Michael Foley "The Age of Absurdity"

ISBN 978-1-84737-524-7. "The Age of Absurdity: Why modern life makes it hard to be happy" by Michael Foley was published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd in 2010. The paperback offers 260 pages consisting of five parts of fourteen chapters, acknowledgements, notes and index. No doubt Amazon recommended this one to us because of our previous purchase of "Irrationality" by Stuart Sutherland (Constable and Company 1992 ISBN 978-1-905177-0703) which we reviewed in March of 2010. So is this just another "Mr Angry" and his personal attempt to brand all of modern life as "rubbish" (to quote a Blur album)? What intrigued us about Foley's work was the potential it unlocked to understand why people are so unhappy that they continue to drive economic activity even after this became demonstrably unsustainable. People want so much, the next big holiday, the next plasma screen TV, the next gadget from Apple, yet none of it makes us happy. So we drive an industrial system of consumption whose sole purpose is to turn natural resources into waste as quickly as possible in some vain attempt to make us "happy". Yet we never can be because this objective is, of course, absurd. In the review of the Sutherland book we felt a little let down by the author who seemed unable to objectively understand what were his own subjective feelings on a matter and what was truly "irrational". It simply came out as pop-psychology dressed up in the clothes of science.

Foley's book is far more a work of philosophy hence arguably more personal. His approach is similar to Sutherland's in the way he find numerous anecdotes and scientific papers to justify his every whim no-matter how contradictory the end result appears to a lay man. But as a whole the result is probably more satisfactory. The disappointment the reader may feel stems from the immense intellectual arrogance of the piece. Foley is never better when he is being witty and trawling the science. There were times when his work goes from being profound and insightful to unmercifully funny. And we mean rib-achingly funny. The section of this book on the workplace just had us spluttering out loud whilst the bit about how people can no longer live without continuous background noise had us nodding in agreement. If this book was all like that we could love it to bits. However a brief glance through the index will give the wary reader an idea as to the let-down. Let me see now. Foley quotes and analyses (at great length) the work of none other than Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Erich Fromm, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Sigmund Freud, Jesus, Buddha, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, William Shakespeare, Oliver James, Franz Kafka, John Gray, Spinoza, T. S. Eliot, Aristotle, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Leo Tolstoy, Homer (of "The Odyssey" fame, not "The Simpsons" - more's the pity) and on and on.... Taking in everything from The Gospels to "Lord of the Rings" in along the way. This man has swallowed the Classics section of his local library and now wishes to prove how clever he is. Of course it all SOUNDS very authoritative but so many of these references are too obscure to have any relevance. You really get the feeling that, after he has read that lot, Foley really should know everything there is to know about, well, everything. However, his greatest insights come not from his philosopher buddies from the works of scientific research. And with the "facts", as Homer Simpson informs us - "you can prove anything".

So does Foley ever succeed in creating a "grand theory of everything". Well, if you can stay awake through the duller sections of this book then it looks as if he has - however hard he tries to ram the simple truths somewhere where you can no longer find them. It seems that modern life puts the cart before the horse: we work hard in order to have the things that make us happy. However, "things" do NOT makes us happy, entirely the opposite. In fact it is the "striving", the working hard, that makes us happy. Indeed, that would seem to be the point of striving. The very act of wanting to achieve something should makes us happy. The journey not the destination.  And the more we have, the more we want. So there is no purpose to having more and it cannot be sustained. So what should make us happy? Well it seems that personal responsibility, autonomy, detachment, understanding, mindfulness, transcendence, acceptance of difficulty, ceaseless striving and the constant awareness of mortality are commonly the things that are most rewarding and makes us most content in the long term. Note the remarkable absence of "more stuff" from this list. Foley then makes a really decent attempt to show us how this is true and how every "modern" trend undermines true happiness. We live in a time where nobody accepts responsibility for his of her actions any more. It will always be somebody else's fault. That can't make us happy. Likewise, we fill our lives with stuff that is simply too complex for us to understand and even if we could our culture now so revels in "dumbing down" that understanding anything is too much bother. We should rediscover the simple pleasures in life - of doing just one thing at a time rather than multi-tasking, of being able to be by ourselves, in complete silence, without having a psychotic episode, and so on.... Foley really revels in the absurd situation we now find ourselves in.

Practically every aspect of our modern existence is engineered to make us unhappy despite the fact we have never had more of the things that we THOUGHT should make us happy. We are all well fed and have good jobs. We have money, family, friends and prestige but none of it really matters anymore. On the positive side this all means that, in reality, we can actually do without the unnecessary trappings of modern culture and be perfectly happy thankyou. In one of the many striking research studies that Foley uncovers is the ones where Americans are compared to the Japanese or Koreans. It as striking how the US education system and culture extols the virtue of self-esteem whereas the Asian cultures promote my self-questioning and introspection. Guess which come out the happiest? We don't need to believe we are a roaring tiger to feel good about ourselves. We just need to spend some time thinking about exactly what and who we are. If we could be bothered. So here you have it: a book cataloguing EVERY possible absurdity of modern British cultural life and managing to demonstrate that the entire things is an unhappy sham. This can be glorious reading at times, frustrating at other times, but it makes its point. We have turned modern life inside out in the pursuit of the one thing we have had in our grasp all along. Learn to take responsibility for your life, find a manner in which you can become detached from this rat race, do things not because they are easy but because they are hard, work hard, strive and get lost inside that striving. Then you will be happy my son. Great.

Frustratingly elitist at times with the mind-numbing habit of name-dropping everyone just for effect.
This books gives us the meat-and-potatoes behind the fact we all know to be true - a consumer society cannot make us happy. Happiness comes from inside.

John Grant "Co-Opportunity"

Thomas H. Greco, Jr. "The End of Money"

Robert L. Hirsch "The Impending World Energy Mess"

ISBN 978-1926837-11-6. "The Impending World Energy Mess - what it is and what it means to YOU!" written by Robert L Hirsch, Roger H Bezdek and Robert M Wendling and published by Apogee Prime in 2010. The review copy is a first edition but is a paperback with dustcover (unusual!). For your money you get 251 pages boasting Preface, Foreword by James Schlesinger, Introduction, eighteen chapters, Postscript, References and Index. Those of us who have been following the peak oil story for a few years (about seven years in the reviewer's case) will be familiar with the work of this writing team. They were responsible for a 2005 report for the US Department of Energy called "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation & Risk Management". In it the team developed scenarios for crash programs to mitigate the risks arising from peak oil. They famously concluded that it would take around 20 years to adjust to peak oil hence we had better start earlier rather than later. Of course nothing happened. The report was of little interest to the US DOE. They buried it and it took a subsequent Freedom on Information request for it to emerge in to the public domain. The report has become a legend in its own lunchtime - so much so that it has become one of the corner stones of peakist folklore. Between the work of Richard Heinberg and Colin Campbell we had all we needed to launch a million paranoia's. From it the entire Transition movement was born as well as Post-Carbon Living.

However, one has to wonder: just how many of us ever read this report or know much about these authors? Well, you can read the 2005 report here. As for the authors, they are all highly qualified and have frequented many Washington think tanks. Given this pedigree you may well come to expect something pretty definitive. However, we have to urge caution; this is a massively disappointing work. It has Washington authority maybe, but it is from a very different planet. Certainly a place unfamiliar to many who see peak oil and climate change as an enormous socio-economic opportunity to create a sustainable future and a better world. To put it mildly, these authors do NOT believe in the better world that you and I may dream of.

Anyone familiar with our book reviews in general, and Post-Carbon Living specifically, will know that we have no time for head-in-the-cloud environmentalists and dreamers. We have read broadly and done our homework. It may only be our humble opinion but we are pretty sure that peak oil is a long term challenge for our entire way of life. However, let us for a second invert our own cosy assumptions and ask ourselves this question: what if right-wing/Republican/GOP/Tea Party believed in peak oil and what if THEY were to write a book about it? This may be a disturbing idea to many but hold on a second - this is more-or-less what you have in this book. One would assume that if you believe in peak oil you believe in natural limits and hence the limits to growth. It is with astonishment to find that there is an alternative point of view that is so tortuous that it requires and Orwellian belief in 2 + 2 = 5. Yes, that's right, this is a peak oil book by climate change deniers.

Now we have been generous and kind to climate change sceptics and deniers in the past. We have reached out to them to try and understand. It is for these reasons that we present our choices in a Realpolitik kind-of-way free of the dreaming spires of environmentalists. It ain't about the birds and the bees anymore - it is about building a sustainable culture. So we have read the books and taken an interest. But, at the end of the day, the denier claims have always been flimsy and ideologically inspired. The work of sceptics is valuable but rarely of such great significance so as to over-turn the vast weight of evidence. However, even to people as open minded us as at Post-Carbon Living we found ourselves gagging at the utter crap the authors of "World Energy Mess" throw at us.

This is not to say that they haven't done their homework. All that time in think-tanks has certainly taught them something. However it looks like these kids grew up in a very sheltered environment. We don't suspect they got out much. This book is for redneck Americans by redneck Americans. Scary. You have to remind yourself that those nice people at the Post-Carbon Institute are Americans just to calm your nerves. In fact the very NEXT book I started to read was by Richard Heinberg - if only to restore my faith in the folks over the pond. So what is it that we have taken such offence by? Well, where to start?! Firstly it is one of the central tenets of peak oil theory that it will impact the entire globalisation project and our very way of life. Our first impression of "World Energy Mess" is that it will be a problem for Americans in their cars.

Hmmm... Well, you can see where that is going. Nowhere. It is one of the first things we tell people about peak oil: a) it isn't about running out of oil and b) it isn't about your darn car. Now, to be fair to the authors of this work they do recognise some of the wider problems but they mention impacts upon farming just ONCE in the entire book (ignoring pages devoted to biofuels). However this is counter-productive and illogical. One can only assume that they subscribe to the George Bush myth of the American way-of-life. It is not up for negotiation hence Americans must never be told that it will end. Even to mention the very idea that they might have to give up cars is so toxic inside the American myth that the Washington think tank posse cannot even mention it. Given this point the authors DO tell American what Peak Oil means to them. And this normally means investing all of their cash in Gold and running to the hills. As we say, a different planet. They don't have a plan and their only constructive suggestions can only lead to the rapid implosion of American culture. If Americans accepted the truth for one second their world would fall apart. The myth is enduring. Thank God that myth is unique to them. When you read THIS book from a European or Asian perspective you are left amazed at how short-sighted it is.

Let us give an example: running vehicles off natural gas or LPG ("liquid petroleum gas" or "autogas"). This is relatively normal in the UK and other European countries. The refueling points are widespread and the market penetration good (largely due to significant tax breaks). However, to read this book, you would be lead to believe that this was a non-starter. It is a non-starter in the USA precisely because they are twenty years behind the rest of the world in energy policy. They have never invested in the use of gas as a motor-vehicle fuel. Hence they have no infrastructure. Which is the very excuse these authors use for dismissing it as a technology. In fact they dismiss all green technologies. They dismiss solar. They dump on wind power. So what do they believe in? Well, they like nuclear and they are open minded about fracking.

