Jeff Rubin "Why your World is about to get a whole lot smaller"

Joseph Stiglitz "Mis-Measuring Our Lives"

ISBN 978-1-59558-519-6. "Mis-measuring our lives - Why GDP doesn't add up" is a report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. It was written by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi and published by The New Press in 2010. This will be a very short review for a very short book. Takes out some lengthy fore-notes and foreword by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and you end up with a booklet some 137 pages long consisting of just three chapters. They call economics the dismal science - in this case "dismal" can be taken two way: firstly this has to be the dullest book ever written about one of the most important challenges facing modern society; secondly, if this book does nothing else it makes a convincing case for just how badly we have deluded ourselves that GDP measures ANYTHING resembling our well-being. The broad-side attack is all here even if it substantially lacks passion. The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress consisted of no less than twenty leading academics (excluding the lead authors and rapporteurs) brought together by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to create a strong critique of GDP and to suggest a roadmap to alternatives. If you ever happen to pick up a copy then please do read just the Sarkozy Foreword. It is lucid and convincing.

Clearly the French President seems strongly convinced himself that GDP measures nothing of any human worth. The difficulty of the work of his Commission (started in 2008) is that, although they well defined the problem, they could only make it obvious how difficult it would be the find a solution. In fact they are barely able to even grasp at what the solution would look like. They throw a few ideas at the wall but it isn't clear which ones stick. On the more positive side if you can stay awake and attentive through its 137 pages you may well find out a few points of interest. I had never known what the word "gross" meant in "gross domestic product". Apparently GDP doesn't net off asset depreciation (something that every accountant does for commercial organisations all the time). Hence during the white heat of the IT revolution if you replaced your Computer every three years, because it became obselete, then GDP indicated that each new purchase brought something new into the economy but was not netting off the fact that people still only had one computer each - the old one having gone to landfill. Makes you wonder. The commission did its work in three parts: the first looked at national income accounting, the second at "quality of life" and the third looked at sustainability. All sections are relevant but it was the last one that will probably interest most readers.

Possibly the dullest book you will ever read. Written in a language few can penetrate. Only makes vagues attempts to define answers to the problem of GDP.
A very good definition of how GDP fails to reflect the well-being of society. Excellent Foreword spells out how mis-measurement is disastrous for our civilisation.

Alexis Rowell "Communities, Councils & A Low-Carbon Future"

ISBN 978 1 900322 65 2. "Communities, Councils & a Low-Carbon Future - What we can do if government won't" by Alexis Rowell was published by Transition Books/ Green Books in 2010. The author is a former London Borough of Camden Councillor and works with Transition Belsize so he was well placed to write this work. In fact, apart from maybe the seminal work by Rob Hopkins, THIS book may well prove to be the most useful of all the Transition Books so far - and it has stiff competition. Anything following this up has a hard act to follow. Alexis had created a perfect, state-of-the-art, guide to engaging with Councils. Not only that but I believe this is THE book that EVERY Council's Sustainability or Environment Officer should have on their book shelf. We have seen Transition Towns give away Transition Books to the local library before - but I think we should raise the money to buy a copy of this book and send it to every Council in the Country. It is a gold-mine. Where did the author find the time to find all of this stuff? I was amazed. I thought I pretty much new what-was-going-on-where when it came to Council best-practice around Britain. However I had hardly scratched the surface of the topic.

There are so many great case-studies in the book it is over-whelming. If you don't have this book with you when you meet with your local Council then you are missing a trick. It is the bible for all future contacts.... Until, we assume, somebody updates it in a few years. It is a fast moving field and this work will date rapidly. Certainly I was impressed by just how much is going on out there. However, given the youth of the Transition Network you may not be surprised to learn that only so much of the material in this book actually deals with Transition Initiatives even though this has been written FOR Transitioners. This may give you the ideas and the blueprint but don't be surprised if some non-Transition organisations are way ahead of you. Which is fine. Transitioners didn't invent sustainability and have no monopoly over working with Councils. Hence those who work with local Friends of the Earth groups will also find this book valuable. The author himself is a bit of a renaissance man who has been both a BBC journalist, a businessman, part-time worker on the 10:10 Campaign, worker on the Camden Climate Action Network, is an active member of Friends of the Earth, a paid-up supporter of Greenpeace and the Soil Association whilst still finding time to go to Climate Camp every year. Then he got elected as a Councillor and won the Sustainability Councillor of the Year award in 2010. Does he sleep? He has done all of this 'green stuff' in just five years after (we assume) giving up the Businessman bit. This is on top of completely transforming his personal lifestyle to have as little impact upon the planet as possible.

The cover price of this book is £14.95 and for your money you get 240 pages including a Foreword by Rob Hopkins, an Introduction, fourteen chapters, an Appendix, References, Resources and an Index. Chapter two tells us how to find our way around local government and is almost worth the cover price alone. Certainly we learnt this stuff the hard way locally and often wondered if there wasn't some kind of "Dummy's Guide" to Councils. Now you have one. From this point you get to see how Councils operate from the point of view of various insiders before the author moves on to ten chapters covering: biodiversity, energy efficiency, energy generation, food, planning, procurement, recycling, transport, water and wellbeing. These were the interesting bits for us. If you had to skip a few chapters then you could omit the sections on water, wellbeing and biodiversity as they were a little weak. That isn't to say they were not relevant but I would imagine most Transition Initiatives might struggle with these ones when working with the Council. However the rest of it is spot on even if I am guessing that "getting elected" is very few Transitioner's cups-of-tea. Alexis admits this when he quotes a survey exposing the disinterest. Oh well, ten out of ten for trying!

