Interconnectedness is a major theme of Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens our Health and What We Can Do about It. Jeffrey Sachs describes the book in his preface as “a scientific detective story of the first order, told with brilliance and relish by one of the world’s great ecological detectives”. The detective is physician and public health scientist Paul Epstein. He has co-authored the book with science writer Dan Ferber.
Category: Book reviews
Life Without Oil
“A gradual contraction into more sustainable patterns of resource use is not the norm for a society that is exploiting the environment. The norm is a last-ditch effort to maintain outward displays of power, and then a sudden, and dramatic, collapse.” That’s one of the foreboding statements with which Steve Hallett and John Wright punctuate their preview of past civilisations in the opening section of their book Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future.
They consider we are at the peak of oil production and that we’re not facing that reality. There are late flurries to extend the discovery of further oil. Deep sea drilling, the exploitation of the Alberta tar sands and oil shale extraction are among them, the latter two causing horrendous environmental damage. But all they will produce is a temporary delay of the decline. The authors judge that around 2015 oil production will show a clear and convincing decline, and the world will be at the beginning of the end of what they call the petroleum interval. It’s an interval that will have occupied a couple of centuries in the long history of humanity. Oil has enabled the construction of a monumental global civilisation in which we have become dependent on the increased productivity and efficiencies of scale it can provide. As it diminishes and disappears we require an energy transition which the book considers we are not geared to make in good time. We therefore face a long global economic contraction as the price of oil escalates, a sequence of economic slumps which will continue until fundamental problems of energy availability, food production, water supply and population control are sufficiently well corrected.
The Fate of Greenland
Gary Comer was a wealthy retired American who found on a private voyage in 2001 that he was able to easily navigate the normally ice-bound Northwest Passage in northern Canada. It perturbed him that he could do so and resulted in his substantial funding of scientific research into the global extent of abrupt climate change. Glaciologist Richard Alley, oceanographer Wallace Broecker and geologist George Denton were leading scientists in the research he funded, and are co-authors with editor Philip Conkling of a newly published book which draws on the past decade of their and others’ work. The Fate of Greenland: Lessons from Abrupt Climate Change is a handsomely produced volume, lavishly illustrated with stunning photographs, many of them taken by Comer himself. It’s written for a general audience, albeit at times requiring close attention from readers when the complexities of some of the scientific detective work are explained.
Climate Capitalism
Climate protection is good business. Entrepreneurs and companies who engage in it are prospering. That’s the message of L. Hunter Lovins and Boyd Cohen in their recently published book Climate Capitalism: Capitalism in the Age of Climate Change . They energetically urge entrepreneurs and businesses to take advantage of the opportunities opened by the need to combat climate change, or climate chaos as they often call it. Acting to protect the climate will unleash a new energy economy, and it will be profitable for business.
The authors are at pains throughout the book to relate hundreds of stories of the many companies that are already reaping the benefits of action. Their positive assurances are evidence-based. The businesses whose success they recount are not waiting on the outcome of the interminable wrangling of politicians but accepting the sustainability imperative and positioning themselves for competitive business advantage in a world that will no longer tolerate unsustainable behaviour.
Climate: The Counter Consensus
This review of Bob Carter’s latest book, by Dr James Renwick, Principal Scientist at NIWA’s Climate Variability & Change group, was first published in the March newsletter of the Geoscience Society of New Zealand. My thanks to Jim for permission to republish it here.
This book is a curious read, full of misinformation, straw-man arguments, and poorly-documented assertions. To become immersed in it, we must enter the through-the-looking-glass world of the “independent” scientist, where those such as myself are the ones “…who have dissembled, told half-truths, cherry-picked their data, fantastically exaggerated, and suppressed the circulation of better science” (Prefatory Essay, p. 19). Meanwhile, the ideas put forward by Prof. Carter are portrayed as representing a balanced appraisal of the issues. From where I sit, that’s the opposite of reality.