One of our favourite quotes from the book is this one about fracking: "New York State imposed restrictions on shale gas drilling over drinking water safety. For these cities, the restrictions amount to a de facto ban on hydraulic fracturing, and environmentalists are seeking a blanket ban on shale gas drilling in all watershed." [Emphasis ours.] Got that? It is OK for people to ban fracking for fear of having their water poisoned but to stop the poisoning of water generally it takes the work of "environmentalists". This can only be true if "environmentalists" are people who like to live and not be poisoned. By that definition we are ALL environmentalists. So you kinda see where these guys are coming from.... They devote an entire chapter (probably the most boring ever) on examining the best way to ration petrol for cars. (Do they get ANYTHING right? Well maybe their view of biofuels and a good chapter on energy return on energy invested (EROEI) lifts this work a little. But very little.)

OK, you want some more examples of the rubbish these guys can write? How about page 20 where wind turbines are dismissed because "Windmills produce electricity, not liquid fuels." D'uh. How could the rest of the World be so stupid so as to invest in wind energy? It is there to grind a bit of corn and look pretty because cars can't run on electricity can they? Well, they can't in the U.S. of A. whose energy policy has been so shortsighted for so long. The authors believe the end of oil will cause severe hardship and this will over ride the "sentiment among environmentalists and people concerned about climate change" (page 131). Wind and other renewable energy solutions cannot be taken seriously because the sun and wind are "intermittent" requiring 100% fossil fuel backup. (This has already been proven to be untrue in countries which already lead the world in renewable energy such as Germany and Denmark.) Although the authors consider joining together multiple renewable systems across wide geographical areas (as per the European plan) they then dismiss this as too difficult on the American continent because American will never agree to it. It is just too difficult a problem to solve - whereas digging up more oil is somehow easier. These things are only a problem in North America. Dear North Americans: the rest of the world is so far ahead of you that you can't see us for dust.

Anyway, a few more words about right-wing dogma. When discussing the management of oil resources the authors praise Saudi Arabia (America's official friends) but pour scorn upon the perceived mismanagement of the Venezuelans (official bad guys). Nuclear proliferation is mentioned in the assessment of nuclear energy. In this assessment North Korea and Iran are the bad guys, India and Pakistan the good guys. There is no mention of terrorism as a threat to nuclear power plants. However in a later section on wind energy the authors (seriously and solemnly) tell us that joining up renewable resources across diverse geographic zones is not possible because terrorists would attack the electricity cables (page 193). Are they serious? Yup. It gets worse. On page 200 the authors tell us that integrating photovoltaics into the grid is "in effect a tax upon all other electrical power users because solar cell power is poaching on the electrical grid that already exists" - yeah, in the same way that other electricity users are poaching more zero-carbon power when I am exporting it to run THEIR air-conditioning systems! Frustrating isn't it?

On page 234 the authors tell us that renewable energy is "insufficient to satisfy our overall energy needs, let alone our liquid fuel needs". They seem to miss the obvious conclusion that the way of life they promote is henceforth about to end... On the same page the authors go onto argue that support for renewable energy is raising the cost of energy for consumers. This ignores the obvious investment argument subsequently used by the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change during July 2011 when wrote an unprecedented Press Release showing that reform of the Electricity market now would eventually save electricity consumers' money in years to come. Hirsch & co have the entire argument upside down and condemn their fellow Americans to even higher prices in future. On page 212 (in the climate change denial chapter) the authors try to tell Americans that any country reducing its carbon footprint could "severely disadvantage their economies and their position international trade". If Americans keep telling themselves that a post-carbon world is a poor one then their economy will fail because they won't keep up. Meanwhile the rest of us are building tomorrow so we can be winners. "Thinking about how the world could change [...] is emotionally and intellectually very difficult." - "...most people's first reaction [..] is one of disbelief and mental shutdown" conclude the authors by page 225. They lack the irony to see that they are talking about their own inability to understand renewable energy and the climate change aspect of the debate.

So if you want a reasonably up-to-date book on peak oil without the frills then this is the book for you. It may well be the most recent and most authoritative. However, by all other measures, this ranks as the worst book about peak oil we have ever read. And we have read some stinkers. And do you know what the authors' solution to peak oil is? Guess. Yup. More oil. Drill baby drill! Burn baby burn!! Drill everywhere for whatever shitty low grade oil you can extract. (The options are thus; fuel efficient transport, oil sands, coal-to-liquids, enhanced oil recovery and gas-to-liquids. They discount shale oil, biomass, nuclear, wind, photovoltaics, electrified railways, a dash-for-gas in electrical generation, and building heating.) Americans believe that they will need liquid fuels because they will ALWAYS need to drive SUVs around suburbia and their way of life is never to be messed with. Minor inconvenient truths like climate change are swept aside. They may have got it right on bio-fuels but their assessment of both wind and solar is wrong that it could have been written by the coal lobby. Oh yes, and they like coal. This book is littered with tired old right-wing American dogma that it will make you splutter in disbelief. The largest and most powerful nation on earth may well have been a shining beacon on the hill at one time but, if this is the best plan their brightest and best can come up with, then they have lost their way. At time of writing the US had lost its AAA credit rating and had been downgraded by Standard & Poor to AA+ (August 2011). It says it all.

The worst book on peak oil you will ever read from people who really should be showing much better leadership on this issue globally.
A good assessment on biofuels and energy return on energy invested lifts this work just a little.

Jacqui Hodgson with Rob Hopkins "Transition in Action"

Zac Goldsmith "The Constant Economy"

ISBN 978 1 84887 067 3. "The Constant Economy - How to Create a Stable Society" by Zac Goldsmith published by Atlantic Books in 2009. This work predates Zac's controversial election to be the Conservative MP for Richmond Park. The book is a short one with only 200 pages in quite a large font and thick paper for the pages. Your money gets you a Preface, Introduction, ten chapters (or "steps"), a Conclusion, Sources & Bibliography, Acknowledgments and Index. You will find this a quick read. Zac became the Editor for The Ecologist in 1997 and has pioneered campaigns on climate change, GM food and pesticides. This book is a result of his work John Gummer MP on the Conservative Party's "Quality of Life" policy review. As such this seems to be the result of thinking that is half the usual environmentalist litany (as per the contents of The Ecologist), and part Conservative Party acceptable politics. For example the matter of man made climate change, economic growth and aviation is so soft peddled as to almost not be mentioned in this book at all. Regardless, he is in no-mans-land. No doubt much of what he has written will self-ghettoise himself as a the Tory party's token big greenie. Many who like The Ecologist will be mortified about how toothless much of the book may seem in comparison to Zac's campaigning years. I guess he wasn't going to win this one.

At least he got himself in Parliament and for a Party that isn't associated with environmentalism. This is a great "bunker-buster". It allows the rest of us to kick down the door of conservative thought and get these people to wake up and realise that this isn't 1979 any more. Margaret Thatcher is ancient history and the paradigm of endless unsustainable growth can easily come to a stuttering halt. But is this book any good? Well it is a story of two halves. It is half Zac-the-campaigning-editor-of-The-Ecologist and half Zac-Tory-MP. It is where he is the latter that this book become interesting. He digs up all kinds of interesting facts and figures that are useful for people who like that sort of thing. Facts and figures are useful when dealing with Tories as they are prone to dismiss all environmental thought is woolly-thinking nonsense. Clearly Tories didn't believe in this sort of rubbish before so Zac has had to keep a steady hand and a level heart in building a water-tight case. As mentioned this has a lot to do with the Tory view of their "quality of life" which became flavour of the month under David Cameron. Goldsmith rounds on, what he calls, the "darker" greens and their extremist dogma - no doubt this goes down well with the Tory faithful but he is making a valuable point. He argues that the extremists have alienated the Conservatives to the extent that the ground has to be reclaimed.

To do this Goldsmith pulls out a quote from the "father of conservative philosophy" Edmund Burke who said "Society... becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." The author goes on to explain that his "constant economy" is "one where resources are valued, not wasted, where food is grown sustainably and goods are built to last. A system where energy security is based on the use of renewable sources, and where communities are valued as our greatest hedge against social, economic, and environmental instability. They would deliver an economy that operates at the human scale, and above all that recognises nature's limits." He goes on to praise localism (although not localisation) with the words "Power needs to be diffused through the community." (page 36). Transition Towns gets a look in and mention on pages 44 and 45 although clearly Zac knows next to nothing about it. We loved his ludicrous mention of the "free cycle system" which we assume means Freecycle (or freegle). Given the 2009 publish date of the book some bits seem highly dated such as Goldsmith's promotion of the German-style feed-in tariff. The previous Labour Government pretty much had this in the pipeline since 2008 so this should have been in the book. All-in-all not a bad exercise. This is probably more important because of who Goldsmith is rather than what he has written. A noble exercise but it is way too full of old-skool environmentalism for this to have the impact he thought it might.

Too much "Ecologist-stylee" super greenie-freakie campaigning on such things as GM foods and fisheries.
When it is good it is very good. We enjoyed his taking pot shots at the "extremist dogma" of the "darker greens" who have done so much damage to our cause.

(Edited by) Richard Heinberg & Daniel Lerch "The Post Carbon Reader"

ISBN 978-0-9709500-6-2. "The Post Carbon Reader - Managing the 21st Century's Sustainability Crises" edited by Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch. Published in 2010 by Watershed Media and the Post Carbon Institute. A large book at 523 pages including Foreword, Preface, Acknowledgements, sixteen parts with a total of 34 chapters, Notes and Index. Some 42 authors contributed to this work most of whom are "Fellows of the Post Carbon Institute". With the one exception (of our very own Rob Hopkins) this is dominated by North American voices. As with all such works - no matter how righteous and admirable it is, it only goes to show just how far behind Europe and the rest of the World, North America is. They may possess some of the best minds and advanced thinking but that thinking appears to exist in their civic society which sits entirely outside the US Government and Federal system. If just a small ounce of all this commonsense found its way into Congress then maybe the US could one day lead the world in terms of action as well as talking around the problem. The sixteen sections of this work are: "Foundation Concepts", Climate, Water, Biodiversity, Food, Population, Culture and Behaviour, Energy, Economy, "Cities, Towns and Suburbs", Transportation, Waste, Health, Education and Building Resilience. Authors include Richard Heinberg, Richard Douthwaite, Bill McKibben, Chris Martenson and Rob Hopkins.

