A compelling argument that companies are willing but not eager to fight climate change.
How five major U.S. corporations based in the South are dealing with climate change.
In his latest, environmental history professor Elmore, the author of Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism and Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future, makes an evenhanded, informative effort to view matters from the points of view of Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Walmart, FedEx, and Bank of America. Of course, such massive corporations focus on profit, but they have no objection to a nominal expense for beneficent projects. Currently, pressure is increasing to spend money fighting climate change. Elmore begins with a short history of each company and then describes their responses, with outcomes varying from modest to minimal. Few readers would expect Coca-Cola to lead these efforts, but its CEO was the only one to pledge to eliminate its major pollutant, hydrofluorocarbons, used in the world’s refrigeration systems, which are thousands of times worse than carbon dioxide in warming the planet. Although converting to other chemicals has proved unexpectedly difficult, Coca-Cola did not back away from its pledge, but the results have been unimpressive so far. Delta boasts that it reduces its carbon footprint by flying fuel-efficient aircraft, but Elmore shows how there is less there than meets the eye. Since fuel is an airline’s highest operating cost, efficiency is good business. Ironically, with declining petroleum prices in the 2010s, older gas guzzlers from the 1970s became so cheap that Delta began investing in them. Walmart, which sucks up land and small businesses, imports most merchandise from China, and pays workers poorly, proclaims its greenness but seems to be dragging its feet. Although not widely considered a polluter, Bank of America admits that its loans support urban sprawl, highways, fossil fuel production, and the destruction of wetlands and forests, and it intends to continue those practices.
A compelling argument that companies are willing but not eager to fight climate change.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781469673332
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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