This attractive vision of the future doesn’t offer many directions on how to get there.
This third edition of an environmental work suggests a path toward a more Earth-friendly economic order.
According to Paul, the world is in crisis due to the rapidly changing climate, and the traditional economic structures have proved insufficient to address the problem. With this book, the author calls for a new paradigm in the way people think about economies. “While traditional economics allows us to exterminate cod, wolves and bees, and pump steers full of growth hormones,” writes Paul in his introduction, “the new paradigm requires respect for life; and so must the new economics.” In addition to cutting greenhouse gas emissions to zero and developing efficient carbon sequestration technologies, the author argues for achieving full employment (in order to offset any job losses created by decarbonizing the economy), restructuring the banking and finance industries, and curbing global population growth. He also makes more localized suggestions, such as reimagining corporate advertising to focus on the health of consumers and having governments incentivize the creation of benefit corporations. The author takes a particular look at the carbon-spewing industries of China as potential models for the means of transitioning to an ecological economy. Paul’s prose is slightly dry but surprisingly cheery given the topic: “A key question for the ecological economy is: are technologies available that would make mining satisfactory environmentally? The answer seems to be generally, ‘yes,’ and a great deal of progress is being made to implement what can now be implemented.” While many of the author’s suggestions sound like good ideas, most of them are also fairly common goals of the current environmental movement. Additionally, Paul rarely offers practical proposals for how to get these policies enacted. (His recommendations at the end of the book include nothing short of changing “human consciousness” via a United Nations declaration.) Readers new to the climate discourse will be impressed, but those with more awareness of the issue may find the book slightly too utopian.
This attractive vision of the future doesn’t offer many directions on how to get there.Pub Date: March 3, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-88640-218-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The Ewings Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
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