris Agreement of 2015—have written a cautionary but optimistic book about the world's changing climate and the fate of humanity. The authors outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a carbon neutral, regenerative world. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can and must do to fend off disaster."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (1,183 ratings)
ISBN 978-0525658351
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A Good Life on a Finite Earth:
The Political Economy of Green Growth
Daniel J. Fiorino
Oxford University Press (January 2, 2018)
No Review
"The potential conflict among economic and ecological goals has formed the central fault line of environmental politics in the United States and most other countries since the 1970s. The accepted view is that efforts to protect the environment will detract from economic growth, jobs, and global competitiveness. Conversely, much advocacy on behalf of the environment focuses on the need to control growth and avoid its more damaging effects. This offers a stark choice between prosperity and growth, on the one hand, and ecological degradation on the other. Stopping or reversing growth in most countries is unrealistic, economically risky, politically difficult, and is likely to harm the very groups that should be protected. At the same time, a strategy of unguided 'growth above all' would cause ecological catastrophe.
"Over the last decade, the concept of green growth — the idea that the right mix of policies, investments, and technologies will lead to beneficial growth within ecological limits — has become central to global and national debates and policy due to the financial crisis and climate change. As Daniel J. Fiorino argues, in order for green growth to occur, ecological goals must be incorporated into the structure of the economic and political systems. In this book, he looks at green growth, a vast topic that has heretofore not been systematically covered in the literature on environmental policy and politics. Fiorino looks at its role in global, national, and local policy making; its relationship to sustainable development; controversies surrounding it (both from the left and right); its potential role in ameliorating inequality; and the policy strategies that are linked with it. The book also examines the political feasibility of green growth as a policy framework. While he focuses on the United States, Fiorino will draw comparisons to green growth policy in other countries, including Germany, China, and Brazil."
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.8 (7 ratings)
ISBN 978-0190605803
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Saving Ourselves:
From Climate Shocks to Climate Action
Dana R. Fisher
Columbia University Press (February 13, 2024)
Part of: Society and the Environment (3 books)
No Review
"Dana R. Fisher is the director of the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity and a professor in the School of International Service at American University. Her books include Activism Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America (2006) and American Resistance: From the Women’s March to the Blue Wave (Columbia, 2019).
"We've known for decades that climate change is an existential crisis. For just as long, we've seen the complete failure of our institutions to rise to the challenge. Governments have struggled to meet even modest goals. Fossil fuel interests maintain a stranglehold on political and economic power. Even though we have seen growing concern from everyday people, civil society has succeeded only in pressuring decision makers to adopt watered-down policies. All the while, the climate crisis worsens. Is there any hope of achieving the systemic change we need?
"Dana R. Fisher argues that there is a realistic path forward for climate action—but only through mass mobilization that responds to the growing severity and frequency of disastrous events. She assesses the current state of affairs and shows why public policy and private-sector efforts have been ineffective. Spurred by this lack of progress, climate activism has become increasingly confrontational. Fisher examines the radical flank of the climate movement: its emergence and growth, its use of direct action, and how it might evolve as the climate crisis worsens. She considers when and how activism is most successful, identifying the importance of creating community, capitalizing on shocking moments, and cultivating resilience. Clear-eyed yet optimistic, Saving Ourselves offers timely insights on how social movements can take power back from deeply entrenched interests and open windows of opportunity for transformative climate action."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (12 ratings)
ISBN 978-0231209304
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Titans of the Climate:
Explaining Policy Process in the United States and China
Kelly Sims Gallagher & Xiaowei Xuan
John P. Holdren (Foreword)
Junkuo Zhang (Foreword)
The MIT Press (February 5, 2019)
No Review
"The United States and China together account for a disproportionate 45 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. In 2014, then-President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced complementary efforts to limit emissions, paving the way for the Paris Agreement. And yet, with President Trump's planned withdrawal from the Paris accords and Xi's consolidation of power—as well as mutual mistrust fueled by misunderstanding—the climate future is uncertain. In Titans of the Climate, Kelly Sims Gallagher and Xiaowei Xuan examine how the planet's two largest greenhouse gas emitters develop and implement climate policy. Through dispassionate analysis, the authors aim to help readers understand the challenges, constraints, and opportunities in each country.
Gallagher, a former U.S. climate policymaker—and Xuan, a member of a Chinese policy think tank, describe the specific drivers—political, economic, and social—of climate policies in both countries and map the differences between policy outcomes. They characterize the U.S. approach as 'deliberative incrementalism'; the Chinese, meanwhile, engage in 'strategic pragmatism.' Comparing the policy processes of the two countries, Gallagher and Xuan make the case that if each country understands more about the other's goals and constraints, climate policy cooperation is more likely to succeed."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.7 (4 ratings)
ISBN 978-0262038751
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Boiling Point
How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis—and What We Can Do To Avert Disaster
Ross Gelbspan
New York: Basic Books, July 2004
No Review
"In Boiling Point, Ross Gelbspan reveals exactly how the fossil fuel industry is directing the Bush administration's energy and climate policies. Even more surprisingly, Gelbspan points a finger at both the media and environmental activists for unwittingly worsening the crisis." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.2 (30 ratings)
ISBN 978-0465027613
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Humanity's Moment:
A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope
Joëlle Gergis
Island Press (March 9, 2023)
No Review
"Dr. Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer at the Australian National University. She served as a lead author for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report and is the author of Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia."
"When climate scientist Joëlle Gergis set to work on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, the research she encountered kept her up at night. Through countless hours spent with the world's top scientists to piece together the latest global assessment of climate change, she realized that the impacts were occurring faster than anyone had predicted.
"In Humanity's Moment, Joëlle takes us through the science in the IPCC report with unflinching honesty, explaining what it means for our future, while sharing her personal reflections on bearing witness to the heartbreak of the climate emergency unfolding in real time. But this is not a lament for a lost world. It is an inspiring reminder that human history is an endless tug-of-war for social justice. We are each a part of an eternal evolutionary force that can transform our world.
"Joëlle shows us that the solutions we need to live sustainably already exist—we just need the social movement and political will to create a better world. Humanity's Moment is a climate scientist's guide to rekindling hope, and a call to action to restore our relationship with ourselves, each other, and our planet."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (36 ratings)
ISBN 978-1642832846
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The Politics of Climate Change (2nd ed.)
Anthony Giddens
Polity (October, 2011)
No Review
"Anthony Giddens is the former director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is now a member of the House of Lords. His many books include The Third Way and Europe in the Global Age."
"Since it first appeared, this book has achieved a classic status. Reprinted many times since its publication, it remains the only work that looks in detail at the political issues posed by global warming. This new edition has been thoroughly updated and provides a state-of-the-art discussion of the most formidable challenge humanity faces this century.
"If climate change goes unchecked, the consequences are likely to be catastrophic for human life on earth. Yet for most people and for many policy-makers too, it tends to be a back-of-the-mind issue. We recognize its importance and even its urgency, but for the most part it is swamped by more immediate concerns.
"Political action and intervention on local, national and international levels are going to have a decisive effect on whether or not we can limit global warming as well as how we adapt to that already occurring. However, at the moment, argues Giddens, we do not have a systematic politics of climate change. Politics-as-usual won't allow us to deal with the problems we face, while the recipes of the main challenger to orthodox politics, the green movement, are flawed at source. Giddens introduces a range of new concepts and proposals to fill in the gap, and examines in depth the connections between climate change and energy security."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.1 (46 ratings)
ISBN 978-0745655154
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The Great Disruption:
Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World
Paul Gilding
Bloomsbury Press (March, 2011)
No Review
"The Great Disruption offers a stark and unflinching look at the challenge humanity faces—yet also a deeply optimistic message. The coming decades will see loss, suffering, and conflict as our planetary overdraft is paid; however, they will also bring out the best humanity can offer: compassion, innovation, resilience, and adaptability. Gilding tells us how to fight—and win—what he calls The One Degree War to prevent catastrophic warming of the earth, and how to start today."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (150 ratings)
ISBN 978-1608192236
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Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less:
A Handbook for Slashing Gas Prices and Solving Our Energy Crisis
Newt Gingrich & Vince Haley
Regnery Publishing (September, 2008)
No Review
"UNABRIDGED VERSION--INCLUDES BUMPER STICKER"
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.0 (28 ratings)
ISBN 978-1596985766
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The Three Ages of Water:
Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future
Peter Gleick
PublicAffairs (June 13, 2023)
No Review
"Peter Gleick is perhaps the world's most widely known and cited water expert. Educated at Yale and Berkeley, he went on to cofound the Pacific Institute, the leading independent research group devoted to reimagining water for a changing world. He is a scientist by training, winner of a MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' award, and an elected member of both the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018 he was awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. He lives in Berkeley, California."
"A revelatory account of how water has shaped the course of human life and history, and a positive vision of what the future can hold—if we act now
"From the very creation of the planet billions of years ago to the present day, water has always been central to existence on Earth. And since long before the legendary Great Flood, it has been a defining force in the story of humanity.
"In The Three Ages of Water, Peter Gleick guides us through the long, fraught history of our relationship to this precious resource. Water has shaped civilizations and empires, and driven centuries of advances in science and technology—from agriculture to aqueducts, steam power to space exploration—and progress in health and medicine.
"But the achievements that have propelled humanity forward also brought consequences, including unsustainable water use, ecological destruction, and global climate change, that now threaten to send us into a new dark age. We must change our ways, and quickly, to usher in a new age of water for the benefit of everyone. Drawing from the lessons of our past, Gleick charts a visionary path toward a sustainable future for water and the planet."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (38 ratings)
ISBN 978-1541702271
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The Green Reich:
Global Warming To the Green Tyranny
Drieu Godefridi
Texquis (October 31, 2019)
No Review
"THE GREEN REICH — GLOBAL WARMING TO THE GREEN TYRANNY. Ban everything we can, eco-tax the rest: this could be the motto of the environmentalists in politics. If human CO2 is the problem, then Man must be restrained, controlled, suppressed in every one of his CO2-emitting activities: that is to say, in the totality of his actions. Researching environmentalism from the root of its anti-humanist ethic to the staggering heights of its actual demands — banning cars, aircraft, meat, nuclear energy, rural life, the market economy, modern agriculture, in short, post-Industrial-Revolution modernity — Drieu Godefridi shows that environmentalism defines a more radical ideology in its liberticidal, anti-economic and ultimately humanicidal claims than any totalitarian ideology yet seen. "Dividing humanity by a factor of ten" is the environmentalist ideal. "Godefridi says we have good reason to be alarmed. Not by climate change, but by the endless, hazardous-to-humans measures that activists propose in response. We need to read Godefridi's book. And re-read it. Before it's too late." -Donna Laframboise "Human survival is not the environmentalists' goal. They do not care about our flourishing, as Godefridi convincingly argues." -Jaana Woiceshyn "This is a book that everyone must read. It is brief, to the point — and utterly frightening, for it lays out the end-game of environmentalism, which will affect us all, if we blindly keep empowering it, as we are now so gleefully doing." -Dr. Nirmal Dass, "The Postil Magazine". PhD (Sorbonne), Drieu Godefridi has authored books on gender, the IPCC and environmentalism."."
I've copied the blurb from Amazon verbatim except for punctuation changes. From that, and customer comments, it appears Godefridi cherry-picked his sources.
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.2 (222 ratings)
ISBN 978-2930650241
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Long Problems:
Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing across Time
Thomas Hale
Princeton University Press (April 2, 2024)
No Review
"Thomas Hale is professor of global public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. His previous books include Beyond Gridlock, Between Interests and Law: The Politics of Transnational Commercial Disputes, Transnational Climate Change Governance, and Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most."
"Political strategies for tackling climate change and other 'long problems' that span generations.
"Climate change and its consequences unfold over many generations. Past emissions affect our climate today, just as our actions shape the climate of tomorrow, while the effects of global warming will last thousands of years. Yet the priorities of the present dominate our climate policy and the politics surrounding it. Even the social science that attempts to frame the problem does not theorize time effectively. In this pathbreaking book, Thomas Hale examines the politics of climate change and other 'long problems.' He shows why we find it hard to act before a problem's effects are felt, why our future interests carry little weight in current debates, and why our institutions struggle to balance durability and adaptability. With long-term goals in mind, he outlines strategies for tilting the politics and policies of climate change toward better outcomes.
"Globalization 'widened' political problems across national boundaries and changed our understanding of politics and governance. Hale argues that we must make a similar shift to understand the 'lengthening' of problems across time. He describes tools and strategies that can, under certain conditions, allow policymakers to anticipate future needs and risks, make interventions that get ahead of problems, shift time horizons, adapt to changing circumstances, and set forward-looking goals that endure. As the climate changes, politics must, too. Efforts to solve long-term problems—not only climate change but other issues as well, including technology governance and demographic shifts—can also be a catalyst for a broader institutional transformation oriented toward the long term. With Long Problems, Hale offers an essential guide to governing across time."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.0 (2 ratings)
ISBN 978-0691238128
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Common Sense for the 21st Century:
Only Nonviolent Rebellion Can Now Stop Climate Breakdown and Social Collapse
Roger Hallam
Chelsea Green Publishing (November 19, 2019)
No Review
"What can we all do to avert catastrophe and avoid extinction? Roger Hallam has answers. In Common Sense for the 21st Century, Roger Hallam, cofounder of Extinction Rebellion, outlines how movements around the world need to come together now to start doing what works: engaging in mass civil disobedience to make real change happen. The book gives people the tools to understand not only why mass disruption, mass arrests, and mass sacrifice are necessary but also details how to carry out acts of civil disobedience effectively, respectfully and nonviolently. It bypasses contemporary political theory, and instead is inspired by Thomas Paine, the pragmatic 18th-century revolutionary whose pamphlet Common Sense sparked the American Revolution. Common Sense for the 21st Century urges us to confront the truth about climate change and argues forcefully that only a revolution of society and the state, similar to the turn that Paine urged the Americans to take into the political unknown, can save us now."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (77 ratings)
ISBN 978-1645020004
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What's Wrong with Climate Politics and How to Fix It
Paul G. Harris
Polity (June, 2013)
No Review
"The book begins by diagnosing what's most wrong with climate politics, including the anachronistic international system, which encourages nations to fight for their narrowly perceived interests and makes major cuts in greenhouse pollution extraordinarily difficult; the deadlock between the United States and China, which together produce over one-third of global greenhouse gas pollution but do little more than demand that the other act first; and affluent lifestyles and overconsumption, which are spreading rapidly from industrialized nations to the developing world." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.5 (10 ratings)
ISBN 978-0745652504
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Hubris:
The Troubling Science, Economics, and Politics of Climate Change
Michael Hart
Compleat Desktops (October 2015)
No Review
"This book explores problems and issues that have emerged in national and international discussion of policies to address climate change. It concludes that every solution put forward by the UN and activists poses more problems than might ever emerge from the marginal human impact on natural climate change. Rather than mitigation, governments should focus on adaptation. As is, climate change discussions have become captive of a utopian agenda that is using climate change as a stalking horse to drive alarm in the hope that it will convince governments to act." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (94 ratings)
ISBN 978-0994903808
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Designing Climate Solutions:
A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy
Hal Harvey, Robbie Orvis & Jeffrey Rissman
Island Press (November 1, 2018)
No Review
"We don't need to wait for new technologies or strategies to create a low carbon future—and we can't afford to. Designing Climate Solutions gives professionals the tools they need to select, design, and implement the policies that can put us on the path to a livable climate future."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (64 ratings)
ISBN 978-1610919562
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Climate Governance in the Developing World
David Held, Charles Roger, & Eva-Maria Nag
Polity (August, 2013)
No Review
"Since 2009, a diverse group of developing states that includes China, Brazil, Ethiopia and Costa Rica has been advancing unprecedented pledges to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, offering new, unexpected signs of climate leadership. Some scholars have gone so far as to argue that these targets are now even more ambitious than those put forward by their wealthier counterparts. But what really lies behind these new pledges? What actions are being taken to meet them? And what stumbling blocks lie in the way of their realization?
"In this book, an international group of scholars seeks to address these questions by analyzing the experiences of twelve states from across Asia, the Americas and Africa. The authors map the evolution of climate policies in each country and examine the complex array of actors, interests, institutions and ideas that has shaped their approaches. Offering the most comprehensive analysis thus far of the unique challenges that developing countries face in the domain of climate change, Climate Governance in the Developing World reveals the political, economic and environmental realities that underpin the pledges made by developing states, and which together determine the chances of success and failure."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.0 (2 ratings)
ISBN 978-0745662770
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The Carbon Crunch:
How We're Getting Climate Change Wrong—and How to Fix It
Dieter Helm
Yale University Press, November 2012
No Review
"In this hard-hitting book, Dieter Helm looks at how and why we have failed to tackle the issue of global warming and argues for a new, pragmatic rethinking of energy policy—from transitioning from coal to gas and eventually to electrification of transport, to carbon pricing and a focus on new technologies." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.2 (56 ratings)
ISBN 978-0300186598
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The Carbon Crunch:
How We're Getting Climate Change Wrong—and How to Fix It (2nd ed.)