So what you are getting are 34 mini-essays giving you the state-of-the-art in post-carbon thinking. Some of us would pretty much buy anything written by Heinberg - everything else is a bonus. There is very good coverage of the topic here and this presents a very broad horizon on the topic. The section on Waste was eye-opening. On the down side we do get some Climate Change scaremongering from the likes of Bill McKibben that seems wholly out of place in a book devoted to solutions rather than navel gazing. This aside, this is a solid piece of work although it suffers badly from its pure US-orientation. At times it is so parochial (check out the section on education) that the work is rendered utterly meaningless outside the USA. However this work is so vast that the generic areas of philosophy can be plundered at will to supply a feast of data for a thousand blogs. The level of intellect on display is top notch. A few high points include the Tom Whipple essay on "Peak Oil and the Great Recession" and Michael Shuman's work on "The Competitiveness of Local Living Economies". If only Shuman's work could be translated into a meaningful work based upon the UK's economy (based as it is entirely upon statistics). It isn't easy to critique a work as vast and diverse as this so this will be a short review. Everybody will find something to enjoy in the Post Carbon Reader. If only we could get book like this more widely read. Excellent.

Not designed for an international audience. The William E Rees work on "Thinking Resilience" was nearly incomprehensible.
A vast and broad piece of work. Enough here to keep everyone happy. A good resource on state-of-the-art thinking.

Keith Farnish "Time's Up!"

ISBN 978 1 900322 48 5 paperback. "Time's Up! An uncivilized solution to a global crisis" by Keith Farnish was published in 2009 by Green Books. For the £10 cover price you get Acknowledgements, Introduction, 16 Chapters (in four sections), an Afterword, References, Notes and an Index. The inside face page has a disclaimer "The author and publishers accept no liability for action inspired by this book". Now that might just give you a clue on this one. The author is a blogger, writer, philosopher and activist but prior to picking this up he was unknown to us. Having read this we see why. It is a book of two halves. The first half, up to page 145, verges between the incredibly dull to the incomprehensible. If this was all to this book I might have graded it as codswallop. This first half is a work of philosophy. Farnish takes navel gazing to new lows as he spends over one hundred pages trying to talk about "The Scale of the Problem". and "Why it matters". In detail this seems to involve the worst kind of scaremongering about all of the kinds of threats mankind faces from mother nature. Let me tell you about my own experiences with mother nature. When my little girl was born she had a lot of eczema. My wife scoured the internet looking for natural cures. When we questioned one medical doctor about this he was dismissive. "Nature is nasty" he told us.

Well, nature is many things but it is neither "nice" nor "nasty" - it simply is what it is. A machine we are all part of. It doesn't judge or take sides. It doesn't care. Farnish uses the first half of the book to tell us how we are messing with nature and how it will come back to haunt us. It may well be that many won't disagree with this and taking us through the threats from "Ten-Millionth of a Metre" up to "One Hundred Metres" has novelty. However the purpose of this section is to convince you that the end of the world is nigh and that drastic action must be taken. Although the belief has been regularly debunked by scientists Farnish repeats the old mantra about how shifting climate zones will expose us to terrible diseases. Although the threat is there his attempt to link the two is as convincing as the Bush administration's attempt to link Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda. Farnish goes part way to recognising this - it is modern air travel that is giving modern diseases their global reach. On page 20 he begrudgingly admits that in the case of the spread of H5N1 it is human behaviour and not Climate Change that is to blame. Later he also connects our destruction of biodiversity with the rise of disease. This maybe genuine, however, there is a subtly at work here that you might spot. This book is less about tackling climate change and more about ridding the planet of industrial civilisation. The author asks us to believe that the many sources of disease that threaten us are arising due to our civilization, hence it is our civilization that is the problem.

This brings us nicely back to the disclaimer that I mentioned earlier. You see a clue on page 79 & 80 where Farnish goes off half-cocked about GM food and other genetic modification of living things. As he feels strongly about this then he sees nothing wrong in equating the availability of genetic information on the internet to the availability of terrorist bomb-making information. In one great leap he has labelled an entire industry as a bunch of terrorists. Strong stuff. Again, up until this point many of Farnish's target audience may well be agreeing with his point of view. Bit by bit, page by page, Farnish convinces he reader (with partial success) that everything in our modern civilised industrial life is rubbish. He claims it has disconnected us from nature. The solution is to reconnect ourselves to Farnish's "real world". Again, you may have sympathies with this but it was at this point that I realised I was no longer seeing eye to eye with the author. His argument was simplistic and one-dimensional. At worst this is damaging. It may well be that extreme right-wing anti-environmentalists will jump upon a book like this to further drive home well honed clichés and stereotypes about the green movement. You can almost hear them laughing "This guy is nuts. He wants us to all reconnect with nature! Ha ha!" If it stopped here then it would be bad enough. But it doesn't. It gets worse.

At one level of Farnish's philosophy he could be indistinguishable from Rob Hopkins of the Transition movement. There is the same sense of holistic problems needing holistic solutions. However Rob would espouse a return to community and the backcasting of solution from a futuristic positive vision. He would also offer an inclusive solution where Governments and Corporations are taking part in the Transition. Farnish excludes them from his revolution. If Rob has an evil twin then maybe Farnish is up for the job. He isn't advocating a positive vision. He is preaching hell. He isn't asking for resilient, relocalised solutions. He asking for the system to be torn down from the inside. He is promoting the destruction of, what he calls the "Culture of Maximum Harm" by internal acts of sabotage. It is OK he says as long as you don't get caught. This is his "uncivilised solution". In other words: anarchy.

This is an anarchist manifesto and only the "people" will be invited to the revolution. The Governments and the Corporations aren't allowed into the party as they are beyond reform. I am sure the fans of climate camps will love this stuff. Farnish contends that we have to prevent global ecological collapse. This is necessary to "ensure the survival of humanity". Thus we must "rid the world of Industrial Civilization". I would contend that humanity IS industrial civilisation much as ants are part of an ant hill. On page 232 he says "[l]osing your cabinet of synthetic pharmaceuticals and your ambulance service may be one kind of loss; but in the big scheme of things, it's a loss that has many gains attached to it." Does Farnish realise how much damage words like this can do? In one sentence he has aligned his views with those of Pol Pot and his "Year Zero" campaign in Cambodia. We don't need the killing fields here or anywhere. Most of us would always choose a field of organic potatoes tilled by volunteers in a Community Supported Agricultural scheme. THAT is a solution. Not anarchy.

This is not to say that there weren't parts of this book that I loved. The section (starting on page 146) concerning how we are kept disconnected from nature was a lot of fun. I am maybe being unfair in labelling it "nature" as Farnish is talking about a broader principle by which we are unable to see the impacts we have upon nature. He doesn't call it "nature", he terms it the "real world". However I would contend that the day to day impacts upon this "third-party" are of no interest to anyone anyway. We are disconnected from the real world because we don't like to be reminded of things that we feel powerless to change or that benefit us. We choose this path. Our real world is very real to us because it IS "real".

If you wish to engage modern civilised society then you have to reconnect them with the future of homo sapiens, NOT "nature" or your own perception of what the "real world" is. We may be interweaved with the future of our environment but unless we convince people of what is in it for them, they will not react. They are already in the real world. But that is the present day and they don't see the consequences of their actions. To change we need to believe in a better tomorrow where sustainability is engineered by slow evolution out of the current paradigm. It is amazing that I have to repeat this point over and over again. I guess Farnish doesn't choose to see what is obvious to most of us. Instead he has chosen an anarchist fantasy. This a radical environmentalist agenda that does a disservice to all of us who seek a genuine cultural change. The author will always choose to "give the Earth a future" rather than mankind because he cannot get his eye off the microscope eyepiece long enough to see the accomplishments of mankind. Nature may well crush us, but in geological timespans the Earth has a bright future. With or without us. In a 100,000 years, by Farnish's own reckoning, there will be nothing left our species. That is but the blinking of an eye for the Earth. We owe the Earth nothing as it is immune to us. We owe it to ourselves to get the most people as possibly through the coming transition as painlessly as possible.

Incredibly damaging anarchist polemic that could set back the transition, to a post-carbon future, back a generation - if anyone took it seriously.
Occasionally enjoyable and angry polemic that reflects the way many of us feel about the problem, if not the solution.

Howard Friel "The Lomborg Deception"

ISBN 978-0-300-16103-8. "The Lomborg Deception" by Howard Friel was published by Yale University Press in 2010. The 258 pages include a foreword by Thomas F. Lovejoy, fourteen chapters, some notes and an index. The large font makes this a relatively quick and easy read. Friel is a new name in the climate change quagmire charading as "debate". He normally writes on political issues such as the future of Palestine, the news media and international law. He never originally intended on writing a book on Lomborg - instead he had started as a work on how the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have reported climate change. Bjorn Lomborg's 2007 book "Cool It" coincided with the IPCC's synthesis report of that year. The two stood in stark contrast. One was the work of 2500 scientists and reviewers whilst the other was an entirely contradictory book by the Scandinavian economist. Clearly common sense dictated that no one would give Lomborg the time of day. His work was utterly irrelevant and it would be entirely irrational to have even published it. Yet it was published - much to the plaudits of the US press. It was THIS that so interested Friel. Beyond the enthusiasm of the press came the support of the right-wing politicians who hold so much control over US Climate Policy (for what its worth). Sadly, the American public too swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

The coup was complete, Lomborg was wielding power way beyond his station. It was enough to make you wonder what he knew that the IPCC did not? Friel decided to find out by painstakingly taking apart Lomborg's assertions in "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and "Cool It" reference by reference. What he reveals in this book depends largely on what side of the debate you are on. For the most part he utterly demolishes Lomborg. Arguably he has stripped away the emperor's lies and shown - as clear as day - that is indeed wearing no clothes whatsoever. However, there does remain a grey area for the doubters to take comfort from. Some of the arguments used by Friel are a little on the weak side. He often admits the "technical" accuracy of Lomborg's words (in essence, he is "right" - well sort of) and then often trots out some rather useless reference to newspaper articles as a means of contradicting Lomborg. These are second hand reports and cannot be considered impartial. Afterall it is Lomborg who is trying to point out that the media exaggerates the impact of Climate Change hence using media reports to counter this point is futile.

