Collier, Paul, The Plundered Planet: Why We Must--and How We Can--Manage Nature for Global Prosperity (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2010) ("The bottom-up approach of providing common information about the problems to ordinary citizens is already proving more effective than this top-down approach. With astonishing speed the sharing of information has changed the political landscape. First in Europe, and more recently in America, ordinary citizens have grasped what their societies need to do to limit carbon emissions. They have pressured their governments to impose a mixture of taxation and regulatory controls on emissions. . . . Changes in policy have followed, not led public awareness.So long as individual governments respond to pressures from their own citizens, formal international cooperation between governments becomes both less important and easier to achieve." Id. at 239-240. Also see "Simplifying the Argument," in Books and Arts, The Economist, May 8th 2010, at 83.).
Cullen, Heidi, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet (New York: Harper, 2010).
Cullen, Heidi, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet (New York: Harper, 2010).
Lerner, Steve, Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England, 2010) ("A number of efforts have been made to find a label that succinctly describes these residential/industrial areas that experience severe contamination problems. In legislative hearings they have been called environmental high-impact areas, but this technical locution did not last and is almost never heard today. Environmental justice activists, who work to improve conditions in these blighted areas, tend to call these areas 'sacrifice zones,' 'fenceline communities,' or 'hot spot of pollution.' I have chosen to highlight the first of these descriptors, 'sacrifice zones,' in the title of this book because it dramatizes the fact that low-income and minority populations, living adjacent to heavy industry and military bases, are required to make disproportionate health and economic sacrifices that more affluent people can avoid. To my mind, this pattern of unequal exposure constitutes a form of environmental racism that is being played out on a large scale across the nation." Id. at 3. "While the era of legally sanctioned racial segregation is past, a new form of not-so-subtle racism is occurring in which many low-income, heavily minority communities are designated as the unofficial dumping grounds for what is known among land use planners and real estate developers as locally unwanted land uses (LULUs). These LULUs are hard to miss for those willing to look. They include a wide variety of high-emission industrial plants and public utilities, including incinerators, hazardous waste dumps, refineries, gasoline tank farms, plastic plants, steel mills, pesticide plants, cement kilns, sewage treatment plants, rubber factories, asphalt batching plants, large-scale pig and cattle feedlots, agricultural areas heavily sprayed with pesticides, tanneries, machine shops, auto-crushing-and-shredding operations, and a host of other nasty facilities." Id. at at 9.).
Mastrandrea, Michael D., & Stephen H. Schneider, Preparing for Climate Change (Boston Review Book) (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: MIT Press, 2010).
Pooley, Eric, The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth (New York: Hyperion, 2010) ("The fight against climate change was mostly portrayed in the media as a lifestyle choice, a matter of righteous consumerism, as if we could stop global warming simply by filling our shopping carts with the right products. Books and magazines were filled with stories of ostentatious self-denial, written by people who proudly evaporated their own sea salt or went without electric lights and toilet paper for a year. These personal responses may have been valid and enriching, but fighting climate change in an industrial society requires political action at the local and—especially—the national level. This book is about people who understood that, and set out to be effective. It is about people who went to war, and learned what war costs." Id. at x.).
Mastrandrea, Michael D., & Stephen H. Schneider, Preparing for Climate Change (Boston Review Book) (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: MIT Press, 2010).
Pielke, Roger, Jr., The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming (New York: Basic Books, 2010) ("But before you proceed, I offer a warning. Over the past ten years at the University of Colorado I have taught a seminar titled Policy, Science, and the Environment. It seeks to introduce first-year graduate students to the messy intersection of science and politics. On my syllabus I have included a cartoon from the series Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin, the little boy, explains to Hobbes, his tiger friend, 'The more you know, the harder it is to take decisive action. Once you become informed, you start seeing complexities and shades of gray. You realize that nothing is a clear and simple as it first appears.' Calvin explains that he has decided not to risk becoming informed, and Hobbers sympathizes: 'You're ignorant, but at least you act on it.' " Id. at xi. "Advocates routinely suggest that action on climate change necessarily means sacrifice. For instance, in late 2009 Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in the United Kingdom argued that a 'planned recession' would be necessary in the United Kingdom in order to reduce emissions in response to the threat of climate change. In practice this would mean that 'the building of new airports, petrol cars and dirty coal-fired power stations will have to be halted in the UK until new technology provides an alternative to burning fossil fuels.' Similarly, in a comment with more symbolic than substance, Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, argued that restaurants should no longer serve ice water, as an illustration of how we need to change our lifestyles. Such calls for sacrifice are a fixture in debates over responding to climate change. However, if there is an iron law of climate policy, it is that when policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emission reduction, it is economic growth that will win out every time." Id. at 46. ).
Pooley, Eric, The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth (New York: Hyperion, 2010) ("The fight against climate change was mostly portrayed in the media as a lifestyle choice, a matter of righteous consumerism, as if we could stop global warming simply by filling our shopping carts with the right products. Books and magazines were filled with stories of ostentatious self-denial, written by people who proudly evaporated their own sea salt or went without electric lights and toilet paper for a year. These personal responses may have been valid and enriching, but fighting climate change in an industrial society requires political action at the local and—especially—the national level. This book is about people who understood that, and set out to be effective. It is about people who went to war, and learned what war costs." Id. at x.).
