Book reviews

What Will Work

by Bryan Walker January 24, 2012

Kristin Shrader-Frechette of the University of Notre Dame is rigorous in the presentation of her argument in What Will Work: Fighting Climate Change with Renewable Energy, Not Nuclear Power. In recent times a number of leading environmentalists have concluded nuclear power has to be employed to enable the transition away from fossil fuels. Shrader-Frechette disagrees. [...]

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Climate Change and Migration

by Bryan Walker January 15, 2012

It’s all too easy for wealthy America and Europe to treat climate-induced migration as a border security issue. Gregory White, Professor of Government at Smith College in Massachusetts, argues in his recent book Climate Change and Migration: Security and Borders in a Warming World that a security-minded response to the phenomenon is both inappropriate and [...]

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Early Warming

by Bryan Walker January 5, 2012

Nancy Lord is a writer who has spent her adult life in Alaska. In her new book, Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North, she tells the stories of people and places and natural environments on whom climate change is impacting in her part of the world. She is climate science savvy, understanding [...]

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Politics of Climate Justice

by Bryan Walker December 28, 2011

I warm to any writer who identifies the solution to climate change in the simple terms employed by Patrick Bond in his recent book Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis Above, Movement Below: leave fossil fuels in the soil, halt deforestation, transform our economies so that renewable energy, public transport and low-carbon systems replace those currently [...]

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What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism

by Bryan Walker December 22, 2011

A couple of months ago when the publishers sent me a review copy I’d requested of The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth they enclosed another shorter book in case I might like to review it as well. I thought from the title it was possibly too similar to The Ecological Rift to warrant [...]

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Introduction to Modern Climate Change

by Bryan Walker November 23, 2011

I wouldn’t normally seek a text book for review, but a pre-publication recommendation described this one as excellent reading for any lay person interested in the subject. I’d also seen the author, Andrew Dessler, in an television interview which I wrote about, which was further encouragement. The book is An Introduction to Modern Climate Change. [...]

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Too Many People?

by Bryan Walker November 12, 2011

In 1932 I was born into a world of 2 billion people.  Nearly 80 years on there are 7 billion, more than three times as many. My own small country New Zealand has nearly tripled its population in that time. I confess to feeling anxiety about the capacity of the globe to sustain this level [...]

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Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of Climate Change

by Bryan Walker November 1, 2011

Canadian investigative journalist William Marsden doesn’t hide his anguish or his anger as he reports the maddening incapacity of political leaders and negotiators to come to terms with climate change. Nor should he. It’s a sorry story he has to tell in his new book Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of Climate Change. Marsden’s [...]

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The Ecological Rift

by Bryan Walker October 25, 2011

Why do we continue with business as usual when we know that it is leading us to disastrous climate change? According to the authors of The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth it is because our capitalist economic system is driven by forces which cannot stand back and weigh the consequences of their drive. [...]

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Rough Winds: Extreme Weather and Climate Change

by Bryan Walker September 27, 2011

James Powell has produced a Kindle eBook, Rough Winds: Extreme Weather and Climate Change, which in brief compass links climate change to the extreme weather events increasing across the globe.  As a Kindle Single it has the advantage of being right up to date with what has been happening in the US, including the visit [...]

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