Dieter Helm
Yale University Press, August 2015
No Review
"In a new edition of his hard-hitting book on climate change, economist Dieter Helm looks at how and why we have failed to tackle the issue of global warming and argues for a new, pragmatic rethinking of energy policy." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (1 rating)
ISBN 978-0300215328
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Climate-change Policy
Dieter Helm (Editor)
Oxford University Press (July, 2005)
No Review
"The threat posed by climate change has not yet been matched by economic policies that can deliver sharp reductions in carbon emissions. The Kyoto Protocol has not received support from the USA, and ratification has been delayed by Russia's reluctance to sign up—both in part because of its costs. Few European countries are on course to meet their own national targets. In consequence, there is a search for a post-Kyoto framework, new institutions and new economic policies to spread the costs and meet them in an economically efficient way. This volume provides an overview of the economics of climate change, the policy options, and the scope for making significant carbon reductions."
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.0 (2 ratings)
ISBN 978-0199281459
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Glacial:
The Inside Story of Climate Politics
Chelsea Henderson
Turner (August 6, 2024)
No Review
"Chelsea Henderson has worked in environmental policy on Capitol Hill for more than 25 years seeking bipartisan solutions to the threats of climate change. She was senior policy advisor for Sen. John Warner (R-VA) during his long-term effort to enact climate change legislation, and she staffed the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee; her tenure spanning the chairmanships of Senators John H. Chafee and Bob Smith. Currently, Chelsea hosts the environmental podcast EcoRight Speaks, and consults on pro-climate solutions for Washington-based advocacy groups. Her op-eds in support of clean energy and robust climate change solutions have been published in The Hill, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and other publications. A cum laude graduate of Boston University's College of Liberal Arts (B.A.) and School of Education (M.Ed.), Chelsea has two adult sons and two perpetually hungry cats. She hails from Maine and lives in the Washington, DC metro area."
"It took nearly sixty years for a meaningful climate change bill to run the political gauntlet from Capitol Hill to the Oval Office. Why?
"From mavericks to party standard-bearers, U.S. Senators, members of the House of Representatives, and presidential candidates have campaigned for four decades espousing their intentions to address the impacts of climate change.
"Glacial: The Inside Story of Climate Politics is the first Inside-the-Beltway account to lay bare the machinations of what went wrong in Washington—how and why our leaders failed to act on climate change as mounting scientific evidence underscored the urgency to do so. Glacial tells a story of behind-the-scenes infighting and power struggles that blocked or derailed federal legislative progress on climate change, even in times of bipartisanship and with polls showing most Americans favored action.
"The good news today is that public opinion is at its highest level of support for climate action, from corporate boardrooms embracing sustainability for business reasons to movements led by passionate younger generations who can't afford to stand mute because it is they who will inherit the worst environmental catastrophes. If the missed opportunities in Washington are instructive, the path to doing so is clear. Our elected officials must use their offices not solely for the power and prestige it bestows upon them personally, but for the public good—and they must do so while there is still time."
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (12 ratings)
ISBN 978-1684429578
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The Air They Breathe:
A Pediatrician on the Frontlines of Climate Change
Debra Hendrickson
Simon & Schuster (July 2, 2024)
No Review
"Debra Hendrickson, MD, is a board-certified pediatrician in Reno, Nevada. She is an associate clinical professor at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, where she lectures on the impact of early childhood experiences (such as poverty and trauma) on long-term health. She has an honors degree in environmental studies from Brown University and was an environmental analyst and planner in New England and Seattle for ten years before attending medical school. Dr. Hendrickson has received many awards for academic achievement and research in both environmental studies and medicine. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, a member of its Council on Environmental Health and Climate Change, and a founding member of Nevada Clinicians for Climate Action. She has three children."
"A timely, revelatory first look into the impact climate change has on children—the greatest moral crisis humanity faces today—by a pediatrician in the fastest warming city in America.
"Wildfires, hurricanes, and heat waves make headlines. But what is happening in Debra Hendrickson's clinic tells another story of this strange and unsettling time. Hendrickson is a pediatrician in Reno, Nevada—the fastest warming city in the United States, where ash falls like snow during summer wildfires. In The Air They Breathe, Dr. Hendrickson recounts patients she's seen who were harmed by worsening smoke, smog, and pollen; two boys in Arizona, stricken by record-setting heat while hiking; children who fled for their lives from Hurricane Harvey and the Tubbs Fire; and a little girl whose life was forever altered by the Zika virus outbreak in 2016.
"The climate crisis is a health crisis, and it is a health crisis, first and foremost, for children. Children's bodies are interwoven with and shaped by their surroundings. As the planet warms and their environment changes, children's health is at risk. The youngest are especially vulnerable because their brain, lungs, and other organs are forming and growing every day, and because their physiology is so different from that of adults. Childhood has always been a risky period of life; throughout history, babies and children have met peril, from polio to famine, from cyclones to war. Yet they have never quite had to face, in quite this way, the potential loss of the future itself.
"The Air They Breathe is not just about the health impacts of global warming, but something more: a soul-stirring reminder of our moral responsibility to our children, and their profound connections to this unique and irreplaceable world."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (8 ratings)
ISBN 978-1501197130
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Hot:
Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth
Mark Hertsgaard
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (January, 2011)
No Review
"For twenty years, Mark Hertsgaard has investigated global warming for outlets including the New Yorker, NPR, Time, Vanity Fair, and The Nation. But the full truth did not hit home until he became a father and, soon thereafter, learned that climate change had already arrived—a century earlier than forecast—with impacts bound to worsen for decades to come. Hertsgaard's daughter Chiara, now five years old, is part of what he has dubbed 'Generation Hot'—the two billion young people worldwide who will spend the rest of their lives coping with mounting climate disruption.
"HOT is a father's cry against climate change, but most of the book focuses on solutions, offering a deeply reported blueprint for how all of us—as parents, communities, companies and countries—can navigate this unavoidable new era. Combining reporting from across the nation and around the world with personal reflections on his daughter's future, Hertsgaard provides 'pictures' of what is expected over the next fifty years: Chicago's climate transformed to resemble Houston's; dwindling water supplies and crop yields at home and abroad; the redesign of New York and other cities against mega-storms and sea-level rise. Above all, he shows who is taking wise, creative precautions. For in the end, HOT is a book about how we'll survive."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (86 ratings)
ISBN 978-0618826124
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A Newer World:
Politics, Money, Technology and What's Really Being Done to Solve the Climate Crisis
William F. Hewitt
William K. Reilly (Fwd.)
Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, December 2012
"Here is a story that has not previously been adequately told: the story of the developments, trends, and visionary people that are, in many ways, mitigating the climate crisis and turning sustainable development into reality, not just a grand concept. In A Newer World, the environmentalist Bill Hewitt explores the advances in business and finance, politics, design, science, and engineering that are transforming the world around us right now, even as the dire climatic consequences of the industrialization of our economies have become ever more starkly apparent." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.7 (3 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-58465-963-1
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Less Is More:
How Degrowth Will Save the World
Jason Hickel
William Heinemann (December 1, 2020)
No Review
"Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, Fulbright Scholar and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is originally from Eswatini (Swaziland) and spent a number of years with migrant workers in South Africa, writing about exploitation and political resistance in the wake of apartheid. He writes regularly for the Guardian, Al Jazeera and Foreign Policy, serves as an advisor for the Green New Deal for Europe and sits on the Lancet Commission for Reparations and Redistributive Justice."
"The world has finally awoken to the reality of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Now we must face up to its primary cause. Capitalism demands perpetual expansion, which is devastating the living world. There is only one solution that will lead to meaningful and immediate change: DEGROWTH. If we want to have a shot at halting the crisis, we need to restore the balance. We need to change how we see nature and our place in it, shifting from a philosophy of domination and extraction to one that's rooted in reciprocity and regeneration. We need to evolve beyond the dogmas of capitalism to a new system that is fit for the twenty-first century. But what does such a society look like? What about jobs? What about health? What about progress? This book tackles these questions and traces a clear pathway to a post-capitalist economy. An economy that's more just, more caring, and more fun. An economy that enables human flourishing while reversing ecological breakdown. An economy that will not only lift us out of our current crisis, but restore our sense of connection to a world that's brimming with life. By taking less, we can become more.
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (836 ratings)
ISBN 978-1785152498
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THE POLITICALLY INCORRECT GUIDE
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change and Environmentalism
Christopher Horner
Washington, DC: Regnery, 2007
A lawyer with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Mr. Horner engages here in an extended rant against certain politicians and environmentalists in general. He views environmentalism as a Communist plot, and accuses environmentalists of hyping global warming threats to cow the populace and crush individual liberty. Also, he gets the science wrong, mostly.
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (414 ratings)
ISBN 978-1596985018
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Behind the Curve:
Science and the Politics of Global Warming
Joshua P. Howe
William Cronon (Foreword)
University of Washington Press (February, 2014)
No Review
"In 1958, Charles David Keeling began measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. His project kicked off a half century of research that has expanded our knowledge of climate change. Despite more than fifty years of research, however, our global society has yet to find real solutions to the problem of global warming. Why?
In Behind the Curve, Joshua Howe attempts to answer this question. He explores the history of global warming from its roots as a scientific curiosity to its place at the center of international environmental politics. The book follows the story of rising CO2—illustrated by the now famous Keeling Curve—through a number of historical contexts, highlighting the relationships among scientists, environmentalists, and politicians as those relationships changed over time."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.2 (6 ratings)
ISBN 978-0295993683
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Making Climate Change History: Documents from Global Warming's Past
Joshua P. Howe (Editor)
Paul S. Sutter (Foreword)
University of Washington Press (April, 2017)
No Review
This collection pulls together key documents from the scientific and political history of climate change, including congressional testimony, scientific papers, newspaper editorials, court cases, and international declarations. Far more than just a compendium of source materials, the book uses these documents as a way to think about history, while at the same time using history as a way to approach the politics of climate change from a new perspective.
Making Climate Change History provides the necessary background to give readers the opportunity to pose critical questions and create plausible answers to help them understand climate change in its historical context; it also illustrates the relevance of history to building effective strategies for dealing with the climatic challenges of the future.
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (1 rating)
ISBN 978-0295741383
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Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists
Peter Huber
New York: Basic Books, December 1999
No Review
"Modern environmentalism, Peter Huber argues, destroys the environment. Captured as it has been by the Soft Green oligarchy of scientists, regulators, and lawyers, modern environmentalism does not conserve forests, oceans, lakes, and streams — it hastens their destruction." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.8 (51 ratings)
ISBN 978-0-465-03112-2
SJ3 363.7 Huber
Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won't Save Us Or the Environment
Michael Huesemann & Joyce Huesemann
New Society Publishers (October, 2011)
No Review
"Techno-Fix questions a primary paradigm of our age: that advanced technology will extricate us from an ever increasing load of social, environmental, and economic ills. Techno-Fix shows why negative unintended consequences of science and technology are inherently unavoidable and unpredictable, why counter-technologies, techno-fixes, and efficiency improvements do not offer lasting solutions, and why modern technology, in the presence of continued economic growth, does not promote sustainability but instead hastens collapse.
"The authors explore the reasons for the uncritical acceptance of new technologies; show that technological optimism is based on ignorance and that increasing consumerism and materialism, which have been facilitated by science and technology, have failed to increase happiness. The common belief that technological change is inevitable is questioned, the myth of the value-neutrality of technology is exposed and the ethics of the technological imperative: "what can be done should be done" is challenged. Techno-Fix asserts that science and technology, as currently practiced, cannot solve the many serious problems we face and that a paradigm shift is needed to reorient science and technology in a more socially responsible and environmentally sustainable direction."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.3 (35 ratings)
ISBN 978-0865717046
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Governing Climate Change:
Polycentricity in Action?
Andrew Jordan, Dave Huitema, Harro van Asselt, & Johanna Forster (Editors)
Cambridge University Press (May 3, 2018)
No Review
"Climate change governance is in a state of enormous flux. New and more dynamic forms of governing are appearing around the international climate regime centred on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). They appear to be emerging spontaneously from the bottom up, producing a more dispersed pattern of governing, which Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom famously described as 'polycentric'. This book brings together contributions from some of the world's foremost experts to provide the first systematic test of the ability of polycentric thinking to explain and enhance societal attempts to govern climate change. It is ideal for researchers in public policy, international relations, environmental science, environmental management, politics, law and public administration."
Rating by Amazon customers: ? (0 ratings)
ISBN 978-1108418126
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The Green New Deal:
Why We Need It And Can't Live Without It — And No, It's Not Socialism!
Larry Jordan
Page Turner Books International, LLC (May 12, 2019)
No Review
"This is not a dry, academic book about the environment. Instead, Larry Jordan offers a timely, well-researched and balanced look at the imperatives of a Green New Deal: what it is, and why we can't live without it. He exposes the rightwing's long history of waging sinister disinformation campaigns to protect corporate profits by attacking as 'socialist' anything that actually helps people. The book reveals overlooked details in the Mueller report about how persons tied to Russian intelligence have influenced Donald Trump's environmental policies. Jordan sets the context for the current debate by exploring the rich, colorful history of our continent since the arrival of Columbus, all the way up to present day, and recounting what some of our Presidents have done on a bipartisan basis to preserve our nation's diverse ecosystem. (Would you believe Richard Nixon ranks as one of our best environmental Presidents and George W. Bush one of the worst?) There are compelling chapters on our vanishing wilderness, saving the forest for the trees and oceans in peril. The latest climate science is presented in convincing and crystal clear fashion. There is groundbreaking reporting on disasters like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, and how the government and big media covered up the true impact on us. The book explains why Trump's border wall would inflict even greater harm than you might imagine. The plight of Central American refugees is tied to climate change that's causing crop failures and a shortage of food in their home countries. There are sensible solutions. Over 400,000 Americans died in WWII, but the World Health organization estimates the number of people killed worldwide from global warming—extreme weather, drought and disease—is at least 150,000 people per year. So isn't this an international emergency too? With a combination of hard-hitting reporting and poetic prose, the author distills the essence of the current debate over a Green New Deal. The book includes scores of photos. Though he is not as well known, Larry Jordan is in a league with historians like John Meecham, Michael Beschloss, Doris Kearns Goodwin and David [sic] Brinkley. Former President Bill Clinton has said of Jordan's writing it is 'very impressive . . . I'm glad I had an opportunity to read it . . . I agree with much of it, as you may guess.' This is an important, substantive look at how Americans can have a brighter future if we adopt healthier, more affordable and efficient green energy alternatives that will also boost wages and combat extreme income disparity."
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.9 (12 ratings)
ISBN 978-0578493602
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Crimes Against Nature:
How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
New York: HarperCollins, August 2004
"In this powerful and far-reaching indictment of George W. Bush's White House, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the country's most prominent environmental attorney, charges that this administration has taken corporate cronyism to such unprecedented heights that it now threatens our health, our national security, and democracy as we know it. In a headlong pursuit of private profit and personal power, Kennedy writes, George Bush and his administration have eviscerated the laws that have protected our nation's air, water, public lands, and wildlife for the past thirty years, enriching the president's political contributors while lowering the quality of life for the rest of us. Kennedy lifts the veil on how the administration has orchestrated these rollbacks almost entirely outside of public scrutiny -- and in tandem with the very industries that our laws are meant to regulate, the country's most notorious polluters. He writes of how it has deceived the public by manipulating and suppressing scientific data, intimidated enforcement officials and other civil servants, and masked its agenda with Orwellian doublespeak. He reports on how the White House doles out lavish subsidies and tax breaks to the energy barons while excusing industry from providing adequate security at the more than 15,000 chemical and nuclear facilities that are prime targets for terrorist attacks. Kennedy reveals an administration whose policies have "squandered our Treasury, entangled us in foreign wars, diminished our international prestige, made us a target for terrorist attacks, and increased our reliance on petty Middle Eastern dictators who despise democracy and are hated by their own people." Crimes Against Natureis ultimately about the corrosive effect of corporate corruption on our core American values -- free-market capitalism and democracy. It is about an administration, the author argues, that has sacrificed respect for the law, public health, scientific integrity, and long-term economic vitality on the altar of corporate greed. It is a book for both Democrats and Republicans, people like the traditionally conservative farmers and fishermen Kennedy represents in lawsuits against polluters. "Without exception," he writes, "these people see the current administration as the greatest threat not just to their livelihoods but to their values, their sense of community, and their idea of what it means to be American."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.7 (126 ratings)
ISBN 978-0-06-074687-2
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On Fire:
The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal
Naomi Klein
New York: Simon & Schuster (September 17, 2019)
No Review
"These long-form essays show Klein at her most prophetic and philosophical, investigating the climate crisis not only as a profound political challenge but as a spiritual and imaginative one, as well. Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of 'perpetual now,' to the soaring history of humans changing and evolving rapidly in the face of grave threats, to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of 'climate barbarism,' this is a rousing call to action for a planet on the brink: An expansive, far-ranging exploration that sees the battle for a greener world as indistinguishable from the fight for our lives, On Fire captures the burning urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the fiery energy of a rising political movement demanding a catalytic Green New Deal."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (778 ratings)
ISBN 978-1982129910
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Climate Adaptation Governance in Cities and Regions:
Theoretical Fundamentals and Practical Evidence
Jörg Knieling (Editor)
Wiley-Blackwell (August 1, 2016)
No Review
"Global climate change creates new challenges in particular for cities and regions. As centres of human activity they are especially vulnerable to climate change impacts. Adapting to a changing climate requires dealing with multiple uncertainties and complexity in order to allow proactive action. Therefore, cities and regions around the globe face the challenge of exploring flexible and innovative forms of governance which have to address specific local or regional vulnerabilities and build capacity to accommodate future change.
