An incisive, inspiring call to combat climate change.
Net zero will require technological innovation, government coordination, urban planning, and steady amelioration of poverty and inequality, according to this far-reaching manifesto on climate policy.
Dasgupta, the president of the World Resources Institute, warns that decarbonization is flagging and urges a systematic transition to a green economy based on several key themes, which he illustrates with concrete examples. New technologies must be created, he asserts, citing WRI’s development of satellite systems to monitor deforestation, a driver of rising emissions. Cities will be “laboratories for change,” Dasgupta forecasts, from rapid-transit bus schemes to crafting “15-minute cities” that provide everything residents need within a 15-minute walk. The author argues that decarbonization must prioritize the needs of Indigenous people, poor communities, the Global South, and displaced workers, and he suggests that rich nations contribute to a climate adaptation fund for developing countries. Dasgupta finally posits that decarbonization can be an economic boon and extols Green New Deal programs like Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Walmart’s experiment with stores that lower emissions using LEDs, green rooftops, and auxiliary power supplies, all while improving efficiency and cutting costs. Dasgupta’s treatise is a wide-ranging, ambitious call to action, with many urgent, perhaps impossible, targets. (“To avoid the worst climate impacts, the world must slash emissions 43 percent by 2030…relative to 2019 levels,” he writes—a tall order given that global emissions are still rising.) Fortunately, he makes his case compelling with real-world specifics and stories of leaders who achieved remarkable progress with limited means, like Wangari Maathai, who won a Nobel Prize for her grassroots tree-planting campaign in Kenya. Dasgupta explains it all in straightforward and very readable prose that cuts the wonkery with empathy. (“I understand the helplessness when people ask, ‘Does it really matter if I give up meat?’ or ‘Will switching to an electric vehicle even make a difference?’ And yet the answer is always: Yes, it does matter.”) Readers daunted by the scale of the climate emergency will find much stimulating food for thought here.
An incisive, inspiring call to combat climate change.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781633310667
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Disruption Books
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
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