An optimistic—if slightly utopian—call for a grand bargain to save the planet.
A nonfiction work outlines a way to fight against climate change.
The political polarization of climate change in America has led to decades of gridlock. Actors from both sides of the aisle hurl accusations at one another, but very little is actually done to mitigate and reverse the looming catastrophe. With this book, Crow and Shireman seek to move past partisan political agendas in order to find solutions that everyone can agree on. After all, climate change is an inherently bipartisan issue—it is something that impacts all Americans, regardless of political affiliation. “This book is part introduction, part agenda, and part strategy on how to save the planet from deniers on both the right and left,” write the authors in their preface. “We introduce conservatives and progressives to each other, not as we’ve been caricatured, but more as we are: complementary opposites who need each other.” Their “best of both worlds” agenda includes protecting the environment and restructuring the economy but doing so in a way that doesn’t antagonize the necessary partners in the process. Using data gleaned from Crow’s environmental organization, EarthX, as well as the evidence of successes and failures from the past 50 years of the environmentalist movement, the authors attempt to blaze a new path forward. Crow and Shireman write in an impassioned prose that nevertheless projects a sense of professionalism and common sense: “It sounds logical, rational, and compelling to manage the market to sustainability. And don’t get us wrong: all these technical fixes are probably part of the solution. But they are far from sufficient. Their fatal flaw is that they lock in the big centralized institutions of our industrial past.” The authors identify themselves as pro-environment, fiscally conservative Republicans (“an endangered political species”). Their target audience is the non-ideological, pragmatic majority of each party, who they estimate constitutes 70% of the American population. While their both-sides-ism is not entirely convincing, their idea of a majoritarian bipartisan coalition to address climate change is an undeniably attractive one. There is a lot of substance here that will be of interest to anyone seeking to understand the scope of the proposals that currently exist in the climate change debate.
An optimistic—if slightly utopian—call for a grand bargain to save the planet.Pub Date: May 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9854524-9-0
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Affinity Press
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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