"This raises questions about the roles of stakeholders, the involvement of citizens, the composition and use of formal and informal instruments as well as the implementation of different forms of organization and regulation at the local and regional level.
"This book provides case studies from cities and regions all around the world. It analyses climate change adaptation from a perspective of organizing, administering and implementing local and regional adaptation strategies and measures. It looks into actors, actor-constellations, institutions and networks of climate adaptation. And, it provides the reader with knowledge about good practices and experiences to be transferred for solving adaptation challenges in cities and regions around the globe."
Rating by Amazon customers: ? (0 ratings)
ISBN 978-1118451717
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Down to Earth:
Politics in the New Climatic Regime
Bruno Latour
Polity (November 19, 2018)
No Review
"The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people."
"What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial.
"The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders.
"This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (244 ratings)
ISBN 978-1509530564
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The Environmental Case: (4th ed.)
Translating Values Into Policy
Judith A. Layzer (Editor)
CQ Press (October, 2015)
No Review
"Answers to environmental issues are not black and white. Debates around policy are often among those with fundamentally different values, and the way that problems and solutions are defined plays a central role in shaping how those values are translated into policy. The Environmental Case captures the real-world complexity of creating environmental policy, and this much-anticipated Fourth Edition contains fifteen carefully constructed cases. Through her analysis, Editor Judith Layzer systematically explores the background, players, contributing factors, and outcomes of each case, and gives readers insight into some of the most interesting and controversial issues in U.S. environmental policymaking."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (85 ratings)
ISBN 978-1452239897
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Truth Wars:
The Politics of Climate Change, Military Intervention and Financial Crisis
P. Lee
Palgrave Macmillan (November, 2014)
No Review
"We live in an age of crises that are global in scale and potentially apocalyptic in severity, affecting the lives of millions billions of people. Peter Lee examines the struggle for truth at the heart of these crises to show how political leaders attempt to shape individual behavior, attitudes and identity."
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (1 rating)
ISBN 978-1137298485
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Climate Change and the Nation State:
The Case for Nationalism in a Warming World
Anatol Lieven
Oxford University Press (March 4, 2020)
No Review
"The climate emergency is intensifying, while international responses continue to falter. In Climate Change and the Nation State, Anatol Lieven outlines a revolutionary approach grounded in realist thinking: redefining climate change as an existential threat to nation states—which it undoubtedly is—and mobilizing both national security elites and mass nationalism. He reminds us that nationalism has proven to be the most powerful force in motivating people to care about the wellbeing of future generations. Throughout, Lieven draws on historical examples to show how earlier political movements marshaled nationalism to implement progressive social reform. In order to implement and maintain a policy revolution such as 'Green New Deal,' he argues, it will be necessary to create dominant national consensuses like those that enabled and sustained the original New Deal and the advanced welfare states in Europe. Now updated in paperback, Climate Change and the Nation State is an essential contribution to the debate on how to deal with a climatic crisis that—if left unchecked—threatens the survival of every nation."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (58 ratings)
ISBN 978-0190090180
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Governing Climate Change:
Global Cities and Transnational Lawmaking
Jolene Lin
Cambridge University Press (June 21, 2018)
No Review
"Cities are no longer just places to live in. They are significant actors on the global stage, and nowhere is this trend more prominent than in the world of transnational climate change governance (TCCG). Through transnational networks that form links between cities, states, international organizations, corporations, and civil society, cities are developing and implementing norms, practices, and voluntary standards across national boundaries. In introducing cities as transnational lawmakers, Jolene Lin provides an exciting new perspective on climate change law and policy, offering novel insights about the reconfiguration of the state and the nature of international lawmaking as the involvement of cities in TCCG blurs the public/private divide and the traditional strictures of 'domestic' versus 'international'. This illuminating book should be read by anyone interested in understanding how cities - in many cases, more than the countries in which they're located - are addressing the causes and consequences of climate change."
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (1 rating)
ISBN 978-1108424851
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The Magna Carta Manifesto:
Liberties and Commons for All
Peter Linebaugh Ph.D.
University of California Press (June 1, 2009)
No Review
"Peter Linebaugh is Professor of History at the University of Toledo. He is the author of The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century and coauthor (with Marcus Rediker) of Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic."
"This remarkable book shines a fierce light on the current state of liberty and shows how longstanding restraints against tyranny—and the rights of habeas corpus, trial by jury, and due process of law, and the prohibition of torture—are being abridged. In providing a sweeping history of Magna Carta, the source of these protections since 1215, this powerful book demonstrates how these ancient rights are repeatedly laid aside when the greed of privatization, the lust for power, and the ambition of empire seize a state. Peter Linebaugh draws on primary sources to construct a wholly original history of the Great Charter and its scarcely-known companion, the Charter of the Forest, which was created at the same time to protect the subsistence rights of the poor."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (23 ratings)
ISBN 978-0520260009
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The Parrot and the Igloo:
Climate and the Science of Denial
David Lipsky
W. W. Norton & Company (July 11, 2023)
No Review
"David Lipsky is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Absolutely American, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year, and Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, which became the basis for the movie The End of the Tour. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and New York. He is a recipient of a Lambert Fellowship, the National Magazine Award, and the GLAAD Media Award. His work has been collected in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Magazine Writing. He teaches writing and literature at New York University and lives in New York City."
"The New York Times best-selling author explores how 'anti-science' became so virulent in American life—through a history of climate denial and its consequences.
"In 1956, the New York Times prophesied that once global warming really kicked in, we could see parrots in the Antarctic. In 2010, when science deniers had control of the climate story, Senator James Inhofe and his family built an igloo on the Washington Mall and plunked a sign on top: AL GORE'S NEW HOME: HONK IF YOU LOVE CLIMATE CHANGE. In The Parrot and the Igloo, best-selling author David Lipsky tells the astonishing story of how we moved from one extreme (the correct one) to the other.
"With narrative sweep and a superb eye for character, Lipsky unfolds the dramatic narrative of the long, strange march of climate science. The story begins with a tale of three inventors—Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla—who made our technological world, not knowing what they had set into motion. Then there are the scientists who sounded the alarm once they identified carbon dioxide as the culprit of our warming planet. And we meet the hucksters, zealots, and crackpots who lied about that science and misled the public in ever more outrageous ways. Lipsky masterfully traces the evolution of climate denial, exposing how it grew out of early efforts to build a network of untruth about products like aspirin and cigarettes.
"Featuring an indelible cast of heroes and villains, mavericks and swindlers, The Parrot and the Igloo delivers a real-life tragicomedy—one that captures the extraordinary dance of science, money, and the American character."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (205 ratings)
ISBN 978-0393866704
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Time to Start Thinking:
America in the Age of Descent
Edward Luce
Atlantic Monthly Press (April, 2012)
"Time to Start Thinking is a book destined to spark debate among liberals and conservatives alike. Drawing on his decades of exceptional journalism and his connections within Washington and around the world, Luce advances a carefully constructed and controversial argument, backed up by interviews with many of the key players in politics and business, that America is losing its pragmatism. . . . While many Americans believe that their country can and should retain its status as a global superpower, Luce sees this as an increasingly unlikely scenario, unless Americans themselves can stand up against the country's increasingly plutocratic character." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.2 (132 ratings)
ISBN 978-0-8021-2021-2
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Run To Failure:
BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster
Abrahm Lustgarten
New York: W. W. Norton &Company, March 2012
"It was Big Oil's nightmare moment, and the dominoes began falling years before the well was drilled. Two decades ago, British Petroleum, a venerable and storied corporation, was running out of oil reserves. Along came a new CEO of vision and vast ambition, John Browne, who pulled off one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in history.
"BP bought one company after another and then relentlessly fired employees and cut costs. It skipped safety procedures, pumped toxic chemicals back into the ground, and let equipment languish, even while Browne claimed a new era of environmentally sustainable business as his own. For a while the strategy worked, making BP one of the most profitable corporations in the world. Then it all began to unravel, in felony convictions for environmental crimes and in one deadly accident after another. Employees and regulators warned that BP's problems, unfixed, were spinning out of control, that another disaster?bigger and deadlier?was inevitable. Nobody was listening.
"Having reported on business and the energy industry for nearly a decade, Abrahm Lustgarten uses interviews with key executives, former government investigators, and whistle-blowers along with his exclusive access to BP's internal documents and emails to weave a spellbinding investigative narrative of hubris and greed well before the gulf oil spill."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (65 ratings)
ISBN 978-0-393-08162-6
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Blowout:
Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth
Rachel Maddow
New York: Crown (October 1, 2019)
"In 2010, the words 'earthquake swarm' entered the lexicon in Oklahoma. That same year, a trove of Michael Jackson memorabilia—including his iconic crystal-encrusted white glove—was sold at auction for over $1 million to a guy who was, officially, just the lowly forestry minister of the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea. And in 2014, revolutionaries in Ukraine raided the palace of their ousted president and found a zoo of peacocks, gilded toilets, and a floating restaurant modeled after a Spanish galleon. Unlikely as it might seem, there is a thread connecting these events, and Rachel Maddow follows it to its crooked source: the unimaginably lucrative and equally corrupting oil and gas industry.
"With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe, revealing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas along the way, and drawing a surprising conclusion about why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. She deftly shows how Russia's rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia's rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the West's most important alliances, and the United States. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, most notably ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson. The oil and gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, 'like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can't really blame the lion. It's in her nature.'
"Blowout is a call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest businesses on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world's most destructive industry and its enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, 'Democracy either wins this one or disappears.'"
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.8 (10,336 ratings)
ISBN 978-0525575474
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Overshoot:
How the World Surrendered To Climate Breakdown
Andreas Malm &Wim Carton
Verso, October 2024
No Review
"Andreas Malm is Associate Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of several acclaimed books, most recently, with the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. His book How to Blow Up a Pipeline is an international bestseller and has been turned into a feature film. Wim Carton is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, Sweden. He's the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics. His work has appeared in top journals such as Nature Climate Change, WIRES Climate Change, and Antipode."
"A scathing critique of proposals to geoengineer our way out of climate disaster by the bestselling author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline
"It might soon be far too hot on this planet. What do we do then? In the era of 'overshoot,' schemes abound for turning down the heat—not now, but a few decades down the road. We're being told that we can return to liveable temperatures by means of technologies for removing CO2 from the air or blocking incoming sunlight. If they even exist, such technologies are not safe.
"They come with immense uncertainties and risks. Worse, like magical promises of future redemption, they might provide reasons for continuing to emit in the present. But do they also hold some potentials? In Overshoot, two leading climate scholars subject the plans for saving the planet after it's been wrecked to critical study. Carbon dioxide removal is already having effects, as an excuse for continuing business as usual, while geoengineering promises to bail out humanity if the heat reaches critical levels.
"Both distract from the one urgent task: to slash emissions now. There can be no further delay. The climate revolution is long overdue, and in the end, no technology can absolve us of its tasks."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.8 (7 ratings)
ISBN 978-1605980409
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The Madhouse Effect:
How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy
Michael E. Mann & Tom Toles
Columbia University Press (September 27, 2016)
"The award-winning climate scientist Michael E. Mann and the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Tom Toles have been on the front lines of the fight against climate denialism for most of their careers. They have witnessed the manipulation of the media by business and political interests and the unconscionable play to partisanship on issues that affect the well-being of billions. The lessons they have learned have been invaluable, inspiring this brilliant, colorful escape hatch from the madhouse of the climate wars.
"The Madhouse Effect portrays the intellectual pretzels into which denialists must twist logic to explain away the clear evidence that human activity has changed Earth's climate. Toles's cartoons collapse counter-scientific strategies into their biased components, helping readers see how to best strike at these fallacies. Mann's expert skills at science communication aim to restore sanity to a debate that continues to rage against widely acknowledged scientific consensus. The synergy of these two climate science crusaders enlivens the gloom and doom of so many climate-themed books?and may even convert die-hard doubters to the side of sound science."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (361 ratings)
ISBN 978-0-231-17786-3
SJ eBook
The New Climate War:
The Fight to Take Back Our Planet
Michael E. Mann
PublicAffairs (January 12, 2021)
"A renowned climate scientist shows how fossil fuel companies have waged a thirty-year campaign to deflect blame and responsibility and delay action on climate change, and offers a battle plan for how we can save the planet. Recycle. Fly less. Eat less meat. These are some of the ways that we've been told can slow climate change. But the inordinate emphasis on individual behavior is the result of a marketing campaign that has succeeded in placing the responsibility for fixing climate change squarely on the shoulders of individuals.
"Fossil fuel companies have followed the example of other industries deflecting blame (think "guns don't kill people, people kill people") or greenwashing (think of the beverage industry's "Crying Indian" commercials of the 1970s). Meanwhile, they've blocked efforts to regulate or price carbon emissions, run PR campaigns aimed at discrediting viable alternatives, and have abdicated their responsibility in fixing the problem they've created. The result has been disastrous for our planet.
"In The New Climate War, Mann argues that all is not lost. He draws the battle lines between the people and the polluters-fossil fuel companies, right-wing plutocrats, and petrostates. And he outlines a plan for forcing our governments and corporations to wake up and make real change, including:
a common-sense, attainable approach to carbon pricing- and a revision of the well-intentioned but flawed currently proposed version of the Green New Deal;
allowing renewable energy to compete fairly against fossil fuels
debunking the false narratives and arguments that have worked their way into the climate debate and driven a wedge between even those who support climate change solutions
combatting climate doomism and despair-mongering
"With immensely powerful vested interests aligned in defense of the fossil fuel status quo, the societal tipping point won't happen without the active participation of citizens everywhere aiding in the collective push forward. This book will reach, inform, and enable citizens everywhere to join this battle for our planet."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (922 ratings)
ISBN 978-1541758230
SJ eBook
Our Fragile Moment:
How Lessons from Earth's Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis
Michael E. Mann
PublicAffairs (September 26, 2023)
"Michael E. Mann is the Presidential Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania.
"He has received many honors and awards, including NOAA's outstanding publication award in 2002 and selection by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002. Additionally, he contributed, with other IPCC authors, to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
"More recently, he received the Award for Public Engagement with Science from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018 and the Climate Communication Prize from the American Geophysical Union in 2018. In 2019 he received the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. In 2020 he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of numerous books, including Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, and The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Threatening our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania."
"In this sweeping work of science and history, the renowned climate scientist and author of The New Climate War shows us the conditions on Earth that allowed humans not only to exist but thrive, and how they are imperiled if we veer off course.
"For the vast majority of its 4.54 billion years, Earth has proven it can manage just fine without human beings. Then came the first proto-humans, who emerged just a little more than 2 million years ago—a fleeting moment in geological time. What is it that made this benevolent moment of ours possible? Ironically, it's the very same thing that now threatens us—climate change.
"The drying of the tropics during the Pleistocene period created a niche for early hominids, who could hunt prey as forests gave way to savannahs in the African tropics. The sudden cooling episode known as the 'Younger Dryas' 13,000 years ago, which occurred just as Earth was thawing out of the last Ice Age, spurred the development of agriculture in the fertile crescent. The 'Little Ice Age' cooling of the 16th-19th centuries led to famines and pestilence for much of Europe, yet it was a boon for the Dutch, who were able to take advantage of stronger winds to shorten their ocean voyages.
"The conditions that allowed humans to live on this earth are fragile, incredibly so. Climate variability has at times created new niches that humans or their ancestors could potentially exploit, and challenges that at times have spurred innovation. But there's a relatively narrow envelope of climate variability within which human civilization remains viable. And our survival depends on conditions remaining within that range.
"In this book, renowned climate scientist Michael Mann will arm readers with the knowledge necessary to appreciate the gravity of the unfolding climate crisis, while emboldening them—and others—to act before it truly does become too late."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (124 ratings)
ISBN 978-1541702899
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The Deluge
Stephen Markley
Simon & Schuster (January 10, 2023)
No Review
"Stephen Markley is the acclaimed author of Ohio, which NPR called a 'masterpiece.' A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Markley's other books include the memoir Publish This Book and the travelogue Tales of Iceland."
"In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.
"From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds. As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity's last chance at a future? A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (900 ratings)
ISBN 978-1982123093
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Ending Fossil Fuel Subsidies:
The politics of saving the planet
Neil McCulloch
Practical Action Publishing (January 15, 2023)
No Review
"Dr. Neil McCulloch is a Director of The Policy Practice. His main area of focus is on the political economy of reform in the energy sector. This has included work on corruption in the electricity sector in Lebanon; power sector reform in Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan; energy access in India; coal phase out in Indonesia; fuel subsidy reform in Indonesia, Nigeria and Zambia; and electricity market reform in Guinea, Mali and Togo. Previously, Dr. McCulloch was the Director of the Economic Policy Program at Oxford Policy Management and, before that, the Lead Economist of the Australian Aid program in Indonesia. He has also led the Globalisation Research Team in the Institute of Development Studies in the UK and was a Senior Economist for the World Bank in Indonesia."
