A well-researched look at global needs and wants, in conflict with local rights.
Who will win the battle for 21st-century green dominance?
Mining is a method of extracting something that is valuable from an environment, transforming the landscape in which it occurs, often irrevocably. That’s the history of coal, shale, gold, diamonds, and other natural resources. The author, strategic co-director of the Climate and Community Institute, focuses her attention on a current global mining commodity, lithium, a “critical mineral” not because it is scarce but because it is essential for economic development. Lithium serves mainly as the key ingredient in rechargeable batteries for electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, and more. The supply is plentiful—lithium deposits have been found on all seven continents. As happens with the mining of many natural resources, the fusion of national security, environmental concerns, and economic policy becomes a political issue. Riofrancos centers her investigation on South America, detailing her visits and interviews with public officials involved in lithium resource policy and environmental activists trying to influence them. She balances this with the history of colonialism’s role in taking natural resources, such as Columbus’ extraction of Hispaniola gold using enslaved workers in the name of the Spanish crown. The tide turned, perhaps, with the rise of OPEC, when oil-exporting countries came together to force multinational corporations to the bargaining table. Countries began to assert their rights to control how, when, and where their national resources would be developed and sold. The U.S. role became prominent during the first Trump administration, which supported the domestic mining and processing of lithium, policies expanded by President Biden’s increased investment in the process. The balance of forces—between public and private, resource nationalism and environmentalism, rich and poor countries—remains fragile.
A well-researched look at global needs and wants, in conflict with local rights.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781324036760
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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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