Too often we get Lomborg's point of view that the glass is half full versus Friel's view that the glass is half empty. Often they are obviously talking about the same thing and are citing the same reference. This happens through large tracts of the book where Friel nit-picks some rather minor points and pads out the argument through endless repetition. It is a little frustrating and it does make you wish you had read Lomborg's book first. In fact we recommend you do although we had not at this point. It would be interesting to see just how many credible citations Lomborg uses that Friel is unable to criticise. We have previously reviewed "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and were unimpressed due to his near-idiotic view that, as oil production has always increased in the past it would magically increase in future - however counter-intuitive this would be for a finite resource. Lomborg uses an unassailable mountain of references, so hats off to Friel for having a go at checking them. The first 65 pages of Friel's book covers "The Skeptical Environmentalist" but only manages the first twenty-nine endnotes. This takes 9000 words. To review the all 2,930 endnotes would have required a book 900,000 words long. An enormous task by any means. Much of this work has been done in various places on the internet. Three scientific forums - one on the Grist web site, a second by the Union of Concerned Scientists and a third published in "Scientific American" - come out through 2001 and 2002. Each was quite effective in ripping great holes out of Lomborg's ideas. They all concluded much as Friel has done: Lomborg has cherrypicked and misrepresented his scientific sources. Some of Lomborg's written beliefs have no known backing in any scientific literature. Many of his cited references flatly contradict his claims or don't exist. In brief we can only conclude that Lomborg makes a very clever job of giving the impression that his own prejudiced and unsubstantiated beliefs have some basis in science. For the most part they do not. He is largely clutching at straws in some desperate attempt to convince people that there is something in his beliefs. He is, quite simply, wrong.

This may be a little uncharitable as Friel often doesn't make a killer case. In fact he rarely shows that much "deception" has actually happened. We are sure Lomborg genuinely believes what he writes. He ignores all evidence to the contrary - however overwhelming it may be, and beefs up ANY flimsy piece of evidence he can find that he thinks supports his case. Many devout "warmers" are guilty of the same thing but it is difficult to precisely pin down a climate-change-believer-version-of-Lomborg. Lomborg has a few goes. He has a fair few cracks at the arch nemesis of all deniers - Al Gore. Friel launches a stout defence of the man who was never quite the President of the Unites States of America. With this and a few other exceptions, Lomborg is vague about who he is criticising. He would be on safe ground if he focussed on media misrepresentation but often waffles about some ill-defined group called "environmentalists" who he claims are exaggerating the risks from climate change. Like so many on the loony-right of the political spectrum he has spent so much time with others of his ilk he feels no need to explain to his reader who these people are. I think we counted one reference to Greenpeace in the entire book. Several major political leaders in Europe got more mentions than do Friends of the Earth. One is left with the impression that "environmentalists" are just some fictional bogeyman that Lomborg wishes to scare children with. Replace "environmentalists" with the word "communists" and you get the picture. It is a handy stereotype with little or no meaning. You certainly can rub shoulders with many ill-informed environmentalists-in-the-street who know little more about the mechanics of our climate than the average "denier-down-the-pub". However Lomborg doesn't feel the need to insult members of the public. He gives the term "environmentalist" some semi-official gravity like it is some organised government department - well funded and running our lives. In fact, time and again, Friel shows that the victims of Lomborg's campaign are actually just Climate Scientists, Oceanographers and anybody else in science who actually has done some peer-reviewed and published research on Climate Change. In short, the term "environmentalist" is nothing short of a smear designed to undermine the work of people the public should listen to before they ever listen to the likes of Lomborg. (Not withstanding idiotic E:Mail chatter amongst colleagues at the CRU.)

Regardless - this book mostly portrays Lomborg's lack of objectivity. He is not a climate change denier. Far from it. He represents, what some right-wing US papers laughably call, the "middle-ground" in the "debate". He believes that man-made climate change is happening but he believes it will not be as serious as claimed and any mitigation is far, far too expensive in comparison. There is some logic to this argument ONLY IF you believe one a fundamental assumption that Friel doesn't even tackle. It is the assumption that Fossil Fuels cannot be replaced cheaply because they will be cheap forever. Of course this is absurd. He fails to understand (and Friel is complicit in this) that fossil fuels are a legacy. They are history. They have no future. Since we have to ditch them, in the near future, anyway, then the future economic prosperity and abundance comes from a form of living that must be sustainable. Many simple changes to cut our carbon addiction actually pay for themselves. Others pay for themselves in the longer run if we accounted for our unhealthy fossil fuel addiction correctly, ie, true-cost economics. There is a better way. Our high-maintenance western lives cannot be sustained. CO2 reduction is the cheaper option. Business-as-usual is not an option. The post-carbon society is inevitable. It is a socio-economic opportunity. Those who get there first will be the winners. Lomborg is wrong from the ground up.

Fail to deliver the killer argument and fails to demolish the central flaws in Lomborg's hypothesis.
Destroys Lomborg and demonstrates that the Scandinavian Economist offers only a faith in business-as-usual based upon little-or-no evidence whatsoever.

John Michael Greer "The Ecotechnic Future"

ISBN 978-0-86571-639-1. "The Ecotechnic Future - envisioning a post-peak world" by John Michael Greer was published by New Society Publishers in 2009. The book is 269 pages long including Introduction, three Parts of thirteen Chapters, Afterword, Notes, Bibliography and Index. Greer is a new author on the scene (by our standards) however this is not his first work. He had previously written "The Long Descent" (New Society 2008) which, as far as we can tell, was along similar lines to this one. When we purchased this work it was based upon some favourable reviews online at Amazon. What we didn't know was that Greer heads the "Ancient Order of Druids in America". Uh-oh - crank alert. Even worse his blog is called "The Archdruid Report". On this basis alone I would feel pretty constrained about recommending this book to any of the locals in our Transition Town. But bear with it. Regardless of Greer's unorthodox background this is a very good book. It is philosophical and challenges the way that many of the "peakist" crowd think about peak oil. Essentially Greer points out that there will be no sudden crash. Instead he prefers to believe in several hundred years of slow muddling through. And he isn't joking about the "muddling through" bit. He calls it "succession". Greer believes that there is no "one way" to solve the current crisis. There is no golden bullet and no magic solution.

Hence, there is no known model for society, in current existence, that we know will survive in the post-peak world. We can only guess at some of the aspects but we cannot engineer it to happen. It will happen through a process of "dissensus" whereby lots of societies and groups will try all kinds of alternative ways of living. It's called experimentation. The failures will be eliminated through Darwinian natural selection leaving a variety of "winners" at some future date. It isn't deterministic or pre-ordained that one system shall triumph over others. It will also be a very uncomfortable journey. Greer calls it "The Long Road". Quite. Greer walks us down that road and through the likely phases and outcomes of the succession in glorious detail. There is the "end of affluence", the "age of scarcity industrialism", the "age of salvage" and finally, the ecotechnic age of the title. This is a time when we have fully adapted to a society without fossil fuels. We will still have some technical knowledge (although some maybe lost). It will be "eco" in the sense that so many modern "technologies" (such as organic farming) are perceived as having an ecological base. They are "technical" as they will have evolved from our current industrial society. Greer doesn't believe it likely that we will return back to the age of the hunter-gather. However, if we mess up this evolution into the ecotechnic age, then that is what awaits us.

This all makes for a very refreshing read. Through the first ten chapters of this book I was delighted at how easy to read and understand Greer's work was. I had not read such a ground-breaking work on peak oil since Heinberg's "The Party's Over" opened my eyes back in 2002. You really get the feel that Greer's argument has much to offer us. Firstly it offers hope - even if it is bedded in a grim reality. We will triumph over peak oil - society will go on. Secondly it helps us understand what we should do today. This probably translates as "don't panic". We need not fear experimentation. We certainly SHOULD be experimenting going-forward as we rather missed the opportunity to make a more-orderly descent in the 1970's. (Note the very heavy US-centric nature of this work although it isn't annoying.) So if you wish to face peak oil with a renewed sense of dark-optimism than read this. It isn't naively upbeat or conservative - far from it. However it does give as a semblance of a road-map and emboldens us for the journey ahead. It certainly is not a call to do nothing as is clear from the occasions when Greer openly scorns the poliical elites in contemporary society.

However, just at the moment I thought I was going to buy a hundred copies, and mail them to everyone I knew, it all came to a grinding halt. In the final three chapters Greer descends into irritating psycho-babble. Whereas in the first ten chapters he happily wades through such enlightening topics as Community, Energy, Food, Home and Work, in the last three he gets bogged down in Culture, Science and something called "The Ecotechnic Promise". From here-on author turns up the philosophising to full volume and its relevance disappears off a cliff. Although philosophy can tell us a great deal about the future of our species there are times when it reads as twaddle. Once the author makes this mistake you also notice one stunning omission from his post-peak vision - and that's "Money". Although he does write in several places about how "money" is some figment of our imagination he then never runs with this idea. He spurns the idea of sudden collapse despite writing his book in 2009 after the crash of 2008. He seems to think that the problem of a post peak-world is purely practical, social and cultural. He thinks that if we relearn the ways of home-economics then somehow we'll muddle through. I would dearly have loved to see him write the obviously missing chapter about which forms of money and economics he thought would triumph in a post-peak society. You can be sure of one thing - it can't possibly be quite the same as we have now. He must be aware the growth economics will finally stop and the endless growth required to pump-prime out money supply will have to stop. Since we have no permanent money supply then this leads to only one conclusion - economic collapse. The biggest threat is from the one resource that, in theory can't run out - money. It would seem that Greer only has one solution to this. He calls it "adaptive responses". Somehow we will invent a new system of money and muddle-through. Well I hope so. This is only implied in his work as he never addresses money directly.

These criticisms to one side, this remains an enjoyable and enlightening book. Through it Greer happily pours disrespect upon almost everyone in the peak oil community and beyond. I wonder if he has any friends left? He does give thanks to Rob Hopkins and the Transition Movement. It is probably the only organisation that the author actually praises. He devotes most of page 185 to Transition but slips in one criticism: Transition is "vulnerable" because of its "reliance upon consensus methods, which tend to create bland compromises based on conventional wisdom". Although consistent with Greer's own belief in dissensus this comment is at odds with what he writes about David Korten's "The Great Turning" only one page later. Greer writes dismissively that Korten "insists that certain people have reached a higher "developmental stage" than the rest of us and are thus naturally fitted to run the world". So does Greer believe in future of non-bland decision-making that avoids conventional wisdom but uses conventional democracy? He spends most of the book treading a thin line between genius and madness. Pages are full of with hot air yet he misses obvious issues. He argues against almost every peak oil thought out there until he ends up contradicting himself. This leaves Greer's "Ecotechnic future" incomplete and flawed...., yet somehow still brilliant and visionary. A confusion of ideas that aren't difficult to like regardless of how contradictory they sometimes seem.

Thumbs down to the clap-trap in the last three chapters and the missing chapter on "Money" which the author forgot about.
Groundbreaking and novel. If you read one book about peak oil this year make it this one. It will change the way you think - like good philosophy should.

Forest Row In Transition - A Work Community In Progress

ISBN 978 095217 572 8. Published by Brambletye Publishing in 2009. 38 pages in big floppy A4 size. A nice quick and easy light-weight read. This is what happens when a Local Council has money burning a hole in its back pocket and decides to give it away to a community group working on local resilience in the face of Peak Oil and Climate Change. There is something truly astounding about this "community work in progress". The Parish Of Forest Row only has 5200 residents. The number of people who worked on these 38 pages is, wait for it, 20 not including those who attended the individual Group meetings where these ideas were sketched out. Now if you are one of those unfortunate souls who live in apathy-town where, out of 100,000 residents you can barely manage to get 5 people into a room together to do anything "transitiony" this is an eye opener.