"Fossil fuel subsidies are killing both people and the planet. By encouraging excessive consumption of fossil fuels, subsidies exacerbate pollution and climate change, make violent protests more likely, and waste huge sums that could be used far better. Yet for years there has been minimal progress in eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. This book explains what fossil fuel subsidies are, how they inflict harm and what steps are being taken to reduce them. It also shows why subsidies persist and why existing efforts have been so ineffective. Drawing lessons from countries which have tried to remove fossil fuel subsidies, it explains that the fundamental challenge to reform is not technical, but political. The catastrophic COVID-19 pandemic and the tragic war in Ukraine illustrate that fossil fuel subsidy reform will only succeed where it supports the achievement of things that really matter politically - energy security, protection from climate change, better air quality, and resources to improve people's lives. The book lays out a new agenda for action on fossil fuel subsidies, showing how a better understanding of the underlying political incentives can lead to more effective approaches to tackling this major global problem."
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (1 rating)
ISBN 978-1788532020
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Falter:
Has the Human Game Begun To Play Itself Out?
Bill McKibben
New York: Henry Holt & Company, April 2019
"Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, Deep Economy, and numerous other books. He is the founder of the environmental organizations Step It Up and 350.org, and was among the first to warn of the dangers of global warming. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, and their daughter."
"Thirty years ago, Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, the first book that alerted us to the dangers of climate change. Falter is a new call to arms, to save not only our planet but our very souls as well.
"Over tens of thousands of years, through the harnessing of nature, the development of civilization, and the application of new technologies, human beings have created the world we live in. But as McKibben points out in this provocative and sobering look at the world today, we are fast approaching a tipping point, putting into question the viability of humanity itself.
"McKibben argues that we have failed to recognize how individual actions often operated against our collective interest, and as a result we now face three daunting challenges - to adjust to a new life on a broken planet, to fight the hyper-individualism that now animates government and business; and to reverse the ways that technology is bleaching out the variety of human existence. He asks if we still retain the tools and social capital to fight these larger forces - and if we are willing to make the effort."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.7 (70 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-250-17826-8
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The Oil Wars Myth:
Petroleum and the Causes of International Conflict
Emily Meierding
Cornell University Press (May 15, 2020)
No Review
"Emily Meierding is Assistant Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California."
"Do countries fight wars for oil? Given the resource's exceptional military and economic importance, most people assume that states will do anything to obtain it. Challenging this conventional wisdom, The Oil Wars Myth reveals that countries do not launch major conflicts to acquire petroleum resources. Emily Meierding argues that the costs of foreign invasion, territorial occupation, international retaliation, and damage to oil company relations deter even the most powerful countries from initiating 'classic oil wars.' Examining a century of interstate violence, she demonstrates that, at most, countries have engaged in mild sparring to advance their petroleum ambitions.
"The Oil Wars Myth elaborates on these findings by reassessing the presumed oil motives for many of the twentieth century's most prominent international conflicts: World War II, the two American Gulf wars, the Iran-Iraq War, the Falklands/Malvinas War, and the Chaco War. These case studies show that countries have consistently refrained from fighting for oil. Meierding also explains why oil war assumptions are so common, despite the lack of supporting evidence. Since classic oil wars exist at the intersection of need and greed—two popular explanations for resource grabs—they are unusually easy to believe in.
"The Oil Wars Myth will engage and inform anyone interested in oil, war, and the narratives that connect them."
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (5 ratings)
ISBN 978-1501748288
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Paying for Pollution:
Why a Carbon Tax is Good for America
Gilbert E. Metcalf
Oxford University Press (January 10, 2019)
No Review
"The threats posed by global climate change are widely recognized and carbon emmissions are the major source of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. Burning fossil fuels causes long-lasting, pervasive damages, costly to those of us alive today and even more to our children and our children's children. The United States is the second largest carbon emitting country in the world and should play a key role in global efforts to reduce emissions.
"Paying for Pollution incisively examines the very real costs—economic and social—of climate change and the challenges of concerted action to reduce future losses due to damages of higher temperatures and more extreme weather. Gilbert E. Metcalf argues that there is a convergence of social, economic, environmental, and political forces that provides an opening for a new approach to climate policy, one based on market principles that can appeal to politicians across the political spectrum. After all, markets work best when the price of a good reflects all its costs.
"Metcalf suggests that a thoughtfully and politically sensitive designed carbon tax could also contribute to an improved tax system, something desired by Republican and Democratic politicians alike. That is, a carbon tax increases fiscal flexibility by providing new revenues to finance reforms to the income tax that improve the fairness of the tax code and contribute to economic growth. Metcalf compares the benefits of a carbon tax to other potential policies, such as cap and trade, to reduce the threats of climate change. None, he shows, are as effective, efficient, and fair as a carbon tax."
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (14 ratings)
ISBN 978-0190694197
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The Triumph of Doubt:
Dark Money and the Science of Deception
David Michaels
Oxford University Press (February 3, 2020)
No Review
"Well-heeled American corporations have long had a financial stake in undermining scientific consensus and manufacturing uncertainty. In The Triumph of Doubt, former Obama and Clinton official David Michaels details how corrupt science becomes public policy — and where it's happening today.
"Opioids. Concussions. Obesity. Climate Change.
"America is a country of everyday crises — big, long-spanning problems that persist despite their toll on the country's health. And for every case of government inaction on one of these issues, there is a set of familiar, doubtful refrains: The science is unclear. The data are inconclusive. Regulation is unjustified. It's a slippery slope.
"Is it?
"The Triumph of Doubt traces the ascendance of science-for-hire in American life and government, from its origins in the tobacco industry in the 1950s to its current manifestations across government, public policy, and even professional sports. Amid fraught conversations of "alternative facts" and "truth decay," The Triumph of Doubt wields its unprecedented access to shine a light on the machinations and scope of manipulated science in American society. It is an urgent, revelatory work, one that promises to reorient conversations around science and the public good for the foreseeable future."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (113 ratings)
ISBN 978-0190922665
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Green Hell:
How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them
Steven Milloy
Regnery Publishing, Inc. (March, 1993)
No Review
"It seems everywhere you look, all you see is green. People are 'living Green', businesses are 'going Green', and consumers are 'buying Green'. But pretty soon this trendy 'Green' lifestyle won't be voluntary, it will be mandatory. Steven Milloy, founder of JunkScience.com, shows how the government and environmental elites will soon have you under their Green thumb, controlling the speed you drive, the temperature of your home, even when you can retire...and that's just the tip of their melting iceberg." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (108 ratings)
ISBN 978-1596985858
SJ eAudiobook
Carbon Democracy: (Rev. Ed.)
Political Power in the Age of Oil
Timothy Mitchell
Verso (November, 2011)
No Review
"Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called 'the economy' and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East.
"In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order. In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (122 ratings)
ISBN 978-1844677450
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The Republican War on Science
Chris Mooney
New York: Basic Books, August 2005
"Science has never been more crucial to deciding the political issues facing the country. Yet science and scientists have less influence with the federal government than at any time since the Eisenhower administration. In the White House and Congress today, findings are reported in a politicized manner; spun or distorted to fit the speaker's agenda; or, when they're too inconvenient, ignored entirely. On a broad array of issues-stem cell research, climate change, missile defense, abstinence education, product safety, environmental regulation, and many others-the Bush administration's positions fly in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus. Federal science agencies, once fiercely independent under both Republican and Democratic presidents, are increasingly staffed by political appointees and fringe theorists who know industry lobbyists and evangelical activists far better than they know the science. This is not unique to the Bush administration, but it is largely a Republican phenomenon, born of a conservative dislike of environmental, health, and safety regulation, and at the extremes, of evolution and legalized abortion. In The Republican War on Science, Chris Mooney ties together the disparate strands of the attack on science into a compelling and frightening account of our government's increasing unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate research and ideologically driven pseudoscience."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (125 ratings)
ISBN 978-0-465-04675-1
SJ3 509.73 Mooney
Storm World
Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming
Chris Mooney
New York: Harcourt, Inc., July 2007
"One of the leading science journalists and commentators working today, Chris Mooney delves into a red-hot debate in meteorology: whether the increasing ferocity of hurricanes is connected to global warming. In the wake of Katrina, Mooney follows the careers of leading scientists on either side of the argument through the 2006 hurricane season, tracing how the media, special interests, politics, and the weather itself have skewed and amplified what was already a fraught scientific debate. As Mooney puts it: 'Scientists, like hurricanes, do extraordinary things at high wind speeds.'
"Mooney—a native of New Orleans—has written a fascinating and urgently compelling book that calls into question the great inconvenient truth of our day: Are we responsible for making hurricanes even bigger monsters than they already are?"
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.8 (26 ratings)
ISBN 978-0151012879
SJ3 363.7387 Mooney
Capitalism in the Web of Life
Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital
Jason W. Moore
London: Verso (November, 2015)
No Review
"Integrating both social and historical factors, this radical analysis of the development of capitalism reveals the ever-deepening relationship between capital and ecology.
"Finance. Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today's global turbulence have a common cause: capitalism as a way of organizing nature, including human nature. Drawing on environmentalist, feminist, and Marxist thought, Moore offers a groundbreaking new synthesis: capitalism as a 'world-ecology' of wealth, power, and nature. Capitalism's greatest strength—and the source of its problems—is its capacity to create Cheap Natures: labor, food, energy, and raw materials. That capacity is now in question. Rethinking capitalism through the pulsing and renewing dialectic of humanity-in-nature, Moore takes readers on a journey from the rise of capitalism to the modern mosaic of crisis. Capitalism in the Web of Life shows how the critique of capitalism-in-nature—rather than capitalism and nature—is key to understanding our predicament, and to pursuing the politics of liberation in the century ahead."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.2 (52 ratings)
ISBN 978-1781689011
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Fueling Freedom:
Exposing the Mad War on Energy
Stephen Moore & Kathleen Hartnett White
Regnery Publishing (May, 2016)
No Review
"Fossil fuel energy is the lifeblood of the modern world. Before the Industrial Revolution, humanity depended on burning wood and candle wax. But with the ability to harness the energy in oil and other fossil fuels, quality of life and capacity for progress increased exponentially. Thanks to incredible innovations in the energy industry, fossil fuels are as promising, safe, and clean an energy resource as has ever existed in history. Yet, highly politicized climate policies are pushing a grand-scale shift to unreliable, impractical, incredibly expensive, and far less efficient energy sources. Today, 'fossil fuel' has become such a dirty word that even fossil fuel companies feel compelled to apologize for their products. In Fueling Freedom, energy experts Stephen Moore and Kathleen Hartnett White make an unapologetic case for fossil fuels, turning around progressives' protestations to prove that if fossil fuel energy is supplanted by 'green' alternatives for political reasons, humanity will take a giant step backwards and the planet will be less safe, less clean, and less free."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.1 (35 ratings)
ISBN 978-1621574095
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Climate Change and Sustainable Development Law in a Nutshell
John Nolon & Patricia Salkin
West Academic Publishing (November, 2010)
No Review
"Policies regarding sustainable development and climate change management appeared on the world stage at the same time and should be studied and understood as a single body of law. This Nutshell enables readers to learn how the U.S. legal system fosters greenhouse gas reduction, energy conservation, and sustainable patterns of growth including energy efficient and sustainable buildings, the use of renewable energy resources, the protection of sequestering open space, and the adaptation of buildings and communities to sea level rise and natural disasters."
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (3 ratings)
ISBN 978-0314264206
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The Environment and International Relations
Kate O'Neill
Cambridge University Press (February, 2009)
No Review
"This exciting textbook introduces students to the ways in which the theories and tools of International Relations can be used to analyse and address global environmental problems. Kate O'Neill develops an historical and analytical framework for understanding global environmental issues, and identifies the main actors and their roles, allowing students to grasp the core theories and facts about global environmental governance. She examines how governments, international bodies, scientists, activists and corporations address global environmental problems including climate change, biodiversity loss, ozone depletion and trade in hazardous wastes. The book represents a new and innovative theoretical approach to this area, as well as integrating insights from different disciplines, thereby encouraging students to engage with the issues, to equip themselves with the knowledge they need, and to apply their own critical insights. This will be invaluable for students of environmental issues both from political science and environmental studies perspectives."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (24 ratings)
ISBN 78-0521603126
N/A
Windfall:
How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America's Power
Meghan L. O'Sullivan
Simon & Schuste (September, 2017)
No Review
"A trusty guide to all the ways in which energy (especially oil and natural gas) impacts international relations, for good and for bad. . . . Windfall is a refreshing and illuminating examination of one thing that's going right." – Foreign Policy
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (114 ratings)
ISBN 978-1501107931
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The Precipice:
Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
Toby Ord
Hachette Books (March 24, 2020)
No Review
"If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years — enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes — those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late.
"Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity.
"An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last."
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (14 ratings)
ISBN 978-0316484916
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Merchants of Doubt:
How a Handul of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway
New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010
"Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge [for] over four decades." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (1,862 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-59691-610-4
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The War on Science:
Who's Waging it Why it Matters What We Can Do About it
Shawn Otto
Lawrence Krauss (Fwd.)
Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, May 2016
No Review
"In every issue of modern society—from climate change to vaccinations, transportation to technology, health care to defense—we are in the midst of an unprecedented expansion of scientific progress and a simultaneous expansion of danger. At the very time we need them most, scientists and the idea of objective knowledge are being bombarded by a vast, well-funded, three-part war on science: the identity politics war on science, the ideological war on science, and the industrial war on science. The result is an unprecedented erosion of thought in Western democracies as voters, policymakers, and justices actively ignore the evidence from science, leaving major policy decisions to be based more on the demands of the most strident voices.
"Shawn Lawrence Otto's provocative new book investigates the historical, social, philosophical, political, and emotional reasons for why and how evidence-based politics are in decline and authoritarian politics are once again on the rise, and offers a vision, an argument, and some compelling solutions to bring us to our collective senses, before it's too late."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (313 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-57131-353-9
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Hijacking Sustainability:
Adrian Parr
The MIT Press (January, 2009)
No Review
"The idea of 'sustainability' has gone mainstream. Thanks to Prius-driving movie stars, it's even hip. What began as a grassroots movement to promote responsible development has become a bullet point in corporate ecobranding strategies. In Hijacking Sustainability, Adrian Parr describes how this has happened: how the goals of an environmental movement came to be mediated by corporate interests, government, and the military. Parr argues that the more popular sustainable development becomes, the more commodified it becomes; the more mainstream culture embraces the sustainability movement's concern over global warming and poverty, the more 'sustainability culture' advances the profit-maximizing values of corporate capitalism. And the more issues of sustainability are aligned with those of national security, the more military values are conflated with the goals of sustainable development.
"Parr looks closely at five examples of the hijacking of sustainability: corporate image-greening; Hollywood activism; gated communities; the greening of the White House; and the incongruous efforts to achieve a 'sustainable' army. Parr then examines key challenges to sustainability—waste disposal, disaster relief and environmental refugees, slum development, and poverty.
"Sustainability, Parr says, offers an alternative narrative of the collective good—an idea now compromised and endangered by corporate, military, and government interests."
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.0 (1 rating)
ISBN 978-0262013062
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The Wrath of Capital:
Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics
Adrian Parr
Columbia University Press (December, 2012)
No Review
"Although climate change has become the dominant concern of the twenty-first century, global powers refuse to implement the changes necessary to reverse these trends. Instead, they have neoliberalized nature and climate change politics and discourse, and there are indications of a more virulent strain of capital accumulation on the horizon. Adrian Parr calls attention to the problematic socioeconomic conditions of neoliberal capitalism underpinning the world's environmental challenges, and she argues that, until we grasp the implications of neoliberalism's interference in climate change talks and policy, humanity is on track to an irreversible crisis.
"Parr not only exposes the global failure to produce equitable political options for environmental regulation, but she also breaks down the dominant political paradigms hindering the discovery of viable alternatives. She highlights the neoliberalization of nature in the development of green technologies, land use, dietary habits, reproductive practices, consumption patterns, design strategies, and media. She dismisses the notion that the free market can solve debilitating environmental degradation and climate change as nothing more than a political ghost emptied of its collective aspirations.
"Decrying what she perceives as a failure of the human imagination and an impoverishment of political institutions, Parr ruminates on the nature of change and existence in the absence of a future. The sustainability movement, she contends, must engage more aggressively with the logic and cultural manifestations of consumer economics to take hold of a more transformative politics. If the economically powerful continue to monopolize the meaning of environmental change, she warns, new and more promising collective solutions will fail to take root."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.8 (6 ratings)
ISBN 978-0231158282
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The Challenge of Climate Change:
Which Way Now?
Daniel P. Perlmutter & Robert L. Rothstein
Wiley-Blackwell (December, 2010)
No Review
"Global warming and climate change present complex interlocking issues of public policy, multilateral negotiation, and technological advancement. This book explores both the problems and the opportunities presented by international agreements, and examines the technological developments and policy goals that can be pursued to effect the changes necessary. Specific steps are proposed in the form of a list of priorities.
"This book represents a cooperative enterprise between two authors of different backgrounds - engineering and international relations - and is directed to an educated but non-professional lay audience without any formal training in either science or international relations. The points of view of negotiators from both developed and developing nations are presented and compared. Each topic is presented from both technical and policy perspectives as a means to evaluate the variety of proposals that have been offered as remedies to global warming.
