books
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New book from McKibben & co. aids grassroots action
Tuesday marks the release (yes, on recycled paper) of Fight Global Warming Now, the Step It Up 2007 team's handbook for grassroots action on climate (and most other issues) in our communities. It's a blueprint for success based on their own experiences.
Step It Up 2: Who's a Leader is just around the corner (Nov. 3), and there is an increasing corps of leaders committing to turn up at the events: eight members of Congress and two presidential candidates: go here to find an event in your neighborhood to support. If you find your choices lacking (hello, North Dakota?) organize one of your own: like coal, it's easy, cheap, and high-impact.
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New book details successes; join a chat with Paul Hawken
At work today I received a review copy of Building the Green Economy: Success Stories From the Grassroots, which just hit the presses and looks interesting. It's a diverse roundup of grassroots efforts aimed at stewardship and urban renewal toward a cleaner economy and greener, more just communities. Green economy superstar Van Jones is interviewed, of course, but I didn't notice a nod to Paul Hawken right off the bat, whose pioneering books on the topic of greening the economy laid the groundwork for the idea, and whose new book, Blessed Unrest, details the incredible, ever-widening scope of the global grassroots movement for a better future (excerpt here).
I'm planning to ask him how he envisions the role of commerce in this new civil society era during a conference call I'm hosting this Friday the 5th, for the Orion Grassroots Network. If you'd like to join this conversation on the global grassroots and pitch Hawken a question of your own, the dial-in info is here.
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Green terms color new dictionary volume
“Carbon neutral” may have been the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2006 word of the year, but it was only recently added to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (which is, presumably, a shorter, British-er version of the same tome?). The SOED defines “carbon neutral” as “making no net release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, especially […]
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Climate-skeptic books abound on Amazon’s top sellers list
An Inconvenient Truth is so last year! Al Gore's book may have been No. 1 in 2006, but the global warming deniers and delayers are outselling everyone this year.
Of course, Bjørn Lomborg's collection of cherry-picked misinformation, Cool It is the top-selling book in four categories: Climatology, Climate Changes, Public Policy, and even Conservation. But who knew that the top book in both Meteorology and Weather was the Competitive Enterprise Institute's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism) -- a book whose title would be accurate if only the word "politically" were removed?
And the no. 2 book in both Climate Changes and Weather is coauthored by world-class denier Fred Singer -- Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years. Sounds like disaster movie dialogue: "It's unstoppable, I tell you, unstoppable."
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New book by Porritt argues that we need to reshape capitalism to deliver a sustainable future
Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.
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We have just published the American paperback version of Capitalism As If the World Matters. The book is written by Jonathon Porritt, one of the foremost environmentalists of his generation and cofounder of my organization, Forum for the Future. The foreword is by Amory Lovins. As well as working with us, Jonathon is chair of the U.K. Government's Sustainable Development Commission. Previously, he was director of Friends of the Earth.
In the book, he tackles the most pressing question of the 21st century: Can capitalism, as the dominant economic system, be reshaped to deliver a sustainable future? He argues that it can be and it must be. He then lays out the framework for a more "sustainable capitalism."
At the heart of the book are two theses: that capitalism is basically the only game in town, with the vast majority of the world's people content for it to remain so for the foreseeable future; and that learning to live sustainably on the planet is a non-negotiable imperative.
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Greenspan on climate change
If you thought Greenspan was confused about energy, his discussion of global warming in The Age of Turbulence is downright stupefying. He opens well (p. 454):There can be very little doubt that global warming is real and man-made.
But the next sentence is (I kid you not):
We may have to rename Glacier National Park when its glaciers disappear, in what now looks to be 2030, according to park scientists.
That's what all the fuss is about -- we'll have to rename one of our national parks in 23 years. This is the Lomborg view. The movie version might be called A Minor Inconvenience.
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Greenspan on energy
Greenspan is no polymath, to go by the discussions of energy and climate in his instant bestseller, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. During his nuclear power love-fest, he writes (p. 453):
Nuclear power is not safe without a significant protective infrastructure. But then, neither is drinking water.
Wow! That's an analogy I bet you never heard before. Greenspan is actually comparing drinking water infrastructure -- which is needed mainly to protect the water from us (i.e. from human pollution) -- with nuclear power's infrastructure; which is needed to protect us from nuclear material, which (unlike water) is inherently dangerous. I guess this economic guru is the only person in the country who would rather live next to a nuclear power plant than a reservoir.
Even more annoying (p. 446):
For example, after the initial surge in the fuel efficiencies of our light motor vehicles during the 1980s, reflecting the earlier run-up in oil prices, improvements slowed to a trickle.
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New book praising biofuels has an unexpected author
There are combinations that are just too weird: chocolate cake and grape juice (to steal from an old Dick Van Dyke show), or hearing the Rolling Stones' music used to market chastity belts and abstinence pledges. Or like seeing the Worldwatch Institute's name on a book praising biofuels ... the very fuels Les Brown, WWI's founder, is crusading against.
The gist of the book seems to be, "We need a completely different kind of biofuels than we have or are likely to ever see, but if that better, fairer system came along, it might be good for the poor." In other words, the Les-Brown-less WWI is now providing cover for people who don't give two burps about the poor, but sho' do love them some subsidies. And for people who will be throwing this book around the way Bush threw around Colin Powell's notorious UN speech on Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction."