The work started as a "Changing Worlds" workshop in a community centre in 2007. This finally expanded into what became Transition Forest Row. Where is Forest Row? Somewhere in Sussex near East Grinstead. Yes. East Grinstead, which has the highest density of diverse religious grouping per square mile than anywhere outside of Hollywood. It is the home of Scientology in Europe. It is a special place. At the rear of the book we hear that "...the Transition impulse spread through the village, groups began to form around particular topics like energy, transport, food.....". If only such Transition fever could grab the rest of the country we would be onto a winner. So what do you get for your £3 (you can download it for free from www.transitionforestrow.org)? Well, £5000 worth of funky graphics and cartoons. The front and back covers are quite striking if bizarrely nothing to do with Transition. A chicken looking at a mountain of strange cartoony-stuff. Weird. Apart from that we lots of nice photo's of nice Forest Row people doing transitiony things like scribbling on paper, making cider and planting things. There are some simplistic mock up newspapers, overviews of transition initiatives, peak oil and climate change, lots of ideas about how a future Forest Row will look and a cartoon family called the "Foresters" who live in 2025. We see the world 2025 through their eyes and examine how things are so different for them.

It is all very inspirational and packed with good ideas. It is actually a text-book version of what the Transition Vision is all about. This is seminal work and every transition initiative should have this tucked away for guidance. Expect it to be heavily thumbed and shame-lessly copied by every other group out there. That isn't to say it is totally flawless. Considering the amount of tax payers money that went into it, it might have been expected that some "science" and demographic analysis might have been inserted by the Council. The work is imaginative but amateurish, charming but somehow lacking authority. It is very "transitiony" but it is just aspirational.... It provides no real clue as to how we get from here to 2025. Things happened but we don't know why. As a roadmap it fails to convince, but it is a "work in progress". Expect great things from this team. Recommended.

Not overly convincing. Lacks expert insight.
The first of its kind. Everyone should read this and try and improve upon it.

James Hoggan "Climate Cover-Up"

ISBN 978-1-55365-485-8. "Climate Cover Up - The Crusade to Deny Global Warming" written by James Hoggan (with Richard Littlemore) was published by Greystone Books in 2009. This 250 page paperback (including Index and Notes) bristles with cover accolades using such phrases as "an imperative read" (Leonardo Dicaprio), "expose" (James Hansen), "crime of the century" (Bill McKibben) and "intergenerational crime" (David Suzuki). We like words such as "cover-up" and "crusade". They have such mythic qualities implying that we are engaged in some great moral war. So we just HAD to read this book. Seeing as it is published in Canada we had to wait a while to get our copy. It sold out on Amazon quite quickly. Well, you can probably guess by now what we are leading up to.... We actually were pretty under whelmed by the result. We probably shouldn't blame the authors though as they have pretty much repackaged the contents of their "DeSmogBlog" for those of us who don't have time to read blogs. For those of us who do (and have read DeSmogBlog at length) then you may feel a little cheated as there is not much here you won't already be familiar with. It's nice to have it on the book shelf but it is hardly essential. So, does this book earn its credentials? Well, if you are an out-&-out "warmer" (and a true zealot at that) then you will love this book as it will make you very angry.

For those of us who have actually read around the topic from both sides of the argument (as well as studied a bit of the science) this book disappoints. It is not the role of this book to discuss the science. Hoggan starts from the assumption that the word of the IPCC is gospel and that any discussion about the impacts of climate change is damaging and irrelevant. For him the science is settled - end of debate. Maybe many of us felt this way five years ago but much water has flowed under the metaphorical bridge since then. Hoggan makes no attempt to describe the sophistication of the debate and prefers only to characterise it as good versus evil. The author sees the topic as the coming apocalypse and no dissent will be tolerated. Many will agree with him. We can't blame you. However, for many of us who have to engage with members of the public about the real-world debate, we find that the warmers are being beaten hands-down by educated people quoting science. Hoggan does not arm the average punter with any tools to handle this problem. He writes about things that have happened (and largely happened in Canada and the USA). His bad guys are out of comic books and some of the anecdotes are amusing, however there is little in the activities of these fossil-foolish PR guys that really surprise us. They do what corporations tell them and pay them to do. If you are as cynical about the world, as many of us are, then you will just shrug your shoulders and press on regardless. Some of us have been through this pain barrier and come out the other side. Fans of DeSmogBlog no doubt will prefer their own comfort zone decorated with their own value system and assumptions.

What infuriates us about this book is that it picks off only the big and obvious targets yet tells us nothing about the dark underbody of denial. Just who are the rank-and-file foot soldiers writing to the letters pages of the local newspapers across this land? They don't all work for oil companies yet they all quote science chapter & verse. Something far darker is going on. For example in 2009 the British Science Museum ran its "Prove it" campaign where it asked the British public to vote on whether or not the 'evidence' of man-made climate change could be believed. Apparently the overwhelming majority voted "no" despite this verdict being largely the opposite of findings based upon other polling. This strongly suggested the internet-based vote had been loaded. The denial-community (if such a thing exists) had got together to vote en masse online. The 'warmer' community then swung into battle with exaltation for people to go online and vote 'yes'! Hence a simple question of science (aimed obviously at children) became yet another battle-ground for opinionated adults. Surely this would just leave the public even more disenchanted and the children confused? Yet who was it behind this block-voting? It may have been completely unorganised. It may well be that not a drop of oil-money went near it. The internet is funny place. The arguments about man-made climate change have long ago bolted the stable. They are now 'out-there' and have a life of their own. Denier books all rocket straight to the top ten in the science area of Amazon. This is what people want to know about. They want to not-believe. What is lacking is truly honest and open debate. All we get is argument from entrenched positions. Is this a "crusade" or simply civil war?

There is an over-riding irony in much of Hoggan's words. He is a PR man. He criticises many in the PR industry for representing the interests of industry and the Oil Companies in an immoral fashion. That maybe fair but when he accuses them of not being scientists then he is on shaky ground. Hoggan belittles many of the "deniers" for their apparent lack of scientific credentials - which is occasionally true - but he is no man to speak on such matters. He obviously knows nothing of the scientific debate nor does he show any signs of being interested in the reasons WHY there is debate. For him it is all about money and right versus wrong. To understand WHY we debate the science we have to turn to other books. Try Mike Hulme's "Why we Disagree about Climate Change" and Peter Taylor's "Chill". The former is a genuine climate scientist concerned that arguments about the climate change debate are massively over-simplified. Our responses are as much cultural as scientific. Peter Taylor is also a highly credible scientist but by Hoggan's definition we shouldn't be listening to him. Why? Because he doesn't work solely in the field of climatology or do any recent/relevant research... The fact that he is a noted scientist who has worked formulating policy for Governments and the UN itself means that he has a very unique insight into the working of the IPCC. Hence his words of caution are entirely credible. There is more at stake here than a cat & mouse game of "good" science versus "bad" science. There is only science. As Hulme tells us - we learn through arguing.

If you dig a little deeper into much of the published work on our climate you find ample evidence that the simplistic link between CO2 and temperature needs continual reassessment. However, as the link is the basis of so much research funding then all the researchers back the paradigm - even if their data doesn't. Digging out 900 research papers and finding that none contradict the consensus is not surprising. However, look a little deeper at the data, or even further afield, and you will find work that needs to be considered. Much of the sceptical dialogue is drawn from this vast body of data. This work is often peer-reviewed and even included in the IPCC main reports (even if they are over-looked because they are "controversial"). To understand our climate you need physicists, oceanographers, biologists and many more besides. New work is being published daily that adds new knowledge. Science that is "settled" is stagnant. A lot of this book comes over as fluff and gossip. Despite the gushing words of Dicaprio there is nothing in this book that really arms you with a greater understanding. If you wish to rebuff deniers based upon the science then look up gristmill, but even that can only give you simple answers to many simple fallacies. This book knows its audience and they will be calling for blood. Great rabble-rousing but not a sophisticated analysis.

Nothing new. Underwhelming and simplistic. Lacking any original wisdom that this topic sorely needs these days.
A few neat anecdotes. Warmer-zealots will be moved and informed.

Anthony Giddens "The Politics of Climate Change"

ISBN 978-0-7456-4693-0. Anthony Giddens' "The Politics of Climate Change" was published by Polity Press in 2009. Giddens is a prolific author with at least another 28 titles to his name plus another 12 edited works to his credit. He is a former Director of the London School of Economics, a Fellow of Kings College and a Member of the House of Lords. By the sound of things there is nothing about modern political philosophy that he doesn't know. This is his first venture into the murky world of Climate Change but his work is largely original and desperately needed. Giddens argues that the very reason we are failing to tackle Climate Change is that we are failing to understand its connection to international energy geopolitics and the power of oil. This is probably the first good book since Kunstler's "Long Emergency" to focus on the interchange between Peak Oil and Climate Change. The added dimension of politics is what has been missing and explains why, despite all the fine words of Tickell and Stern, the attempts to replace Kyoto have been such a miserable failure. It may sound as if this 264 page book (including acknowledgements, introduction, nine chapters, afterword, notes, references and index) might be really boring but you would be wrong. If anything this is one of the most accessible books on the topic that we have seen.

It is also far more useful and believable than Mike Hulme's "Why we disagree about Climate Change" that, although enlightening, offered little in the way of solutions. Where these two authors do agree is that a Kyoto-style agreement cannot be reached because we fail to understand the problem. Hulme assumes that this is some vague and ill-defined issue of philosophy suggesting we don't know what we want and are generally quarrelsome. Hardly helpful. Giddens is more to-the-point in his analysis. It is the Realpolitik that gets in the way. Political power is the problem. He goes further in arguing that as most past, present and future emissions only come from 6 countries (if you include the EU is one nation) they should get together and agree targets. Hulme had come to a similar conclusion in saying that multiple local agreements are best. Although finding Stern's approach naive (on page 201 "...there is no mention of politics in Stern's discussion, no analysis of power, or of the tense nature of international relations."), Giddens appears to agree that what is needed is a long-term central body to over-see and enforce multiple multi-lateral and regional Climate Change agreements. Stern suggested such a body at the level of the WTO and this, again, appears a reasonable way forward, if only because we haven't tried in and we need something, anything, to break the deadlock.