"The text is supported by illustrations and tables where appropriate, including a list of References at the end of each chapter."
Rating by Amazon customers: 2.5 (2 ratings)
ISBN 978-0470654989
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The Carbon Collision Course:
Australia's Emissions and Energy Policy Crisis
Andrew Perry
Andrew Perry (January 23, 2019)
No Review
"In 2018, the lack of a coherent policy on energy and associated emissions once again caused a political crisis in Australia. But emissions policy can't just be about emissions and energy. It must also be about what direction to take the whole economy in for the next 25 years.
"At 22 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, Australia has the highest per capita greenhouse gas emission footprint of all the western industrialised nations. This compares to 11 tonnes per capita in Germany and only eight tonnes in the UK.
"This book explains:
Why Australia's emissions are so high compared to those of its western peers.
How Australia easily beat its Kyoto Protocol round one emission target without needing to take any proactive measures on fossil fuel consumption or efficiency.
How, despite the Kyoto Protocol, Australia has expanded exports of coal and liquefied natural gas in the past 28 years, and is now one of the largest fossil fuel exporters in the world.
Why any emission reductions from reduced fossil fuel consumption in Australia will do nothing for global emissions if the coal and gas are simply exported to be burned elsewhere.
Why Australia won't be able to meet the Paris emission reduction target without dramatic changes to its energy policy."
Rating by Amazon customers: ? (0 ratings)
ISBN 978-0987635808
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The Case for the Green New Deal
Ann Pettifor
Verso (November 5, 2019)
No Review
"To protect the future of life on earth, we need to do more than just reimagine the economy—we have to change everything. One of the seminal thinkers of the program that helped ignite the US Green New Deal campaign, Ann Pettifor explains how we can afford what we can do, and what we need to do, before it is too late.
"The Case for the Green New Deal argues that economic change is wholly possible, based on the understanding that finance, the economy and the ecosystem are all tightly bound together. The GND demands total decarbonization and a commitment to an economy based on fairness and social justice. It proposes a radical new understanding of the international monetary system. Pettifor offers a roadmap for financial reform both nationally and globally, taking the economy back from the 1%. This is a radical, urgent manifesto that we must act on now."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (79 ratings)
ISBN: 978-1788738156
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The Climate Fix:
What Scientists and Politicians Won't Tell You About Global Warming
Roger Pielke, Jr.
Basic Books (September, 2010)
No Review
"Why has the world been unable to address global warming? Science policy expert Roger Pielke, Jr., says it's not the fault of those who reject the Kyoto Protocol, but those who support it, and the magical thinking that the agreement represents. In The Climate Fix, Pielke offers a way to repair climate policy, shifting the debate away from meaningless targets and toward a revolution in how the world's economy is powered, while de-fanging the venomous politics surrounding the crisis." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.2 (71 ratings)
ISBN 978-0465020522
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Heaven and Hell:
The Pope Condemns the Poor to Eternal Poverty
Ian Plimer
Connor Court Publishing Pty Ltd (October, 2015)
No Review
"The Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis, Laudato Si (care for our common home) was influenced by atheists, communists and green activists. The Pope advocates burdening the Third World with inefficient unreliable high-cost renewable energy and agriculture thereby keeping the poor in eternal poverty. Only when Third World children can do homework at night using cheap coal-fired electricity can they escape from poverty. Looking purely at the science rather than the theology, Ian Plimer shows the failure of the current Pope in his understanding of the real issues causing poverty, especially in Third World countries."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (14 ratings)
ISBN 978-1925138801
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The Climate War
True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight To Save the Earth
Eric Pooley
New York: Hyperion, June 2010
"Eric Pooley is deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth (Hyperion, June 2010). Eric began his journalism career as a freelance reporter in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he was an award-winning feature writer, political columnist and senior editor for New York magazine. He joined Time in 1995 as White House correspondent and went on to serve as the magazine's chief political correspondent and national editor.
"In 2002 Eric was named editor of Time Europe, the London-based international edition of Time, and three years later he became managing editor of Fortune, responsible for all global editorial operations of the magazine. In 2007 he left Time Inc. and began work on The Climate War. In 2009 he started writing a climate and energy column for Bloomberg News, and in February 2010 he was named deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek.
"Eric's work has been recognized with many awards and honors, including a 2001 National Magazine Award (for Time's single-topic issue on the September 11 attacks, which he helped edit), the 1996 Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency (for his coverage of the Clinton Administration), and four Henry R. Luce awards from Time Inc. He is also a three-time finalist for the National Magazine Award in categories ranging from General Excellence (for his editorship of Fortune) to Public Service (for a Time cover story that temporarily shut down an unsafe nuclear power plant in Connecticut).
"Eric has written about climate politics for Time, Slate, Bloomberg News and other publications. In the fall of 2008 he studied press coverage of the issue at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he was a Kalb Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. He was a featured commentator in Heat, the 2008 PBS Frontline global warming documentary, and has appeared on Nightline, Charlie Rose, The CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Larry King Live, Anderson Cooper 360, All Things Considered, and many other programs. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Brown University and lives with his wife and two daughters in New York."
"Why has it been so hard for America to come to grips with climate change? Why do so many people believe it isn't really happening? As President Obama's science advisor John Holdren has said, 'We're driving in a car with bad brakes in a fog and heading for a cliff. We know for sure that cliff is out there. We just don't know exactly where it is. Prudence would suggest that we should start putting on the brakes.' But powerful interests are threatened by the carbon cap that would speed the transition to a clean energy economy, and their agents have worked successfully to deny the problem and delay the solutions."
"To write this book, Pooley, the former managing editor of Fortune and chief political correspondent for Time, spent three years embedded with an extraordinary cast of characters: from the flamboyant head of one of the nation's largest coal-burning energy companies to the driven environmental leader who made common cause with him, from leading scientists warning of impending catastrophe to professional skeptics disputing almost every aspect of climate science, from radical activists chaining themselves to bulldozers to powerful lobbyists, media gurus, and advisors in Obama's West Wing--and, to top it off, unprecedented access to former Vice President Al Gore and his team of climate activists.
"Pooley captures the quiet determination and even heroism of climate campaigners who have dedicated their lives to an uphill battle that's still raging today. He asks whether we have what it takes to preserve our planet's habitability, and shows how America's climate war sends shock waves from Bali to Copenhagen. No other reporter enjoys such access to this cast of characters. No other book covers this terrain. From the trenches of a North Carolina power plant to the battlefields of Capitol Hill, Madison Avenue, and Wall Street, The Climate War is the essential read for anyone who wants to understand the players and politics behind the most important issue we face today."
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.6 (20 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-4013-2326-4
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Strategic Ignorance
Why the Bush Administration is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress
Carl Pope & Paul Rauber
San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, May 2004
"Strategic Ignorance sets forth not only the shocking Bush record but the stories and strategies behind it. Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope and coauthor Paul Rauber brief us on the key administration figures, as well as legislators and lobbyists on the reactionary right, who strive to gut landmark laws; facilitate payback to polluters; distort, suppress, or ignore science; and invent soothing flimflam like 'Clear Skies'." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.0 (10 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-57805-109-0
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Climate Change Justice
Eric A. Posner & David Weisbach
Princeton University Press (March, 2010)
No Review
"Climate change and justice are so closely associated that many people take it for granted that a global climate treaty should—indeed, must—directly address both issues together. But, in fact, this would be a serious mistake, one that, by dooming effective international limits on greenhouse gases, would actually make the world's poor and developing nations far worse off. This is the provocative and original argument of Climate Change Justice. Eric Posner and David Weisbach strongly favor both a climate change agreement and efforts to improve economic justice. But they make a powerful case that the best—and possibly only—way to get an effective climate treaty is to exclude measures designed to redistribute wealth or address historical wrongs against underdeveloped countries."
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.9 (5 ratings)
ISBN 978-0691137759
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Catastrophe:
Risk and Response
Richard A. Posner
Oxford University Press (December, 2005)
No Review
"Catastrophic risks are much greater than is commonly appreciated. Collision with an asteroid, runaway global warming, voraciously replicating nanomachines, a pandemic of gene-spliced smallpox launched by bioterrorists, and a world-ending accident in a high-energy particle accelerator, are among the possible extinction events that are sufficiently likely to warrant careful study. How should we respond to events that, for a variety of psychological and cultural reasons, we find it hard to wrap our minds around? Posner argues that realism about science and scientists, innovative applications of cost-benefit analysis, a scientifically literate legal profession, unprecedented international cooperation, and a pragmatic attitude toward civil liberties are among the keys to coping effectively with the catastrophic risks."
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.7 (15 ratings)
ISBN 978-0195306477
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Catastrophe:
Risk and Response (2nd ed.)
Richard A. Posner
Oxford University Press (September, 2012)
No Review
"In Catastrophe, Richard A. Posner addresses the threat of global disaster from a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective. Incorporating insights from economists, physical scientists, environmental scientists, psychologists, and other experts, Posner explains how we can minimize risks and differentiate low probability risks from more threatening high probability ones. He raises difficult questions about the role of politicians and policymakers in addressing catastrophic risk. Must we yield a degree of national sovereignty in order to deal effectively with global warming? Is limiting our civil liberties a necessary and proper response to the threat of bioterrorist attacks? Is investing in detection and interception systems for asteroids money well spent? How far can we press cost-benefit analysis in the design of responses to world-threatening events? These are but a few of the issues explored in this fascinating, disturbing, and necessary book.
"In this revised and updated edition, Posner incorporates many new scholarly insights about catastrophe and risk that have emerged in the wake of the 2004 Indonesian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial crisis, recent catastrophes which he discusses in detail."
Rating by Amazon customers: ? (0 ratings)
ISBN 978-0195379075
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The Inquisition of Climate Science
James Lawrence Powell
New York: Columbia University Press, August 2011
"Talk radio has done an end run around the voting populace. With Rush Limbaugh now the unofficial leader of the Republican Party and the far right controlling the five major syndicates, conservatives have a disproportionate voice in the medium—even in liberal cities such as New York, Boston, and San Francisco. Writing with his characteristic and incisive wit, Bill Press exposes the destructive power of Rush, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly, and the other polarizing figures of talk radio who dominate 90% of the political airwaves today. Citing their own words as evidence, Press brilliantly makes the case that much of what is broadcast on radio and television today is—at best—distorted and partisan, and—at worst—lies, propaganda and bigotry sold by these talented modern-day pitchmen who have followings in the millions."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.2 (30 ratings)
ISBN 978-0-312-60629-9
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Reality Check:
How Science Deniers Threaten Our Future
Donald R. Prothero
Pat Linse (Illus.)
Michael Shermer (Fwd.)
Indiana University Press; Reprint edition (February 13, 2017)
No Review
"The battles over evolution, climate change, childhood vaccinations, and the causes of AIDS, alternative medicine, oil shortages, population growth, and the place of science in our country?all are reaching a fevered pitch. Many people and institutions have exerted enormous efforts to misrepresent or flatly deny demonstrable scientific reality to protect their nonscientific ideology, their power, or their bottom line. To shed light on this darkness, Donald R. Prothero explains the scientific process and why society has come to rely on science not only to provide a better life but also to reach verifiable truths no other method can obtain. He describes how major scientific ideas that are accepted by the entire scientific community (evolution, anthropogenic global warming, vaccination, the HIV cause of AIDS, and others) have been attacked with totally unscientific arguments and methods. Prothero argues that science deniers pose a serious threat to society, as their attempts to subvert the truth have resulted in widespread scientific ignorance, increased risk of global catastrophes, and deaths due to the spread of diseases that could have been prevented."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (66 ratings)
ISBN 978-0253024541
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After Nature:
A Politics for the Anthropocene
Jedediah Purdy
Harvard University Press (September, 2015)
No Review
"Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. Henceforth, the world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists have called this new planetary epoch the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. The geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. Climate change is planetary engineering without design. These facts of the Anthropocene are scientific, but its shape and meaning are questions for politics-a politics that does not yet exist. After Nature develops a politics for this post-natural world.
"Jedediah Purdy begins with a history of how Americans have shaped their landscapes. He explores the competing traditions that still infuse environmental law and culture?a frontier vision of settlement and development, a wilderness-seeking Romanticism, a utilitarian attitude that tries to manage nature for human benefit, and a twentieth-century ecological view. These traditions are ways of seeing the world and humans' place in it. They are also modes of lawmaking that inscribe ideal visions on the earth itself. Each has shaped landscapes that make its vision of nature real, from wilderness to farmland to suburbs?opening some new ways of living on the earth while foreclosing others.
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.3 (79 ratings)
ISBN 978-0674368224
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Climate Change Policy in the United States:
The Science, the Politics and the Prospects for Change
Dianne Rahm
Columbia University Press (December 2017)
No Review
"This overview of global warming and its human causes examines the international agreements regarding climate change and the U.S. response to those agreements, as well as key provisions of the Kyoto Protocol, to explain the difficulties of any subsequent treaties. Framing the scientific debate against moral, ethical, and religious considerations, the book offers potential solutions. The book includes seven maps and tables, notes, bibliography, and index."
Rating by Amazon customers: ? (0 ratings)
ISBN 978-0786442997
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Lost Mountain:
A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness
Erik Reece
New York: Riverhead Books, February 2006
"A groundbreaking work of literary nonfiction that exposes how radical strip mining is destroying one of America's most precious natural resources and the communities that depend on it." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (82 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-59448-908-2
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Supercapitalism:
The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life
Robert B. Reich
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, September 2007
"Mid-twentieth-century capitalism has turned into global capitalism, and global capitalism—turbocharged, Web-based, and able to find and make almost anything just about anywhere—has turned into supercapitalism. But as Robert B. Reich makes clear in this eye-opening book, while supercapitalism is working wonderfully well to enlarge the economic pie, democracy—charged with caring for all citizens—is becoming less and less effective under its influence.
"Reich explains how widening inequalities of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and the spreading effects of global warming are the logical outcomes of supercapitalism. He shows us why companies, fighting harder than ever to maintain their competitive positions, have become even more deeply involved in politics; and how average citizens, seeking great deals and invested in the stock market to an unprecedented degree, are increasingly loath to stand by their values if it means biting the hands that feed them. He makes clear how the tools traditionally used to temper America's societal problems—fair taxation, well-funded public education, trade unions—have withered as supercapitalism has burgeoned.
"Reich sets out a clear course to a vibrant capitalism and a concurrent, equally vibrant democracy. He argues forcefully that the spheres of business and politics must be kept distinct. He calls for an end to the legal fiction that corporations are citizens, as well as the illusion that corporations can be 'socially responsible' until laws define social needs. Reich explains why we must stop treating companies as if they were people—and must therefore abolish the corporate income tax and levy it on shareholders instead, hold individuals rather than corporations guilty of criminal conduct, and not expect companies to be 'patriotic.' For, as Reich says, only people can be citizens, and only citizens should be allowed to participate in democratic decision making."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (160 ratings)
ISBN 978-0-307-26561-6
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The Eskimo and the Oil Man
The Battle at the Top of the World for America's Future
Bob Reiss
New York: Business Plus, May 2012
"The Arctic century is upon us. A great jockeying for power and influence has erupted among nations in the high north. At stake are trillions of dollars in profit or loss, US security, geopolitical influence and the fate of a fragile environment as well as the region's traditional people. As the ice melts and oil companies venture north, the polar regions may become the next Panama Canal, the next Arabian Peninsula—places on earth that remain relatively unknown in one century and become pivotal in the next. Now Shell oil plans to sink exploratory wells in the pristine waters off the North Slope of Alaska—a site that the company believes contains three times as much oil as the Gulf of Mexico.
"The Eskimo and the Oil Man tells this story through the eyes of two men, one an Iñupiat Eskimo leader on Alaska's North Slope, the other the head of Shell Oil's Alaska venture. Their saga is set against the background of an undersea land rush in the Arctic, with Russian bombers appearing off Alaska's coast, and rapid changes in ice that put millions of sea mammals at risk. The men's decisions will affect the daily lives of all Americans, in their cities and towns and also in their pocketbooks. The story begins as a fight and ends with a surprise.
"In the spirit of Thomas L. Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded, bestselling author Bob Reiss traveled in America's High North over three years and spent time with scientists, diplomats, military planners, Eskimo whale hunters and officials at the highest levels of the government. He traveled to remote villages and sailed on a US icebreaker. The Eskimo and the Oil Man reflects the issues dividing every American community wrestling with the balance between energy use and environmental protection, our love of cheap gas and the romance of pristine wilderness."
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.9 (27 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-4555-2524-9
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Getting to Green:
Saving Nature: A Bipartisan Solution
Frederic C. Rich
New York: W. W. Norton & Company (April, 2016)
No Review
"In Getting to Green, Frederic C. Rich argues that meaningful progress on urgent environmental issues can be made only on a bipartisan basis. Rich reminds us of American conservation's conservative roots and of the bipartisan political consensus that had Republican congressmen voting for, and Richard Nixon signing, the most important environmental legislation of the 1970s. He argues that faithfulness to conservative principles requires the GOP to support environmental protection, while at the same time he criticizes the Green movement for having drifted too far to the left and too often appearing hostile to business and economic growth.
