book review

Life Without Oil

by Bryan Walker May 17, 2011

“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 [...]

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Ethics and climate action: we’re in this together

by Bryan Walker January 12, 2010

The reason international negotiations to tackle climate change are not working is because they have been premised on long-established norms of state sovereignty and states’ rights. Consequently they are characterised by “diplomatic delay, minimal action -– especially relative to the scale of the problem – and mutual blame between rich and poor countries, resulting in [...]

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The Carbon Age

by Bryan Walker June 26, 2009

Journalist and science writer Eric Roston’s book The Carbon Age, highly praised when it was first published last year, is now available in paperback.  It’s about carbon in the universe and the essential part it plays in life on Earth. It’s also about climate change, as its subtitle suggests: How Life’s Core Element Has Become [...]

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Hell and High Water

by Bryan Walker April 5, 2009

For some months now I have been visiting Joseph Romm’s blog Climate Progress regularly, valuing it for its lively and informed commentary on climate science and politics and its focus on the solutions already available to us. The cover of his book Hell and High Water is prominent on the website and I grew uncomfortably aware that [...]

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Climate Wars

by Bryan Walker December 22, 2008

Gwynne Dyer’s new book Climate Wars explores the all-important political dimension of addressing climate change. Military history is Dyer’s speciality. One origin of this book was his dawning awareness that, in a number of the great powers, climate-change scenarios are already playing a large role in the military planning process. The other factor persuading him [...]

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Six Degrees

by Bryan Walker December 15, 2008

This posting is based on a Waikato Times column written in July. The Royal Society in the UK awarded its 2008 science writing prize to Mark Lynas for his global warming book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Warming Planet. I found the book telling when I read it last year, and it was good [...]

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Ten technologies to save the planet

by Bryan Walker December 10, 2008

As the news on climate change becomes increasingly serious it is all the more important to affirm that the problem has solutions provided the world applies them soon enough. Prominent UK environment writer Chris Goodall surveys some of those solutions in a well-researched fashion in his new book, Ten Technologies to Save the Planet.  In [...]

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