The first Chapter on Risk is pretty much standard fair for this kind of book but we don't have to wait long before Chapter 2 kicks in with the Peak Oil argument. In this he aligns with Stern in suggesting that decarbonisation is economically inevitable although he doesn't dwell on the matter much. Giddens' view is simply that the world map of politics is being drawn up as a race for the last of the planet's fossil fuels. Since decarbonisation challenges the status quo of the role that Russia, the Central Asian Republics and OPEC play then this is the pivotal point for world affairs the lens through which we must look to understand why climate change negotiations are on a road to nowhere. Agreements that were reached  were as a result of backroom political trade-offs rather than any real desire to tackle the problem. It is all just political posturing which achieves little or nothing. Since the passing of the Bush Jnr years in the Whitehouse, and the arrival of Barack Obama, there is now more chance of getting the USA to take a leading role via multi-lateral action. This clearly illustrates that actions are at the whim of global politics and we have to understand what is driving world affairs before we understand how to tackle such a global issue. In Chapter 3 Giddens lays into the "green movement" and largely dismisses them as irrelevant because he perceives them as a political group that contest the existence of the very institutions that we need to create and enforce the policies to combat Climate Change. In fact he dismisses the role of such organisations for the rest of the book and just generically refers to "NGO's". He sees their contribution as less than useful as they do not engage geopolitics on the world stage nor do they understand it. In this he is both partially right and probably wholly unfair. He is thinking and describing mostly the "Green Party" and doesn't give credit for how diverse the NGO's are in this area. The "Greens" (big 'G') are but one element. Giddens probably focuses on them because they are a political party so he is aware of them. Since they are unlikely to gain much real power this is all rather a moot point anyway.

By Chapter 5 Giddens talks about the roles of Carbon Taxes which he seems to prefer of Carbon Trading, although he leaves room for both. Like the rest of us he is waiting for Carbon Markets to work rather than act as a political fig leaf. As they remain unproven he prefers Carbon Taxes which Stern was largely dismissive of. Even Stern accepted they had a role on a national level but he didn't have much enthusiasm for them. By Chapter 7 we have moved on to Climate Change Adaptation. This is a most peculiar section of the book as Giddens appears to take on the role of insurance salesman and devotes most of the chapter to discussing financial insurance. This is not what most of us think of when we describe "adaptation". This chapter stands out as an oddity as being the only section where the authors goes off at a nearly irrelevant tangent. Stern has clearly illustrated that we cannot insure ourselves financially against Climate Change. By Chapter 8 the author is back on-message as he examines Climate Change negotiations before moving rapidly onto the final Chapter on Geopolitics. This section resonates the most as offering the most original analysis of the problem of reaching agreement. Giddens argues persuasively that we have left the post-Cold War honeymoon period and are back into a new Cold War - the war for resources. The players now are largely China and the USA. He suggests that these two should hold Cold War style summits to thrash out agreements to avoid conflict. If not he believes that we could see events spiral out of control and end up with the use of genuine weapons of mass destruction.

Giddens has created a work here that aligns with much that we have observed in the real world of climate politics. On page 11 he writes "we must create a positive model of a low-carbon future". This could be lifted right out of the work of the Transition Towns movement. He goes on to say that "It won't be a green vision, but one driven by political, social and economic thinking." Quite! He echoes the thoughts that we have here at PCL; Climate Change is not an environmental issue and to pigeon hole it as such guarantees that we will not deal with it. Giddens' advice to policy makes are thus: 1) Promote political and economic convergence upon a positive vision of a low-carbon future. It should overlap all areas of public policy. A low-carbon economy is a competitive one. 2) Embed the concern with Climate Change into every day lives so it is in the foreground all the time. 3) Avoid making party political points out of Climate Change. It is not a left wing issue. It is for the radical centre. The state must ensure action over the long term so policy must transcend the lifetimes of individual parliaments. 4) Perform long term risk assessments. He goes onto question the role of economic growth in developed countries and suggests that this is outmoded. Such growth is only needed in the developing world but all Nations need to engage in proactive adaptation.

To Giddens the neo-liberal experiment has failed because it was too short-termist. Future success will not depend on some return to Soviet style centralised planning but rather a return to long-termism in Government policy making. Governments must ensure that the markets will fix the problem by simply planning ahead. Unlike Stern, Giddens' is not dismissive of Climate Change sceptics saying (on page 24) "...the sceptics deserve and must receive a hearing. Scepticism is the lifeblood of science..." Finally this author confirms that "oil is the enemy of freedom" and a curse. On page 218 he adds "If the industrial nations could break away from their wholesale dependency on oil and natural gas; it would benefit not only them but, perversely. also the producer nations." We couldn't have said it better ourselves. This book is a near perfect analysis of where we have gone so terribly wrong in tackling Climate Change. We thought it could be fixed with a type of new Montreal Agreement and the sort of market trading that worked well to fix acid rain. However, we were mistaken. Fossil fuels are strategic assets to be fought over. We are addicted to them. The closest way we can fix this is to adopt the thinking of arms negotiations of the cold war. This may seem brutal and harsh, but that, sadly, is how it is. If there is one book you read on Climate Change this year make it this one. Please.

Confuses adaptation with financial insurance.... As if we can somehow buy our way out of trouble. Stern has rightly ruled that out already.
A near perfect and highly useful book on how to tackle Climate Change. It is a geopolitical problem resulting from the addiction to oil. Cold war politics returns.

Mike Hulme "Why we disagree about Climate Change"

ISBN 978-0-521-72732-7. "Why we disagree about climate change - Understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity" by Mike Hulme. Published in 2009 by Cambridge University Press. The review copy is the 392 page paperback which includes Foreword, Preface, 10 Chapters, Bibliography and Index. The author is no climate change denier nor zealot. He spent seven years leading the Tyndall Centre before moving on to work at the UEA (University of East Anglia) School of Environmental Sciences as a genuine Professor of Climate Change. He has published real peer-reviewed research on the topic as well as prepared reports for the UK Government, the EU and the IPCC. There is probably nothing he doesn't know about Climate Change. Hence his choice of topic is therefore interesting and brave. Not for him another shock-book packed with climate porn and worst-case scenarios. No, this is a reaction against any extreme views. Hulme's work is at the same time both sublime and infuriating. This book is packed with valuable insight but it leads us to conclude very little about how we can proceed. The author argues that "Climate Change" is different from "climate change" in lower case. There is the science and then our perception of this science and resulting policy.

Whereas climate change is a scientific issue "Climate Change" is a social issue. It is both mirror and magnifying glass. In it we see ourselves and we must use it as a mechanism to better understand ourselves. This is a work of modern philosophy and it may well not be an easy read to many. Many a 'warmer' may prefer the simplistic guidelines in James Hoggan's "Climate Cover-up". Hoggan prescribes the lack of progress in climate change negotiations to cartoon bad guys. Hulme strips down the sociological construct down to its bare bones to reveal the real reason why we can never agree about Climate Change. There are no simple bad guys. Everyone is part of the problem because we all understand Climate Change differently. We see it through a lenses of our cultural and personal expectations. The arguments will never be won by science because it is no, ultimately, a scientific problem with a prescribed "solution". Instead we have a sophisticated, multi-dimensional and multi-layered problem which tells us as much about our human society as it does about the interplay of sun, ocean and atmosphere. We all have different viewpoints upon the risks. We all fear different things. "Facts" get re-interpreted through the looking-glass of man-made climate change. For example 15,000 people died in France in August 2003 due to high temperatures. This was amplified through the press as a climate-change-related disaster. Yet in 1976 France suffered 6000 premature deaths due to a heat wave and no one even noticed. The statistical anomaly was only spotted in retrospect and was never commented upon.

Hence "Climate Change" has become a football for everyone with an "issue". Environmentalists see it as an environmental issue. Human rights campaigners see it as a global justice issue. The economists see it as an economic problem whilst politicians see it as a governance issue. It is all of these and none of these. Hulme walks through all the phenomenon that are in the mix; from science to economics, from faith to psychology, from communication to sociology and beyond. We don't disagree on Climate Change because we receive different science. We disagree for the same reasons we disagree about everything else. According to Hulme this disagreement is actually healthy as it helps us learn. Our society is now unable to even assimilate the very concept of scientific uncertainty. The situation is so bad that scientists (via the IPCC) feel the need to invent certainty in some desperate measure to induce action. However, it is all to no avail. We keep arguing and nothing every gets resolved. Each year we are exalted to cut our emissions by 10% or told that we have "ten years to save the planet". Each year a thousand ideas rise and fall in the areas of "dangerous climate change", carbon markets, civic environmentalism, poverty minimisation, zero-carbon technologies, international treaty, geo-engineering and so on. But what is it all for? What is the purpose of our species upon the plant? Why are we here? Which one of the many aspirations within our 'battle' with climate change are we trying to obtain? Is it a stable climate or a more just world? Is it reformed economic policies or the preservation of some lost Eden? Since we don't know what we want then we will never agree. Our climate will always be different from the one we want.

In 1962 Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" awoke the modern environmental movement. Since that time they have relished winning nearly every battle only to lose the war. Despite thirty years of campaigning on a million micro-issues they were completely out-manoeuvred by the rise neo-liberal economics. By the end of the 20th Century we had ripped a hole in our ozone layer, asset-stripped the planet of its fossil fuel reserves and changed the planet's climate. By any measure this is a mortifying failure. And yet we still fail. We fail to reach any agreement on an international treaty to deal with the problem. This, argues Hulme, is precisely because this is not a problem that can be solved with any single treaty. This book will make your head spin. If you have the patience to get to the end of it then you will be none the wiser about how we resolve the deadlock. On this essential point Hulme fails to deliver any killer-punch. We learn why we disagree but it isn't sufficient enough for us to understand by what method we should actually agree. This is Hulme's point - we will never agree. Hence we need a multitude of approaches that allow smaller groups to agree, then take it one baby step at a time. Novelist Ian McEwan explained it thus: "We are a clever but quarrelsome species - in our public discourses we can sound like a rookery in full throat". Precisely. There you have it - Climate Change as theology. Disturbing.

Little positive contribution to what the solutions may be.
Valuable insight, often sublime. Useful.

Chris Goodall "Ten Technologies to Save the Planet"

ISBN 978 1 84668 868 3. "Ten Technologies to Save the Planet" by Chris Goodall was published in 2008 by Profile Books. A 292 page paperback of the kind we like - a quick & easy read. We have been a big fan of Chris's since his "How to live a Low Carbon Life" in 2006. What is more he is a nice chap who has been happy to trade E:Mails with us on several occasions about such topics as lightbulb libraries and recycled biodiesel for electricity generation versus transport. We have had few, if any, quibbles with his work and have enjoyed his carbon commentary blog too. "Ten Technologies" is Chris on good form. When Mark Lynas sings his praises with words like "superb" (from the front cover) you know you are onto a winner. This book is also far more optimistic than the similar "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" by David JC Mackay which makes it a far more pleasant read too. The ten 'technologies' are wind, solar, wave/tidal, CHP, insulation, electric cars, 2nd generation biofuels, carbon capture, biochar and land management. Certainly Chris is no environmentalist and appears to have little sympathy with green-dogma against cars or biofuels.