"With a clear-eyed understanding of past failures and a realistic view of the future, Getting to Green argues that progress on environmental issues is within reach. The key is encouraging Greens and conservatives to work together in the space where their values overlap—what the book calls 'Center Green.' Center Green takes as its model the hugely successful national land trust movement, which has retained vigorous bipartisan support.
"Rich's program is pragmatic and non-ideological. It is rooted in the way America is, not in a utopian vision of what it could become. It measures policy not by whether it is the optimum solution but by the two-part test of whether it would make a meaningful contribution to an environmental problem and whether it is achievable politically. Application of the Center Green approach moves us away from some of the harmful orthodoxies of mainstream environmentalism and results in practical and actionable positions on climate change, energy policy, and other crucial issues. This is how we get to Green."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.7 (36 ratings)
ISBN 978-0393292473
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Losing Earth:
A Recent History
Nathaniel Rich
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April 2019
"By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change?including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours.
"The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich's groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon—the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight.
"Now expanded into book form, Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry's coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The book carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.7 (394 ratings)
ISBN 978-0-374-19133-7
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Hell and High Water
Global Warming—the Solution and the Politics—and What We Should Do
Joseph J. Romm
New York: William Morrow, December 2006
"Joseph Romm is the founder and executive director of the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions and a fellow at the Center for American Progress. Under President Clinton he was acting assistant secretary at the Department of Energy, heading the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The author of the award-winning The Hype About Hydrogen, he holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and lives in Washington, D.C."
"Romm explains that we already possess the technologies and know-how we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; what we lack is the will to act. As Romm analyzes the 'miscoverage' of global-warming realities in the press, especially the facts pertaining to dire changes already affecting plants, animals, and humans, he laments the perversity and folly of politicizing a global crisis. We must recognize, Romm asserts, that 'ideology trumps rationality' all too often in public discourse, preventing us from doing what needs to be done to avert still preventable catastrophes." – Donna Seaman, Booklist
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.3 (31 ratings)
ISBN 978-0-06-117212-0
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American Energy:
The Politics of 21st Century Policy
Walter A. Rosenbaum
CQ Press (March, 2014)
No Review
"There are rapid, and sometimes radical, changes now transforming energy production and consumption in the United States. Utilizing contemporary examples throughout his narrative, Walter A. Rosenbaum captures this transformation in American Energy: The Politics of 21st Century Policy while analyzing how important actors, institutions, and issues impact American energy policymaking. With clear explanations of relevant energy technologies?from controversial fracking to mountain top mining to nuclear waste storage?the book first looks at the policy options available in governing the energy economy and then discusses specific resources (petroleum and natural gas, coal, nuclear power, electricity, renewable energy, conservation) and the global energy challenges associated with climate change. This is a perfect supplement for any environmental politics course."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.0 (2 ratings)
ISBN 978-1452205373
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Environmental Politics and Policy (12th ed.)
Walter A. Rosenbaum
CQ Press (October 5, 2022)
No Review
"Walter A. Rosenbaum's classic Environmental Politics and Policy, Twelfth Edition, provides definitive coverage of environmental politics and policy, lively case material, and a balanced assessment of current environmental issues. The newly streamlined first half of the book sets needed context and describes the policy process, while the second half covers specific environmental issues such as air and water, toxic and hazardous substances, energy, and global policymaking on issues like climate change and trans-boundary politics. The Twelfth Edition includes updated case studies and a look at the transition in environmental policies between the Trump and Biden administrations, offering students a current and relevant look at the continuing challenge of reconciling sound science with practical politics."
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.8 (8 ratings)
ISBN 978-1071844519
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Political Ecology:
System Change Not Climate Change
Dimitri Roussopoulos
Black Rose Books (September 24, 2018)
No Review
" 'System change not climate change!' This cry reverberated throughout the streets of Paris during 2015's heated COP21 climate negotiations. It was as much a demand as it was an indictment of the failure of existing political institutions to respond adequately to our world's ecological crisis. In an era of slow motion apocalypse, with 3,500 international environmental agreements to date, where did everything go wrong?
"In this new and greatly expanded edition of his 1991 classic Political Ecology, Dimitri Roussopoulos delves into the history of environmentalism to explain the failure of the state management of the ecological crisis. He explores civil society's various past responses and the prospects for channeling environmentalist aspirations into political alternatives, emphasizing the ideas of social ecology and the central role of democratic neighborhoods and cities in developing alternatives. Ecologists, Roussopoulos argues, aim further than simply protecting the environment—they call for new communities, new lifestyles, and a new way of doing politics.
"This US edition also includes a new preface analyzing the implications of Trump's presidency for climate politics and an extensive new conclusion analyzing the Paris Accord. Revised, expanded, and updated, Political Ecology is a classic that provides an essential, timely history of the environmental movement now when we need it most."
Rating by Amazon customers: ? (0 ratings)
ISBN 978-1551646534
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Oil Wars
Yahia Said
Mary Kaldor & Terry Lynn Karl (Editors)
Pluto Press (May 20, 2007)
No Review
"Yahia Said is a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics. Mary Kaldor is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics and the author of numerous books. Terry Lynn Karl is Gildred Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies at Stanford University and author of The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States."
"Are oil-rich countries prone to war? And if so, why? There is a widely held belief that contemporary wars are motivated by the desire of great powers like the United States or Russia to control precious oil resources and to ensure energy security. This book argues that the main reason why oil-rich countries are prone to war is because of the character of their society and economy. Sectarian groups compete for access to oil resources and finance their military adventures through smuggling oil, kidnapping oil executives, or blowing up pipelines. Outside intervention only makes things worse. The use of conventional military force as in Iraq can bring neither stability nor security of supply. This book examines the relationship between oil and war in six different regions: Angola, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Indonesia, Nigeria and Russia. Each country has substantial oil reserves, and has a long history of conflict. The contributors assess what part oil plays in causing, aggravating or mitigating war in each region and how this relation has altered with the changing nature of war. It offers a novel conceptual approach bringing together Kaldor's work on 'new wars' and Karl's work on the petro-state."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (2 ratings)
ISBN 978-0745324791
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Environmental Law and Policy (6th ed.)
James Salzman & Barton Thompson Jr
Foundation Press (August 28, 2024)
No Review
"Environmental Law and Policy is a user-friendly, concise, affordable treatment of environmental law. Written to be highly readable and enjoyable rather than a dry reference source, the book provides a broad conceptual overview of environmental law while also explaining the major statutes and cases. The book includes multiple problem exercises, describing a legal or policy conflict in detail and asking students to identify and assess solutions. The new edition is fully updated to include policy initiatives of the Biden Administration, important recent Supreme Court decisions through the 2023-2024 term (Sackett, Loper Bright Enterprises, Jarkesy, Cedar Point Nursery), and the emerging role of Native American tribes in environmental law. The first part of the book provides an engaging discussion of the major themes and issues that cross-cut environmental law, including a new problem exercise on the Rights of Nature. The second part of the book examines the substance of environmental law, with separate sections on each of the major statutes. The third part of the book discusses important issues of natural resources law, including the public trust doctrine, endangered species conservation, wetlands protection, and energy issues. Part four addresses environmental impact statements and the National Environmental Policy Act. The book is one of the most widely adopted environmental texts not only in law schools but in both undergraduate and graduate classes."
Rating by Amazon customers: ? (0 ratings)
ISBN 978-1609303051
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Lawless World:
America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules from FDR's Atlantic Charter to George W. Bush's Illegal War
Philippe Sands
New York: Viking Books, October 2005
"Sands, a British international lawyer and law professor, delivers a cool, reasoned lashing to the Bush administration for leading—and to Tony Blair for colluding with—a 'full-scale assault' on the international rule of law, in this richly detailed survey of modern international legal disputes." – Publisher's Weekly
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.1 (13 ratings)
ISBN 978-0-670-03452-9
SJ3 341 Sands
A Crisis Like No Other:
Understanding and Defeating Global Warming
Robert De Saro
Bentham Science Publishers (March 28, 2023)
No Review
"Robert De Saro is president and founder of Energy Research Company, a high-tech research and development firm through which he researches and publishes extensively on energy topics, some of them directly related to global warming."
"A Crisis Like No Other: Understanding and Defeating Global Warming couples engaging and creative storytelling with accurate details to explain global warming. It covers both the technical and human issues of global warming by addressing what's causing global warming, and why people don't believe it exists. The book tells readers how to convince others that global warming is not only real, but life-threatening, and offers a clearly laid out path to solve it. The book is accurate and carefully researched, drawing on the author's thirty years studying the science of global warming, and the human psyche that surrounds it.
"The author breaks down the subject into four parts, which can be thought of as four mini-books in one. The first part covers the psychology of global warming denial, how to defend ourselves against its lies and fake news, and how to convince others of global warming's grave harm. The second part describes exactly what global warming is. The third answers the question what makes us so sure? Finally, the last part provides a road map showing us how to defeat global warming.
"This book is comprehensive, fast paced, and easily accessible to readers from all walks of life. It provides an overview of everything one needs to know about global warming and, as such, is an excellent survey of global warming topics. In addition to being an easy and enjoyable read for the general public, A Crisis Like No Other: Understanding and Defeating Global Warming serves as a handy primer on climate change for environmental science classes."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.8 (7 ratings)
ISBN 978-1681089621
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Why We Can't Afford the Rich
Andrew Sayer
Richard Wilkinson (Foreword)
Policy Press (April, 2015)
No Review
"Even as inequalities widen, the effects of austerity deepen, and the consequences of recession linger, in many countries the wealth of the rich has soared. Why We Can't Afford the Rich exposes the unjust and dysfunctional mechanisms that allow the top 1% to siphon off wealth produced by others through the control of property and money. Leading social scientist Andrew Sayer shows how over the past three decades the rich worldwide have increased their ability to hide their wealth, create indebtedness, and expand their political influence.
"Aimed at all engaged citizens, this important and accessible book uses simple distinctions to burst the myth of the rich as especially talented wealth creators. But more than this, as the risk of runaway climate change grows, it shows how the rich are threatening the planet by banking on unsustainable growth. Forcefully arguing that the crises of economy and climate can only be resolved by radical change, Sayer makes clear that we must make economies sustainable, fair, and conducive to well being for all." (Emphasis added)
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (14 ratings)
ISBN 978-1447320791
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Science as a Contact Sport:
Inside the Battle To Save Earth's Climate
Stephen H. Schneider
Tim Flannery (Intro.)
Washington: National Geographic Society, November 2009
"Stephen H. Schneider (1945-2010) received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Plasma Physics from Columbia University in 1971. In 1975, he founded the interdisciplinary journal, Climatic Change, and continues to serve as its editor. Schneider was honored in 1992 with a MacArthur Fellowship for his ability to integrate and interpret the results of global climate research through public lectures, seminars, classroom teaching, environmental assessment committees, media appearances, Congressional testimonies, and research collaboration with colleagues. He has consulted with federal agencies and/or White House staff in the Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations. Schneider was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2002 and received both the National Conservation Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation and the Edward T. Law Roe Award of the Society of Conservation Biology in 2003. He has been an author for all 4 assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, and served as a Coordinating Lead Author in Working Group 2 for the last two reports as well as serving on the Synthesis writing teams. In 2000, he and Richard Moss co-authored the uncertainties guidance paper for IPCC authors. His recent work has centered on the importance of risk management in climate-policy decision making, given the uncertainties in future projections of global climate change, and he continues to serve as an adviser to decision makers and stakeholders in industry, government and nonprofit sectors on possible climate-related events and policy responses. He is also engaged in improving public understanding of science and environment through extensive media communication and public outreach."
"Schneider, part of the Nobel Prize-winning team that shared the accolade with Al Gore in 2007, had a front-row seat at this unfolding environmental meltdown. Piecing together events like a detective story, Schneider reveals that as expert consensus grew, well-informed activists warned of dangerous changes no one knew how to predict precisely—and special interests seized on that very uncertainty to block any effective response. He persuasively outlines a plan to avert the building threat and develop a positive, practical policy that will bring climate change back under our control, help the economy with a new generation of green energy jobs and productivity, and reduce the dependence on unreliable exporters of oil—and thus ensure a future for ourselves and our planet that's as rich with promise as our past."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.3 (45 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-4262-0540-8
SJ0 6/22/2018
The Geopolitics of Renewables
(Lecture Notes in Energy, Book 61)
Daniel Scholten (Editor)
Springer (February 9, 2018)
No Review
"Renewables are a game changer for interstate energy relations. Their abundance and intermittency, possibilities for decentral generation and use of rare earth materials, and generally electric nature of transportation make them very different from fossil fuels. What do these geographic and technical characteristics of renewable energy systems imply for infrastructure topology and operations, business models, and energy markets? What are the consequences for the strategic realities and policy considerations of producer, consumer, and transit countries and energy-related patterns of cooperation and conflict between them? Who are the winners and losers?"
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (1 rating)
ISBN 978-3319678542
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Sons of Wichita
How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty
Daniel Schulman
New York: Grand Central Publishing, May 2014
"Daniel Schulman is a senior editor in the Washington bureau of Mother Jones, and a founding member of the magazine's investigative journalism team. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, Psychology Today, The Village Voice, and many other publications. He splits his time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Washington, DC."
I include this book because it gives insight into the thinking of the Koch family. Patriarch Fred Koch made his fortune in oil. Of his four sons, Charles and David continued in that tradition, and also primarily shared their father's dedication to conservative and libertarian causes. They are among the prime facilitators of resistance to low-carbon energy and climate-change mitigation.
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.3 (880 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-455-51873-9
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Five Times Faster:
Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change
Simon Sharpe
Cambridge University Press (June 6, 2023)
No Review
"Simon Sharpe is Director of Economics for the Climate Champions Team and a Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute. He designed and led flagship international campaigns of the UK's Presidency of the UN climate change talks (COP 26) in 2020-2021; worked as the head of private office to a minister of energy and climate change in the UK Government; and has served on diplomatic postings in China and India. He has published influential academic papers and created groundbreaking international initiatives in climate change risk assessment, economics, policy, and diplomacy."
"We need to act five times faster to avoid dangerous climate change. As Greenland melts, Australia burns, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, we think we know who the villains are: oil companies, consumerism, weak political leaders. But what if the real blocks to progress are the ideas and institutions that are supposed to be helping us? Five Times Faster is an inside story from Simon Sharpe, who has spent ten years at the forefront of climate change policy and diplomacy. In our fight to avoid dangerous climate change, science is pulling its punches, diplomacy is picking the wrong battles, and economics has been fighting for the other side. This provocative and engaging book sets out how we should rethink our strategies and reorganise our efforts in the fields of science, economics, and diplomacy, so that we can act fast enough to stay safe."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (87 ratings)
ISBN 978-1009326490
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The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy
David Shearman & Joseph Wayne Smith
Praeger (August, 2007)
No Review
"This provocative book presents compelling evidence that the fundamental problem behind environmental destruction—and climate change in particular—is the operation of liberal democracy."
"Climate change threatens the future of civilization, but humanity is impotent in effecting solutions. Even in those nations with a commitment to reduce greenhouse emissions, they continue to rise. This failure mirrors those in many other spheres that deplete the fish of the sea, erode fertile land, destroy native forests, pollute rivers and streams, and utilize the world's natural resources beyond their replacement rate. In this provocative book, Shearman and Smith present evidence that the fundamental problem causing environmental destruction?and climate change in particular?is the operation of liberal democracy. Its flaws and contradictions bestow upon government?and its institutions, laws, and the markets and corporations that provide its sustenance?an inability to make decisions that could provide a sustainable society."
"Vandana Shiva, a world-renowned environmental leader and thinker, is director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology and Ecology. Her many books include Ecofeminism, Soil, Not Oil and Staying Alive. Shiva has served as an adviser to governments in India and abroad as well as non-governmental organizations including the Women's Environment Development Organization and the Third World Network. She is one of the leaders of the International Forum on Globalization, and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (1993)."
"World-renowned environmental activist and physicist Vandana Shiva calls for a radical shift in the values that govern democracies, condemning the role that unrestricted capitalism has played in the destruction of environments and livelihoods. She explores the issues she helped bring to international attention—genetic food engineering, culture theft, and natural resource privatization—uncovering their links to the rising tide of fundamentalism, violence against women, and planetary death. Struggles on the streets of Seattle and Cancun and in homes and farms across the world have yielded a set of principles based on inclusion, nonviolence, reclaiming the commons, and freely sharing the earth's resources. These ideals, which Dr. Shiva calls "Earth Democracy," serve as an urgent call to peace and as the basis for a just and sustainable future."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.1 (8 ratings)
ISBN 978-1783607792
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Undermining Science:
Suppression and Distortion in the Bush Administration
Seth Shulman
Berkeley: University of California Press, January 2007
"This vitally important exposé shows how the Bush administration has systematically misled Americans on a wide range of scientific issues affecting public health, foreign policy, and the environment by ignoring, suppressing, manipulating, or even distorting scientific research. It is the first book to focus exclusively on how this explosive issue has played out during the Presidency of George W. Bush and the first to comprehensively document his administration's abuses of science.