He kicks the book of very early by saying "The world needs a mix of technical advances and complementary reductions in energy use - including substantial lifestyle changes -..." which strikes an agreeable chord. However he fails to explain exactly what he means. Could it me that he agrees with the concept that renewable energy will not sustain a consumer society? We hope so. Maybe it makes him a bit more green than he will admit to! Generally he does not describe any political process or mechanism for GHG emission reduction (such as contract and converge, Transition Towns, and so on). This is not the sort of 'technology' he means. This is technology in a conventional sense, not the social and political sense. Of course we need all aspects to be covered but the author sticks to what he knows best. We might say Chris is a techno-optimist without it becoming any sort of fetish. He is realistic and, in this, he is no different from other commentators who tell us that we already have all we need to know to solve the problem of decarbonising our economies. The only faux pax is the title of the book. "Saving the plant" Chris? Really? Saving ourselves methinks. Recommended

Biochar and land management seem impossible to implement.
A good optimistic run-down of the challenges ahead for renewable energy. A cheery ready & bang up-to-date.

Rob Hopkins "Transition Handbook"

ISBN 978 1 900322 18 8. "The Transition Handbook - From oil dependency to local resilience" by Rob Hopkins. Published in 2008 by Green Books Ltd. THE book for the Transition movement. That handbook! At our local Transition Town meetings our membership have been known to turn up clutching this to their chests like the Gospels. On the front cover Richard Heinberg implores the readership to follow its guidance. So, is it that good? Well, yes, and no, maybe, a little bit. You get 240 pages including Appendices, References, Resources and index. Rob breaks the content down into "The Head", "The Heart" and "The Hands". The first 77 pages covering the 'head' is actually the best bit as it is a well explained, rational and logical view of our situation and the solutions to it. This is inspirational. We get a clear insight into peak oil, climate change and cutting carbon emissions through relocalisation. In the 'heart' Rob moves onto his positive vision of transition He introduces the concept of a future of abundance rather than rationing. We examine his experience in Kinsale before moving onto the 'hands' where practical examples are supplied. Anyone used to reading and re-reading the 'primer' document on the Transition Network web site will see much here that is familiar. While this is all great one does get a sinking feeling glancing through the 'tools for transition' as they remind you of excruciating team building exercises you may have had to endure at work. Indeed, just like other books by permaculture experts it all looks like the re-invention of management consultancy techniques. I am sure there will be a long running set of Dilbert Cartoons aimed at Transition Towns in the near future. I sure hope Rob doesn't take this too seriously. Thankfully he does not and there is plenty of humour in the book too. He often admits that he doesn't have all the answers and that each Transition will be unique. The author obviously hankers after a golden wartime era with some medieval cob building thrown in for good measure - but then he admits this is only for inspiration, only an example. He is realistic enough to know that there is no turning back the clock with this vision. We do get a good year-long look at Transition Town Totnes experience. The background to the Totnes experience is very illuminating as it does confirm that there is something very special about the TT pioneers. Totnes, like Lewis, is an 'alternative' town. In 1926 a wealthy American heiress turned up in the town to conduct an experiment in combining arts, music & theatre. The establishment of a college of arts and a range of rural enterprises attracted lots of 'cultural creatives' to the area. Rob describes it as a 'hot bed' of environmentalism. Of course Transition would work there. Try that on a London Council Estate. It was a nice experiment but the program needs to be rolled out to "normal" people too. How to do that? No answers here really. The book is also suspiciously silent on the source of funding for this pursuit. In just one month Totnes managed to get both Aubrey Meyer and Tony Juniper to speak. This is the tip of the iceberg, they seemed to line up the brightest and the best of the environmental community's celebrities. That must have been expensive. Most Towns will struggle to get anyone through their doors let alone to dig in their pockets to pay for it. These communities must already have enormous human capital & some cash. They are already programmed to survive. What about the rest of us? This handbook provides inspiration but much of the practical advice seems doubtful. Most people would run screaming from the room if asked to perform some of the exercises suggested here. We must all find our own path to transition. It is a book that must be rewritten for every town. And that is exactly what is happening. Think of it as a work in progress. Let it inspire you, then throw it away and roll up your sleeves..... Recommended.

Too many embarrassing management games.
A unique, essential and seminal work.

Tamzin Pinkerton & Rob Hopkins "Local Food"

ISBN 978 1 900322 43 0. "Local Food - How to make it happen in your community" was written by Tamzin Pinkerton and Rob Hopkins. Published by Green Books in 2009. 216 pages long including References, Resources and Index. Well it had to happen - finally a really useful book about Transition. Not to say that there was anything wrong with Transition Timeline or the Transition Handbook but "Local Food" is the best stab yet at showing Transition in working practice. This is the real deal - littered with examples from around the globe we get full coverage of everything from "The Great Reskilling" through to School Projects and "Community Supported Agriculture". Whereas the earlier books looked largely at the reasons for change and the theory of Transition, "Local Food" really deals with the meat and potatoes (pardon the pun) of HOW DO WE TRANSITION? It is a question we have all been asked "But what does Transition actually DO!?" Well, here is the answer. We only hope that this is the first of many such practical example books.

Now if a spot of gardening really isn't your thing don't worry. This is not a gardening book. It is more of a 'legs-up' explaining each type of local food project and how to get it started. Clearly it takes a lot of hard work and a little bit of money. But enthusiasm seems to count for a lot too. Some of the projects are really simple - like selling organic veg at a primary school, but they do scale all the way up to full grown farms and supply chain businesses. There is something here for everyone. So if you are asked for a project brief by your Council or funding agency then please plagiarise this book shamelessly. It is eye-opening just how many projects are up and running but also how sophisticated some have become. Many predate Transition and have since been absorbed by the Transition phenomena or are now closely linked to them. One thing I have to say is that book is completely focussed on Peak Oil with little real impact analysis of Climate Change. As we know this will have temporary positive effect in the UK with longer growing seasons which suggests no great urgency for change here.

One of the high points comes on page 16 with a suggested model for local food distribution: 2.5% of food should be from your own garden, 5% from your neighbourhood, 17.5% from local sources, 35% from within 100 miles, 20% from the UK, 15% from Europe leaving 5% from abroad. Hopefully this dispels the myth that Transition is some crazy self-sufficiency cult. It is all about redressing the balance more in favour of the local to build resilience. Highly recommended if you love food and feel the need to do something. Academic reading for the rest of us.

Sometimes seems a bit academic for many.
A perfect score for a book that barely puts a foot wrong. If it is 'local food' it is in this book. Read it now.

Ben Goldacre "Bad Science"

ISBN 978-0-00-728487-0. "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre was published by Harper Perennial in 2009 (first published by Fourth Estate in 2008). This 370 page work is by writer, broadcaster, doctor and Guardian Columnist Ben Goldacre (who gives us the "Bad Science" column and web site). This is not a book about Climate Change (although it gets a brief mention). In fact if you wish to know more about the misreporting of Climate Change in the media then go no further than the book "Flat Earth News" by fellow Guardian Journalist Nick Davies. This is certainly not a book about Peak Oil. So why even review it here? Well, because it speak volumes about how our media misrepresents science and why our people fail to understand it. Since both Climate Change and Peak Oil are highly scientific problems then our failure to comprehend either is much explained by Goldacre's work. Ben debunks, that is what he does. If you have some comfortable assumption that homeopathy will be the "medicine" of choice for the Post-Carbon world then think again. The very problem with so many people who so well understand the possible impacts of Climate Change and Peak Oil is that they blithely overlay there own prejudices to decide the outcome. Since many of these sort of cultural-creatives have a hankering after alternative or complementary medicines (or far worse) then they immediately link a post-carbon future to some utopia where there will no more big pharmaceutical companies and everyone pops vitamin tablets to cure every disease. Ben will have none of this.

You can see why. He obviously sits on a Sunday and reads the column inches devoted in Sunday Supplements (to some of the "quality" newspapers) to complementary medicine, fad diets and "pill-pushing" nutritionists. He finds a rich gold-mine of irrational rubbish in these pages and it obviously pours forth into his Bad Science web site and Guardian Column. He has a lot of material to play with. He sets the scaremongering journalists right. He corrects the flaky statistics and debunks the myths of evil pharmaceutical companies trying to take over the world. This he shows to be a lot of nonsense. He replaces bad science with good science.

Now, if you have a problem with science, maths or statistics then you will struggle with this work. It does require you to pay attention. Some may find it boring. However, bear it out and you will be richly rewarded. What struck us the most about this brilliant book is that the TRUE story behind the made-up headlines is actually far more interesting than the bullshit you read in the papers. Goldacre blames the Journalists with social science degrees for not understanding science. Not understanding it at all. They are not bothered with the truth to the story - only the headline. Ben exposes how even children can see behind the lies and distortion.... Children know that you breath oxygen via your lungs not your stomach. So when Gillian McKeith (her of the UK's Channel 4 TV program "You are What You Eat") tells you to eat the greenest part of the leaf because it contains the most oxygen you know she is blowing it out of her arse. Best of all Ben tells us exactly what happens with the placebo effect. He shows that anyone can be fooled which is why it is so important to understand how scientific studies have to be done properly. He introduces the reader to concepts of objective science and how we have been mislead into believing that pills can solve all ills. He gets quite angry at the medicalisation of every human condition. He rounds it off with a thorough review of what went so terribly wrong with the MMR hoax. His work is littered with so many examples it leaves you quite astounded at just how dumb we have become. You will never believe anything you read again. Thoroughly recommended.

Nothing wrong with this even if it doesn't deal directly with Climate Change or Peak Oil.
Amazing and stunning piece of work. You will be aghast at what passes for "science" these days. Get angry!

HC Flores "Food not Lawns"

ISBN 978 1 933392 07 3. Full Title: "Food Not Lawns - How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighbourhood into a Community". Written by H.C.Flores and published by Chelsea Green in 2006. 334 pages including Notes and Index. In English you could roughly translate the title as 'how to turn your garden into a vegetable patch using stuff you found in rubbish bins and get all your neighbours round to help'. This work approximately comes in three parts: permaculture guide, management guru dogma and hippy manifesto. The hippy manifesto section would probably drive most people insane. If talk about connecting your cosmic consciousness with your inner tree kinda stuff turns you on then this is the book for you. Otherwise this is just gibberish to most people. Lets pick an example. Open the book at random to, say, page 162, third paragraph "In this way we replace unconscious evolution with conscious natural selection and rejoin the whole as willing stewards of the earth." What does this mean? You get about a hundred pages of this. The section we can think of as the "management guru" stuff would not look out of place in the bookshelf of the average white collar manager who has spent a bit of time working on the Business Masters. I wonder if the author is conscious of this? If you want a book on permaculture gardening then there are probably much better books than this. This book takes on a more holistic approach to gardening in the community. However, it is largely applicable to North America. It covers a very broad church, all the way from gardening for children all the way to getting out of gaol for getting arrested on demonstrations. It has its political elements but not enough to make it interesting. It is a rich slice of hippy life in Oregon today. It completely fails to reach out and connect with 99% of the population elsewhere in the world. That isn't to say that it isn't interesting. It is just that it is not that relevant or engaging. The appeals for Organic Gardeners to rifle through other people's waste for their requirements will not appeal to many. Indeed, it only proves how wasteful American culture has become. The Author fails to appreciate that living off garbage is not itself a path to sustainability. A mixed bag. Sometimes inspiring. Sometimes annoying. Take it or leave it. We'll leave it.

She is away with the fairies.
A slice of Community action with its heart in the right place.

Gelbspan "Boiling Point"

ISBN 0-465-02761-X. Published by Basic Books in 2004 as a follow to Ross's first work "The Heat is On" from 1997. Like many U.S. liberals his scorn for the neo-con Policies of the Bush regime can scarcely be hidden. Whilst his first book warned of the imminent danger his second deals with his horror and surprise to find that, far from everyone rallying to make things better, things (in fact) got a lot worse. Climate change accelerated whilst Politicians and the Fossil Fuel Industry (at least in the U.S.) did the opposite of what was necessary. An act he labels (accurately) as a 'crime against humanity'. He provides many stunning examples of the damage of global climate change before examining proposals to restrict green-house gas emissions. He criticises all of them before putting forward his own technology-lead (and U.S. lead) solution. Like other US journalists his view of the global problem and global solution is parochial, simplistic and naive. He doesn't give the impression that he has actually travelled anywhere in the world and actually spoken to anyone about the issue. This is not cutting edge investigative journalism. He just read a few books on the matter. However, it is hard to criticise. His heart is in the right place and he is right. Read it for its look at corrupt Government, but there is little here that hasn't been made public elsewhere.

Often naive about the solutions.
A good read and it deals the dirt on the US Administration.

Chris Goodall "How to live a Low-Carbon Life" 2nd Edition 2010

Chris Goodall "How to live a Low-Carbon Life" 1st Edition 2006

The WTO believes that all trade is good and any form of 'localisation' is a restrictive trade practice. There is plenty of ammunition here and this is worth a book in its own right. After this the book settles into Chris's trawl through every possible measure that individuals can take to reduce their Carbon Footprints. There are some surprising conclusions in some of his statistics and it is a real eye-opener. However, if there must be criticism it is that the statistics are a bit scatter-gun. Rarely does the book thoroughly examine the 'embedded carbon' consumed in making such items as washing machines, solar panels or fridges. (I suspect that this is due to a lack of data - although this doesn't stop Chris from just guessing numbers where he felt fit!) Embedded Carbon is mostly excluded from the numbers.

Some numbers are presented in an idiosyncratic fashion with apples occasionally compared to pears. He uses cost per tonne of Carbon as a baseline number to compare various measures - great idea but sometimes the cost is nothing of even negative where the measures pay for themselves. I also suggest that the reader thoroughly examines the section on Car driving with a critical eye. On the first read through it looks as if Chris suggests that you should never replace your car unless it has blown up. However this assumption works on the basis that you sell your old car to someone who never had a car before. This suggest that every car sale increases cars on the road by 100% although this contradicts the actual numbers of 1% to 2%pa Chris quotes elsewhere. Hence the individual incremental embedded Carbon of a new car is the new one minus an old one that gets scrapped out of the entire supply chain at some point. Maybe I should re-read this section because I am sure he can't mean this! A thoroughly recommended read but be careful with all the numbers. Use as a source book of ideas.

Back-of-envelope calculations occasionally amiss.
Essential book for everyone's shelf. A great read.

Gray "Heresies"

Clive Hamilton "Growth Fetish"

ISBN 0-7453-2250-6. Published by Pluto Press in 2003. A disarmingly simple book about a very simple and inconvenient truth: despite record levels of prosperity and growth in many industrialised western nations nobody is happier. Why is that? Could it be that all our economic metrics are useless in measuring human worth? Does another plasma-TV really make you feel better? You live in a world of relentless hard work and ambition. You have no time for family or hobbies as you try to live up to the economic measure of success - having as much money as possible. It doesn't make you feel good. A brilliantly original book and a must-read. Why do we continue to wreck the only planet we have in the pursuit of ever heightened levels of consumption? A damning indictment of consumerism. Economic growth did not lead to better lives for everyone.  Our social priorities and political structures have become corrupted with an obsession for growth. Everyone is alienated. Affluence is a sickness rotting our communities and creating generation of selfish, useless, people. Hamilton argues for a whole new set of metrics for measuring economic success. He believes that we are wasting our talents on marketing the same old rubbish over and over again in new labels.. and boy does he hate marketing! A work of philosophy of gaining relevance. We will all take a leaf from this book when the oil dries up, the planet burns and the Americans come for you... Thoroughly and wholeheartedly recommended. Maybe one of the better books you will ever take home.

Maybe a little naive about the marketing bit.
Seminal work about how unquestioned lust for economic growth at all costs. You must read this book.

Huber "Bottomless Well"

ISBN 0-465-03116-1. Published by Basic Books in 2005. Co-authored by Peter W Huber & Mark P Mills. Subtitled "The twilight of fuel, the virtue of waste, and why we will never run out of energy". This is an unusual book for me to read but never let it be said that I don't seek all shades of opinion about such matters. I do enjoy iconoclasts and I would dearly love to believe that the end of oil will be of no problem for modern western civilisation. However, anyone of moderate education will be disappointed by this book. It does not contain any answers to oil depletion. Although there are a few interesting points of view in this book it is largely pseudo-science blended with voodoo-economics. You would have to be exceptionally dumb to be taken in by this dangerous nonsense. Mark Mills served on the White House staff so this does explain the energy policy of the USA over the last 20 years. How can anyone take this rubbish seriously? Waste is not virtuous. It is pure semantics to argue that gravity is our friend as you fall off a cliff. There is NOTHING to replace oil. This book is fantasy. The only comfort it will be anyone in North America in 2050 is for burning. It will be the only thing keeping them warm. Don't buy it unless you wish for an insight into the dullard neo-conservative mindset of those running the White House (and, hence, the World).

Bizarre fantasy. Disappointing. Factually incorrect.
I hope this book burns well when the oil runs out.

Nigel Griffiths "Eco-House Manual"

ISBN 978 1 84425 405 7. Haynes "Eco-House Manual" by Nigel Griffiths. Published by Haynes Publishing in 2007. 161 pages long excluding Glossary and Index. Haynes built its reputation publishing do-it-yourself car maintenance manuals. The quality of those original manuals were sometimes cosmetically a little poor but they told you what you needed to know. Lately Haynes has branched out into other DIY zones and so have included an "Eco-House" manual on its list of Home DIY books that includes other books such as ones on Victorian Houses and Home Extensions. Sadly the "eco-House" concept is not yet mainstream enough to warrant run-of-the-mill inclusion in all the other books. It gets its own book. As if there is some kind of choice about such matters with the new Building Regulations Part "L" coming into effect. Still, this covers all the bases from 'Principles' to Heating, from Microgeneration to Gardens. However, Haynes now seem to have taken the opposite design approach to that they took on the Car Maintenance Manuals - this one looks pretty but it content is not detailed enough for most. In comparison to "The Green Building Bible" this all comes over as grossly light-weight. However the Bible is THE Bible and there is no compare. For those of us who take this topic VERY seriously anything else seems ludicrous. So, to its credit, this is not the most light-weight book on this topic on the market. It has big pages with widely spaced words in big font. There are plenty of big pictures and diagrams. Easy on the eye. However, closer examination reveals that the pictures are mostly completely generic and add little understanding to the text. Few pictures even manage to have a caption. Go to page 11 and see a section labelled "Deforestation" and beneath it there is a picture of some land without trees. Like we needed that. The same page has a section on "Water Resources" with a picture of a semi-dry reservoir.... And so on.  It is all so mind-numbingly obvious that you get the feeling they are just padding out the material for cosmetic reasons. If you want an intro to the topic then this is quite good. Unfortunately it could have been so much better. A good Christmas stocking filler for the serious DIYer.

Could have been a little less light-weight.
Pretty to look at. A nice introduction.

Hymers "Eco-Friendly Home"

ISBN 978 1 84537 406 8. "Converting to an Eco-Friendly Home - The Complete Handbook" was published in 2007 by New Holland Publishers. It is odd to note that the copy I have was printed in Singapore. Hence this physical work contains its own excessive share of embodied carbon. This is 168 pages long excluding  Glossary, Contacts and Index. Seven chapters neatly carve up the House into Light, Power, Heat, Shelter, Air, Waste and Water. There is little information about the author in the book and I haven't done any further research. Hence I have idea what his background is other than he is a qualified Building Control Officer. He states in his opening & closing words that he is concerned with reducing carbon footprints to beat climate change. No mention of Peak Oil or resource depletion. As such the author's thinking is firmly in the mould of "The Ecologist" circa 2000. There is a lot of emphasis in making changes to your home regardless of the embodied energy or how far away the materials may have come. Paul is also exceedingly concerned about internal air pollution from VOC's and Electromagnetic radiation. Indeed he is almost paranoid about these problems however exceedingly minor they are in comparison to the threat of climate change and peak oil. Hence everything is in the title: "Eco-Friendly". This is a traditional 'green' view of things. The front cover screams at you that you will "stand out in the housing market" - yes, but it won't help you sell your house. We know from bitter experience. The book has no pictures but lots of diagrams which all seem to have been commissioned for the book and not borrowed. The author is enthusiastic about the topic and often mentions his own personal experiences. Occasionally it verges on the too personal. He is not a great believer in 'powerdown' in the garden. Whereas we would insist that lighting the garden and exterior or a home is a waste of energy he enthuses about all kinds of energy-efficient ways of achieving it - without questioning the purpose of this wasteful lifestyle choice. Quirky and questionable choices can be found throughout the book. He is overly keen on domestic Wind Turbines mounted on chimney stacks (an absolute no-no in the industry) and insists on calling Ground Heat Pumps "Geothermal" although, as even he points out, the energy is not from volcanic activity (it is another form of solar thermal). He thinks "biomass" is just rotting vegetation. There is brief mention of Log Stove but nothing on Wood Pellet Boilers. He thinks that Stainless Steel is a more environmentally friendly material than Zinc..... And so on through the book. These odd ideas & strange use of language is a minor distraction only and the book is still useful. However I would still recommend readers to go for the Chris Goodall book or the Green Building Bible first as they are far more authoritative and have a better view of the big picture out there.

Overly concerned with micro-threats. Sometimes wrong.
Occasionally useful.