"In 2001, a group of eminent American scientists affiliated with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) contacted Seth Shulman, an experienced investigative journalist, to look into charges of serious mishandling of scientific information in the current administration. Shulman's investigation resulted in the groundbreaking report 'Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making,' which served as the basis for a highly publicized UCS scientists' statement accusing the Bush administration of a misuse of science that was signed by dozens of Nobel laureates, National Medal of Science recipients, and members of the National Academy of Sciences. To date, more than 8,000 scientists across the country have signed the statement based upon Shulman's reporting. This book, drawing upon scores of interviews and including never-released information, goes beyond the UCS report to document the Bush administration's suppression and distortion of science, bringing this issue to a wider audience.
"Shulman explains that, by knowingly misrepresenting and suppressing the truth, the Bush administration broke its covenant with its constituents in the most fundamental way possible, with consequences that reach far beyond the scientific community."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (11 ratings)
ISBN 978-0-520-24702-4
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This Book Will Save the Planet:
A Climate-Justice Primer for Activists and Changemakers
Dany Sigwalt
Aurélia Durand (Illustrator)
Frances Lincoln Children's Books; Illustrated edition (August 2, 2022)
Reading age: 12-16 years | Grade level: 7-11
No Review
"Dany Sigwalt is a DC native, parent, and Co-Executive Director of Power Shift Network, an organization that works to mobilise the collective power of young people to mitigate climate change. She is working for climate justice, liberation, and healing for Black folks & all people.
Aurélia Durand is a French graphic artist. Her work, which includes the illustrations for the #1 New York Times bestseller This Book Is Anti-Racist, is a vivid celebration of diversity; she dedicates her artistic voice to matters involving representation. Aurélia represents Afro-descendants as joyful, proud, and empowered—a united community whose destinies are intertwined. These colorful personalities present the unified voice of a global community whose hopes, dreams, and desires envision an inclusive future for all. Her work has been featured in advertising campaigns, galleries, and editorial magazines; her clients include Nike, The New Yorker, Facebook, and more. Find her on Instagram: @4ur3lia."
"A rousing and radical investigation into the climate crisis, its causes, and how to fight for the most vulnerable people affected by it, This Book Will Save the Planet is a vibrantly illustrated study of one of humanity's most significant threats.
"With this third title in the New York Times #1 best-selling Empower the Future series, you'll gain a deeper understanding of climate change and climate justice.
"Our planet is in crisis. The ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, wildfires are raging… and those most affected by global warming are marginalized communities across the globe.
"But all is not lost—there's still time for each and every one of us to make a difference.
"Through the lens of intersectionality, author Dany Sigwalt lays out the framework for how we can come together to fight climate change, and how we can work to put people over profit. The planet is not protected if all its inhabitants are not; the people are not protected if the planet they inhabit is not.
"In this book, you will:
Discover the core principles of climate justice
Learn how solidarity, community, and mutual aid can change the world
Find out how to use your privilege to stand-up for other people
"At the end of each chapter, there are activities and calls to action to get you thinking and to grow your knowledge. All you need is a pen and a piece of paper.
"With kaleidoscopic and vibrant illustrations by artist Aurélia Durand, this book is written for everyone who lives on planet Earth. By the end, you'll have the tools you need to go out and make a difference.
"The Empower the Future series is a collection of vital and urgent books about how we can all build a better world. Other titles in the list include This Book is Feminist and This Book is Anti-Racist."
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.9 (26 ratings)
ISBN 978-0711268890
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Nature Unbound:
Bureaucracy vs. the Environment
Kenneth J. Sim, Randy T. Simmons & Ryan M. Yonk
Independent Institute (March, 2016)
No Review
"What if what we think we know about ecology and environmental policy is just wrong? What if environmental laws often make things worse? What if the very idea of nature has been hijacked by politics? What if wilderness is something we create in our minds, as opposed to being an actual description of nature? Developing answers to these questions and developing implications of those answers are our purposes in this book. Two themes guide us—political ecology and political entrepreneurship. Combining these two concepts, which we develop in some detail, leads us to recognize that sometimes in their original design and certainly in their implementation, major U.S. environmental laws are more about opportunism and ideology than good management and environmental improvement." – the authors
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (1 rating)
ISBN 978-1598132274
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The Deniers:
The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud
** And those who are too fearful to do so
Lawrence Solomon
Richard Vigilante Books (April 1, 2008)
No Review
"The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (128 ratings)
ISBN 978-0980076318
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The Deniers:
The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud
Lawrence Solomon
Richard Vigilante Books (April 16, 2010)
No Review
"Eminent environmentalist Lawrence Solomon set out to find whether any real scientists diverged from global warming orthodoxy. What he found shocked him. Not only did world renowned scientists dissent on every headline warming issue, but the dissenters were far more accomplished and eminent scientists. This fully revised new paperback edition features two new chapters: fresh exposes on climate profiteers (there are many) and global warming affirmers (there are few)." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.5 (11 ratings)
ISBN 978-0980076370
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The Bad Science and Bad Policy of Obama's Global Warming Agenda
Roy W. Spencer
Encounter Books (January, 2010)
No Review
"As the U.N. moves closer to a new global warming treaty, it is time to examine the calls for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The health and welfare of humanity has benefited from access to fossil fuels, and any drastic move to limit that access must have extraordinary evidence to support it.
"While alternative energy technologies will increasingly be relied upon in the face of dwindling fossil fuel supplies, leading climate researcher Dr. Roy W. Spencer argues that the free market is the best mechanism for solving the problem. In addition, Dr. Spencer addresses the new science that suggests that our modern fears of anthropogenic global warming might well be unfounded, because the climate system itself might be responsible for causing what is now known as climate change."
Rating by Amazon customers: 3.4 (19 ratings)
ISBN 978-1594034824
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Climate Confusion:
How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies That Hurt the Poor
Roy W. Spencer
Encounter Books (March, 2008)
No Review
"Forsaking blindingly technical statistics and doomsday scenarios, Dr. Spencer explains in simple terms how the climate system really works, why man's role in global warming is more myth than science, and how the global warming hype has corrupted Washington and the scientific community." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (260 ratings)
ISBN 978-1594033735
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Red Sky at Morning:
America and the Crisis of the Global Environment
James Gustave Speth
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2nd edition, March 2005
No Review
"James Gustave Speth is dean and professor in the practice of environmental policy and sustainable development at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University. He founded and was president of the World Resources Institute, co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, served as adviser on environmental issues for Presidents Carter and Clinton, and was chief executive officer of the United Nations Development Programme. For his role in bringing the global warming issue to wide public attention, Speth was recently awarded the prestigious Blue Planet Prize."
"This book will change the way we understand the future of our planet. It is both alarming and hopeful. James Gustave Speth, renowned as a visionary environmentalist leader, warns that in spite of all the international negotiations and agreements of the past two decades, efforts to protect Earth's environment are not succeeding. Still, he says, the challenges are not insurmountable. He offers comprehensive, viable new strategies for dealing with environmental threats around the world.
"The author explains why current approaches to critical global environmental problems—climate change, biodiversity loss, deterioration of marine environments, deforestation, water shortages, and others—don't work. He offers intriguing insights into why we have been able to address domestic environmental threats with some success while largely failing at the international level. Setting forth eight specific steps to a sustainable future, Speth convincingly argues that dramatically different government and citizen action are now urgent. If ever a book could be described as 'essential,' this is it."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.2 (23 ratings)
ISBN 978-0300107760
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They Knew:
The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis
James Gustave Speth
The MIT Press (August 24, 2021)
No Review
"In 2015, a group of twenty-one young people sued the federal government for violating their constitutional rights by promoting the climate catastrophe, depriving them of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. They Knew offers evidence for their claims, presenting a devastating, play-by-play account of the federal government's role in bringing about today's climate crisis. James Speth, tapped by the plaintiffs as an expert on climate, documents how administrations from Carter to Trump—despite having information about climate change and the connection to fossil fuels—continued aggressive support of a fossil fuel based energy system.
"What did the federal government know and when did it know it? Speth asks, echoing another famous cover up. What did the federal government do and what did it not do? They Knew (an updated version of the Expert Report Speth prepared for the lawsuit) presents the most compelling indictment yet of the government's role in the climate crisis, showing a forty-year failure to take action.
"Since Juliana v. United States was filed, the federal government has repeatedly delayed the case. Yet even in legal limbo, it has helped inspire a generation of youthful climate activists."
An Our Children's Trust Book
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (1 rating)
ISBN 978-0262542982
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Climate Code Red
The Case for Emergency Action
David Spratt & Philip Sutton
Scribe Publications Pty Ltd., June 2008
No Review
"This meticulously documented call-to-action reveals extensive scientific evidence that the global warming crisis is far worse than officially indicated—and that we're almost at the point of no return.
"Serious climate-change impacts are already happening: large ice-sheets are disintegrating, sea-level rises will reach 5 metres this century, and we are seeing devastating species loss.
"It is no longer a case of how much more we can 'safely' emit, but whether we can stop emissions and produce a deliberate cooling before the Earth's climate system reaches a point beyond any hope of human restoration.
"These imperatives are incompatible with 'politics as usual' and 'business as usual'—we face a sustainability emergency that urgently requires a clear break from the politics of failure-inducing compromise."
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (4 ratings)
ISBN 978-1921372209
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The Scotia Widows:
Inside Their Lawsuit Against Big Daddy Coal
Gerald M. Stern
New York: Random House, August 2008
"On March 9, 1976, a violent explosion, fueled by high concentrations of methane gas and coal dust, ripped through the Scotia mine in the heart of Eastern Kentucky coal country. The blast killed fifteen miners who were working nearly three and a half miles underground; two days later, a second explosion took the lives of eleven rescue workers. For the miners' surviving family members, the loss of their husbands, fathers, and sons was only the beginning of their nightmare.
"In The Scotia Widows, Gerald M. Stern, the groundbreaking litigator and acclaimed author of The Buffalo Creek Disaster, recounts the epic four-year legal struggle waged by the widows in the aftermath of the disaster. Stern shares a story of loss, scandal, and perseverance—and the plaintiffs' fight for justice against the titanic forces of 'Big Daddy Coal.' "
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (22 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-400-06764-0
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Short Circuiting Policy:
Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States
Leah Cardamore Stokes
Oxford University Press (April 15, 2020)
No Review
"Leah Cardamore Stokes is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California Santa Barbara. Her research and writing on climate change and energy policy has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian, as well as numerous scholarly journals."
"In 1999, Texas passed a landmark clean energy law, beginning a groundswell of new policies that promised to make the US a world leader in renewable energy. As Leah Stokes shows in Short Circuiting Policy, however, that policy did not lead to momentum in Texas, which failed to implement its solar laws or clean up its electricity system. Examining clean energy laws in Texas, Kansas, Arizona, and Ohio over a thirty-year time frame, Stokes argues that organized combat between advocate and opponent interest groups is central to explaining why states are not on track to address the climate crisis. She tells the political history of our energy institutions, explaining how fossil fuel companies and electric utilities have promoted climate denial and delay. Stokes further explains the limits of policy feedback theory, showing the ways that interest groups drive retrenchment through lobbying, public opinion, political parties and the courts. More than a history of renewable energy policy in modern America, Short Circuiting Policy offers a bold new argument about how the policy process works, and why seeming victories can turn into losses when the opposition has enough resources to roll back laws."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (104 ratings)
ISBN 978-0190074258
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Governing the Climate:
New Approaches to Rationality, Power and Politics
Johannes Stripple & Harriet Bulkeley (Editors)
Cambridge University Press (November, 2013)
No Review
"Despite a growing interest in critical social and political studies of climate change, the field remains fragmented and diffuse. This is the first volume to collect this body of scholarship, providing a key reference point in the growing debate about climate change across the social sciences. The book provides a new set of insights into the ways in which climate change is creating new forms of social order, and the ways in which they are structured through the workings of rationality, power and politics. Governing the Climate is invaluable for three main audiences: social science researchers and advanced students in the field of climate change; the wider research community interested in global environmental politics and global environmental governance; and policy makers and researchers concerned more broadly with environmental politics at international, national and local levels."
Rating by Amazon customers: ? (0 ratings)
ISBN 978-1107046269
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Climategate:
A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam
Brian Sussman
Washington, DC: WND Books, 2010
"Those now notorious intercepted emails documenting leading scientists conspiring to squelch global-warming skeptics and falsifying data proved exactly what Brian Sussman has been saying for years. Climategate is intended for anyone who has ever expressed skepticism about the clamorous environmentalist claims that the Earth is in peril because of mankind's appetite for carbon-based fuels. By tracing the origins of the current climate scare, Sussman guides the reader from the diabolical minds of Marx and Engles in the 1800s, to the global governance machinations of the United Nations today. Climategate is a call to action, warning Americans that their future is being undermined by a phony pseudo-science aimed at altering and dominating every aspect of life in the United States and the world."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.7 (297 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-935071-83-9
SJ3 363.7387 Sussman
Eco-Tyranny:
How the Left's Green Agenda will Dismantle America
Brian Sussman
Washington, DC: WND Books, April 2012
No Review
"Exorbitant energy prices, rolling blackouts, acute food shortages, critical water deficiencies, and private property rights usurped: this is America's future as envisioned by the environmental movement's well-honed green agenda. In order to de-develop the United States, the Left is using phony environmental crises to demonize capitalism and liberty, and purposefully withhold America's vast natural resources—and the Obama Administration is piloting the plan. Eco-Tyranny, by best-selling author Brian Sussman, presents a rational strategy to responsibly harvest our nation's vast resources in order to fulfill the future needs of a rapidly growing population."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (93 ratings)
ISBN 978-1936488506
SJ3 320.58 Sussman
Climate Cult:
Exposing and Defeating Their War on Life, Liberty, and Property
Brian Sussman
Post Hill Press (June 10, 2024)
No Review
"Brian Sussman is an award-winning meteorologist, Hall of Fame talk radio host, author, and podcaster. After graduating from the University of Missouri, Brian became a TV meteorologist and science reporter for KPIX Channel 5 in San Francisco, as well as the regular fill-in weather reporter for CBS This Morning in New York. Prompted by an urge to speak his mind about politics and current events, he transitioned to talk radio in San Francisco on KSFO-AM, where he hosted The KSFO Morning Show for nearly two decades while also filling in for Mark Levin's and Michael Savage's national programs. His first book, Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam, instantly became a bestseller. He hosts his own podcast called The Brian Sussman Show."
"Climate Cult reveals how the climate change agenda has reached into virtually every corner of American life, reducing personal freedom, exacerbating inflation, usurping property rights, and redefining social justice, equity, and equality—to save liberty, it must be stopped.
"'Of over thirty books I have read on this topic, Brian Sussman has the best understanding of what the climate movement is all about…Climate Cult is a must-read.' –Dr. Neil Frank, Former Director, National Hurricane Center
"The climate change agenda has nothing to do with a pristine environment. Instead, it's a devious scheme designed to upend America's foundational rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
"Originally conceived by early disciples of Marx, this scheme relies on ecological crises—both real and imagined—to frighten the masses into cult-like submission as it seeks to create a brave new world. Advanced by the United Nations, promoted by the World Economic Forum, practiced at the federal and state level, embraced by the educational system, and sold by media mouthpieces, the climate change agenda has invaded nearly every aspect of society, threatening to dismantle American liberty and advance a total reset of the world's economy. In Climate Cult, Brian Sussman presents impeccable research and persuasive facts that will embolden you to take a stand against this dangerous charade."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (8 ratings)
ISBN 978-8888455449
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Just Cool It!:
The Climate Crisis and What We Can Do — A Post-Paris Agreement Game Plan
David Suzuki & Ian Hanington
Greystone Books (April, 2017)
No Review
"Climate change is the most important crisis humanity has faced, but we still confront huge barriers to resolving it. So, what do we do, and is there hope for humanity? The problem itself is complex, and there's no single solution. But by understanding the barriers to resolving global warming and by employing a wide range of solutions—from shifting to clean energy to planting trees to reforming agricultural practices—we can get the world back on track.
"Just Cool It! is David Suzuki at his most passionate. In this book, he offers a comprehensive look at the current state of climate science and knowledge and the many ways to resolve the climate crisis, imploring us to do what's necessary to live in a better, cleaner future. When enough people demand action, change starts happening—and this time, it could be monumental."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (16 ratings)
ISBN 978-1771642590
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Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy:
Defending Reason in a Free Society
Michael J. Thompson & Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker (Editors)
Prometheus (December 11, 2018)
No Review
"Defending the role that science must play in democratic society—science defined not just in terms of technology but as a way of approaching problems and viewing the world. In this collection of original essays, experts in political science, the hard sciences, philosophy, history, and other disciplines examine contemporary anti-science trends, and make a strong case that respect for science is essential for a healthy democracy. The editors note that a contradiction lies at the heart of modern society. On the one hand, we inhabit a world increasingly dominated by science and technology. On the other, opposition to science is prevalent in many forms—from arguments against the teaching of evolution and the denial of climate change to the promotion of alternative medicine and outlandish claims about the effects of vaccinations. Adding to this grass-roots hostility toward science are academics espousing postmodern relativism, which equates the methods of science with regimes of "power-knowledge." While these cultural trends are sometimes marketed in the name of "democratic pluralism," the contributors contend that such views are actually destructive of a broader culture appropriate for a democratic society. This is especially true when facts are degraded as "fake news" and scientists are dismissed as elitists. Rather than enhancing the capacity for rational debate and critical discourse, the authors view such anti-science stances on either the right or the left as a return to premodern forms of subservience to authority and an unwillingness to submit beliefs to rational scrutiny. Beyond critiquing attitudes hostile to science, the essays in this collection put forward a positive vision for how we might better articulate the relation between science and democracy and the benefits that accrue from cultivating this relationship."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.7 (13 ratings)
ISBN 978-1633884748
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Climate of Capitulation:
An Insider's Account of State Power in a Coal Nation
Vivian E. Thomson
The MIT Press (April 21, 2017)
No Review
"Environmental policy expert Vivian E. Thomson is former Professor in the Departments of Environmental Sciences and Politics at the University of Virginia, where she was on the faculty from 1997 to 2017 and where she directed the Environmental Thought and Practice BA Program. She has been an air pollution policymaker at the national and state levels in the USA and she has been Distinguished Fulbright Professor of American Studies in Denmark."
"In Climate of Capitulation, Vivian Thomson offers an insider's account of how power is wielded at the state level when coal air pollution threatens people and ecosystems. Thomson, a former member of Virginia's State Air Pollution Control Board, identifies a 'climate of capitulation' in state government — a deeply rooted favoritism toward coal and electric utilities in states' air pollution policies.
"Thomson illuminates overt and covert power struggles that involved a host of players, including Governor Tim Kaine, and she exposes the root causes of Virginia's climate of capitulation. Extending her analysis to fifteen other coal-dependent states, Thomson offers policy reforms aimed at mitigating ingrained biases toward coal and electric utilities in states' air pollution policy making."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.8 (13 ratings)
ISBN 978-0262036344
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The Climate Book:
The Facts and the Solutions
Greta Thunberg
Penguin Press (February 14, 2023)
"Greta Thunberg was born in 2003. In August 2018, she started a school strike for the climate outside the Swedish Parliament that has since spread all over the world. She is an activist in Fridays for Future and has spoken at climate rallies across the globe, as well as at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the US Congress, and the United Nations."
"We still have time to change the world. From Greta Thunberg, the world's leading climate activist, comes the essential handbook for making it happen.
"You might think it's an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, at a scale and speed never seen, against all the odds. There is hope - but only if we listen to the science before it's too late.
"In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts - geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders - to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Throughout, illuminating and often shocking grayscale charts, graphs, diagrams, photographs, and illustrations underscore their research and their arguments. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild's strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried?
"We are alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. Together, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now."
There are 13 one-star customer reviews on Amazon. Three concern damage to the book in shipment. This, by "Garick Newtzie" (?), is the best of the others (and that's not saying much):
"Never listen to a political activist about a scientific topic. The world isn't going to end. There are many, many pressure relief valves in the atmosphere of the earth. Just literally read anything by Dr. Richard Lindzen who is a MIT professor and has studied this his whole career."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (1,018 ratings)
ISBN 978-0593492307
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The Republican Reversal:
Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump
James Morton Turner & Andrew C. Isenberg
Harvard University Press (November 12, 2018)
No Review
"Not long ago, Republicans could take pride in their party's tradition of environmental leadership. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the GOP helped to create the Environmental Protection Agency, extend the Clean Air Act, and protect endangered species. Today, as Republicans denounce climate change as a 'hoax' and seek to dismantle the environmental regulatory state they worked to build, we are left to wonder: What happened?
"In The Republican Reversal, James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg show that the party's transformation began in the late 1970s, with the emergence of a new alliance of pro-business, libertarian, and anti-federalist voters. This coalition came about through a concerted effort by politicians and business leaders, abetted by intellectuals and policy experts, to link the commercial interests of big corporate donors with states'-rights activism and Main Street regulatory distrust. Fiscal conservatives embraced cost-benefit analysis to counter earlier models of environmental policy making, and business tycoons funded think tanks to denounce federal environmental regulation as economically harmful, constitutionally suspect, and unchristian, thereby appealing to evangelical views of man's God-given dominion of the Earth.
"As Turner and Isenberg make clear, the conservative abdication of environmental concern stands out as one of the most profound turnabouts in modern American political history, critical to our understanding of the GOP's modern success. The Republican reversal on the environment is emblematic of an unwavering faith in the market, skepticism of scientific and technocratic elites, and belief in American exceptionalism that have become the party's distinguishing characteristics."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (6 ratings)
ISBN 978-0674979970
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Atmospheric Justice:
A Political Theory of Climate Change
Steve Vanderheiden
Oxford University Press; 1 edition (April 16, 2008)
No Review
"When the policies and activities of one country or generation harm both other nations and later generations, they constitute serious injustices. Recognizing the broad threat posed by anthropogenic climate change, advocates for an international climate policy development process have expressly aimed to mitigate this pressing contemporary environmental threat in a manner that promotes justice. Yet, while making justice a primary objective of global climate policy has been the movement's noblest aspiration, it remains an onerous challenge for policymakers.
"Atmospheric Justice is the first single-authored work of political theory that addresses this pressing challenge via the conceptual frameworks of justice, equality, and responsibility. Throughout this incisive study, Steve Vanderheiden points toward ways to achieve environmental justice by exploring how climate change raises issues of both international and intergenerational justice. In addition, he considers how the design of a global climate regime might take these aims into account. Engaging with the principles of renowned political philosopher John Rawls, he expands on them by factoring in the needs of future generations. Vanderheiden also demonstrates how political theory can contribute to reaching a better understanding of the proper human response to climate change. By showing how climate policy offers insights into resolving contemporary controversies within political theory, he illustrates the ways in which applying normative theory to policy allows us to better understand both.
"Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued, Atmospheric Justice makes an important step toward providing us with a set of carefully elaborated first principles for achieving environmental justice."
Rating by Amazon customers: 2.5 (5 ratings)
ISBN 978-0195334609
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Governing Climate Change, a Responsibility Perspective:
An Analysis into the Conceptions of Responsibility Underlying the Problem-Solving Strategies Regarding Climate Change
Dolf van der Schoot
LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing (January, 2011)
No Review
"The build-up of scientific knowledge about climate change has increased its urgency within public debate, but also defined it as a formidable problem of governance. As such, climate change is an ?untamed risk', one with an accumulating effect and a time-dimension that differs from what ?traditional' problem-solving structures are used dealing with. International attempts at governance, like the UN Climate Change Conferences, only demonstrate this divergence. To understand these problem-solving strategies and their shortcomings better, an analysis is given of the conceptions of responsibility underlying them. It is then asked how these conceptions could better fit the specific characteristics of climate change. Through the work of the French philosopher Alain Badiou the book then arrives at an imperative for action that is at the same time inclusive and particular, offering examples of its implications for any problem-solving strategy on a national or global scale. This work thus offers ideas on policies and strategies regarding climate change, and as such can be insightful for a broad public; from policy advisors to scholars as to the generally interested reader."
Rating by Amazon customers: ? (0 ratings)
ISBN 978-3843386449
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The Gospel of Climate Skepticism
Robin Globus Veldman
University of California Press (October 22, 2019)
No Review
"Robin Globus Veldman is an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar whose research examines how religious beliefs and cultural identity shape attitudes toward the natural world. She is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Texas A&M University."
"Why are white evangelicals the most skeptical major religious group in America regarding climate change? Previous scholarship has pointed to cognitive factors such as conservative politics, anti-science attitudes, aversion to big government, and theology. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, The Gospel of Climate Skepticism reveals the extent to which climate skepticism and anti-environmentalism have in fact become embedded in the social world of many conservative evangelicals. Rejecting the common assumption that evangelicals' skepticism is simply a side effect of political or theological conservatism, the book further shows that between 2006 and 2015, leaders and pundits associated with the Christian Right widely promoted skepticism as the biblical position on climate change.
"The Gospel of Climate Skepticism offers a compelling portrait of how during a critical period of recent history, political and religious interests intersected to prevent evangelicals from offering a unified voice in support of legislative action to address climate change." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (8 ratings)
ISBN 978-0520303676
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Global Warming Gridlock:
Creating More Effective Strategies for Protecting the Planet
David G. Victor
Cambridge University Press (April, 2011)
No Review
"Global warming is one of today's greatest challenges. The science of climate change leaves no doubt that policies to cut emissions are overdue. Yet, after twenty years of international talks and treaties, the world is now in gridlock about how best to do this. David Victor argues that such gridlock has arisen because international talks have drifted away from the reality of what countries are willing and able to implement at home. Most of the lessons that policy makers have drawn from the history of other international environmental problems won't actually work on the problem of global warming. Victor argues that a radical rethinking of global warming policy is required and shows how to make international law on global warming more effective. This book provides a roadmap to a lower carbon future based on encouraging bottom-up initiatives at national, regional and global levels, leveraging national self-interest rather than wishful thinking."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.1 (7 ratings)
ISBN 978-0521865012
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Before It's Gone:
Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America
Jonathan Vigliotti
Atria/One Signal Publishers (April 2, 2024)
No Review
"Jonathan Vigliotti is an Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award-winning CBS News national correspondent whose work has appeared on numerous platforms including CBS Sunday Morning, Face the Nation, 48 Hours, and more. His reporting has taken him to more than forty countries and territories across six continents. Follow him on Twitter @JonVigliotti. Before It's Gone is his first book."
"Discussion of the climate crisis has always suffered from a problem of abstraction. Data points and warnings of an overheated future struggle to break through the noise of everyday life. Deniers often portray climate solutions as inconvenient, expensive, and unnecessary. And many politicians, cloistered by status and focused always on their next election, do not yet see climate as a winning issue in the short run, so they don't take any action at all. But climate change, and its devastating consequences, has kept apace whether we want to pay attention or not.
"CBS News national correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti has seen that crisis unfold for himself, spending nearly two decades reporting across the United States (and the world) documenting the people, communities, landmarks, and traditions we've already surrendered. Vigliotti shares with urgency and personal touch the story of an America on the brink.
"Before It's Gone traces Vigliotti's travels across the country, taking him to the frontlines of climate disaster and revealing the genuine impacts of climate change that countless Americans have already been forced to confront. From massive forest fires in California to hurricanes in Louisiana, receding coastlines in Massachusetts and devastated fisheries in Alaska, we learn that warnings of a future impacted by climate are no more; the climate catastrophe is already here.
"This is the story of America, and Americans, on the edge, and a powerful argument that radical action on climate change with a respect for its people and traditions is not only possible, but also the only way to preserve what we love."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.6 (41 ratings)
ISBN 978-1668008171
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Climate Leviathan:
A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future
Joel Wainwright & Geoff Mann
Verso (February 13, 2018)
No Review
"Despite the science and the summits, leading capitalist states have not achieved anything close to an adequate level of carbon mitigation. There is now simply no way to prevent the planet breaching the threshold of two degrees Celsius set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What are the likely political and economic outcomes of this? Where is the overheating world heading?
"To further the struggle for climate justice, we need to have some idea how the existing global order is likely to adjust to a rapidly changing environment. Climate Leviathan provides a radical way of thinking about the intensifying challenges to the global order. Drawing on a wide range of political thought, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann argue that rapid climate change will transform the world's political economy and the fundamental political arrangements most people take for granted. The result will be a capitalist planetary sovereignty, a terrifying eventuality that makes the construction of viable, radical alternatives truly imperative."
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (1 rating)
ISBN 978-1786634290
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Resisting the Green Dragon:
Dominion not Death
James Wanliss
The Cornwall Alliance (2011)
No Review
"Resisting the Green Dragon: Dominion, Not Death takes its cue from James 4:7, "Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you." Learn how the Bible powerfully confronts environmental fears and how — in God's wise design — people and nature can thrive together.
Without doubt, one of the greatest threats to society and the church today is the multifaceted environmentalist movement. Although its reach is often subtle, there isn't an aspect of life that it doesn't seek to force into its own mold."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.2 (38 ratings)
ISBN 978-1886568587
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Where Mountains Are Nameless
Passion and Politics in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Jonathan Waterman
New York: W.W. Norton &Co., May 2005
Jonathan Waterman's name might have chosen his life path, for he's spent a great deal of time kayaking the waters of Alaska. He's also walked its mountains and understands its natural history. He knows what's at stake and describes it well, along with making us acquainted with some of the people who strive to preserve the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or exploit the oil that lies beneath it.
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.1 (8 ratings)
ISBN 978-0-393-05219-0
SJ0 6/22/2018
The Next One Hundred Years:
Shaping the Fate of our Living Earth
Jonathan Weiner
New York: Bantam Books, March 1990
Jonathan Weiner presents the history of our understanding of the greenhouse effect clearly, showing that even Arrhenius's early estimates of how much a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would raise Earth's temperature came reasonably close to the current number. He is concerned that, given our tendency to react to events rather than anticipate and avert them, we may delay too long before facing the problem of climate change. Yet he is cautiously hopeful. He points to the successes in dealing with acid rain and the ozone hole. And he presents perhaps the first warning of the risks of geoengineering as a solution.
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (15 ratings)
ISBN 978-0-553-05744-7
SJ0 6/22/2018
Come On!:
Capitalism, Short-termism, Population and the Destruction of the Planet
Ernst von Weizsaecker & Anders Wijkman
Springer (November, 2017)
No Review
"Current worldwide trends are not sustainable. The Club of Rome's warnings published in the book Limits to Growth are still valid. Remedies that are acceptable for the great majority tend to make things worse. We seem to be in a philosophical crisis. Pope Francis says it clearly: our common home is in deadly danger. Analyzing the philosophical crisis, the book comes to the conclusion that the world may need a "new enlightenment"; one that is not based solely on doctrine, but instead addresses a balance between humans and nature, as well as a balance between markets and the state, and the short versus long term. To do this we need to leave behind working in "silos" in favor of a more systemic approach that will require us to rethink the organization of science and education.
"However, we have to act now; the world cannot wait until 7.6 billion people have struggled to reach a new enlightenment.
"This book is full of optimistic case studies and policy proposals that will lead us back to a trajectory of sustainability. But it is also necessary to address the taboo topic of population increase. Countries with a stable population fare immensely better than those with continued increase.
"Finally, we are presenting an optimistic book from the Club of Rome."
Rating by Amazon customers: 4.4 (27 ratings)
ISBN 978-1-4939-7418-4
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Petrocultures:
Oil, Politics, Culture
Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson & Imre Szeman (Editors)
McGill-Queen's University Press (June 26, 2017)
No Review
"Sheena Wilson is associate professor of English and cultural studies at the University of Alberta. Adam Carlson is a PhD candidate in English and film studies at the University of Alberta. Imre Szeman is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta."
"Contemporary life is founded on oil—a cheap, accessible, and rich source of energy that has shaped cities and manufacturing economies at the same time that it has increased mobility, global trade, and environmental devastation. Despite oil's essential role, full recognition of its social and cultural significance has only become a prominent feature of everyday debate and discussion in the early twenty-first century. Presenting a multifaceted analysis of the cultural, social, and political claims and assumptions that guide how we think and talk about oil, Petrocultures maps the complex and often contradictory ways in which oil has influenced the public's imagination around the world. This collection of essays shows that oil's vast network of social and historical narratives and the processes that enable its extraction are what characterize its importance, and that its circulation through this immense web of relations forms worldwide experiences and expectations. Contributors' essays investigate the discourses surrounding oil in contemporary culture while advancing and configuring new ways to discuss the cultural ecosystem that it has created. A window into the social role of oil, Petrocultures also contemplates what it would mean if human life were no longer deeply shaped by the consumption of fossil fuels."
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (3 ratings)
ISBN 978-0773550384
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A Primer on Climate Change and Renewable Energy Policies and Regulations:
Designing Competitive and Sustainable Green Energy Markets
WonJu Sul
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (December, 2016)
No Review
"The transition to a low carbon economy is irresistible and energy remains at the heart of global climate change solutions. Effective renewable energy policy is absolutely crucial in shaping competitive and attractive markets. However, energy markets are highly complex, living systems that involve a variety of technologies spanning a wide range of technical and economic maturity. Each market is unique so there is no one-size-fits-all policy formula that can put the global power system on a firmer path to the low carbon economy. A Primer on Climate Change and Renewable Energy Policies and Regulations takes a pragmatic look at the available choices and evaluates the mechanisms, key considerations, pros and cons, and examples of what worked and what did not and why." – publisher
Rating by Amazon customers: 5.0 (2 ratings)
ISBN 978-1541294257
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The GeoPolitics of Energy:
Achieving a Just and Sustainable Energy Distribution by 2040
Judith Wright & James Conca
BookSurge Publishing (November, 2007)
No Review
"By taking Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to the next level, The GeoPolitics of Energy: Achieving a Just and Sustainable Energy Distribution by 2040 by Judith Wright, Ph.D. and James Conca, Ph.D. not only raises awareness of the issues surrounding global warming, but provides concrete solutions. Straightforward and succinct, this powerful work is comprised of dramatic photos and meticulous research. With over twenty timelines and predictive graphs, the planet's future energy needs are plotted in a way to break down complex issues and inspire intelligent discussions on the future of the earth—a living planet. Proactive and timely, the authors take expanding energy use of industrialized countries and the energy needs of developing countries into account as they forge a template of directives that convey not what should happen, but what must happen if all the citizens of planet earth are allowed to enjoy the wonders of technological advances and the bounties of the natural world."