A few sections of dubious relevance or are comparatively weak.
A smashing book. Probably the most useful book I have ever read about real grassroots action that activists can take in coordination with Local Government.

Stephen H. Schneider "Science as a Contact Sport"

ISBN 978-1-4262-0540-8. "Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate" by Stephen H. Schneider was published by National Geographic in 2009. We reviewed the hardback copy which had 295 pages including Foreword, Introduction, nine Chapters, Acknowledgements, Notes and Index. We admit to reading this book in just one sitting. It served as an antidote to the previous read that was the somewhat turgid "Questioning Collapse". It is all relative as "Science as a Contact Sport" wasn't THAT entertaining but it was nice just to kick back and read what is, effectively, an autobiography. Schneider probably knows more about man-made climate change than any man alive. Or so says Tim Flannery, Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council in the Foreword. This may well be true as he started out in climatology in the early 1970's when the field barely existed as an area of science. Right from the off he made a name for himself in the media when he part-penned a paper that suggested the world was in for global cooling. Of course this early work on aerosols was wrong and he corrected the model some three years later. Inevitably, to this day, he is still reminded about this. Of course the climate change deniers find this fact hilarious with the obvious refrain about Schneider "not making his mind up - why should we believe him now?" However, as the good man clearly says, good science evolves through mistakes.

Schneider does seem to have known almost everyone who was anyone. He worked alongside both Al Gore and Carl Sagan. It was with Sagan that he had his most regrettable bust-up with when he revealed that Sagan's theory of "Nuclear Winters" was fundamentally flawed. Schneider believed that Sagan had ignored the evidence in order to promote the theory on ideological grounds. This is precisely the sort of error being made today by climate change deniers. The irony is that, despite his track record of "conservative" science (rather than what might be seen as "hysteria") the climate change denial community continue to twist his words to suggest that science should lie in order to achieve ideological objectives. This is profoundly untrue. But the truth is never the objective for deniers. The reason why he has fallen victim so many times over the years is that he, like Sagan, is a great performer. He has worked extensively in the media spotlight and realises the importance of science in informing policy. However he has always felt that, science should never prescribe policy - only advise. He has thus drawn hate mail both from environmental campaigners and from climate change deniers precisely because he sits in the middle.

This "middle" is not, however the centre-ground owned by the likes of Bjorn Lomborg (who Schneider writes about at length). Schneider knows that climate change is man-made and something has to be done. He has worked for the IPCC since inception and was instrumental in constructing the language of uncertainty that the organisation uses. For example the term "highly likely" actually means nothing unless you can apply a tangible figure of 95% to it. It is Schneider's many years testifying at Senate hearings and working in the IPCC that make the most interesting reading. He laments that the Senate hearings in 1979 at the end of the Carter administration covered the same ground as those in 2009. Thirty years had passed yet still nothing had been done. Schneider writes that the problem "can  be summed up in five easy pieces: ignorance, greed, denial, tribalism and short-term-thinking." This comes over loud and clear in his blow-by-blow accounts of numerous IPCC gatherings.

When the climate change deniers tell you that the IPCC are "political" you should probably believe them! If they tell you, though, that the reports are only written by a handful of people, don't believe them. Recall the Ian Plimer claims that the IPCC are a bunch of environmentalists and not proper scientists! If you want to know the truth about how the IPCC works then read "Science as a Contact Sport"! In fact the truth is scarier than fiction. The reports from thousands of climatologists are gathered up and synthesised before hundreds gather in rooms to argue about every word of the text of the final IPCC report. The actual science bit is fine but powerful interests undermine the process. The usual culprits are China and the U.S.A. who obstruct proceedings over and over again with pointless technical points that have nothing to do with the conclusions of the scientists whose work they are meant to be reviewing. To those of us who didn't know how the IPCC worked this is quite shocking. No wonder the reports end up being so conservative and smother the 'end-of-the-world-awful-truth' in so many caveats. It is difficult to make out whether anything bad is happening at all. Conservative and pro-fossil fuel politics corrupt the IPCC. It corrupts the science. But the corruption is all one way. It hides the problem from the public. It doesn't exaggerate it. This book is a remarkable insider's view of 40 years of evolving climate science. A great read. Sometimes shockingly so.

Oddly seems to completely ignore tipping points where warming increases CO2 output. This underplays the urgency of our situation.
Great insight into how politics infests and corrupts the IPCC to the point that climate change science is neutralised in favour of powerful fossil-fuel interests.

Salomon "The Energy Saving House"

ISBN 1-89804-935-1. "The Energy Saving House" by Thierry Salomon & Stéphane Bedel. This Book was published by the French "Eco-Centre" known as "Terre Vivante" and was adapted for the UK by CAT after purchasing the rights at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2001. A lot of the technology in the book is rather more suited to a Northern Mediterranean climate than our colder Northern European one. Hence the CAT edition went through some heavy rewriting. There is a lot of mention of Nuclear Power Stations throughout this slim book (142 pages) which also betrays its French origins. At points it makes you wonder if CAT regretted this decision as it may have been easier to start from scratch. Another oddity of this work is that it was backed by Friends of the Earth who we guess supplied some funding for the project. Both the original authors are engineers specialising in renewables. The first half of the books is little more than a primer for anyone wishing to build their own home as these sections largely deal with house design. For the vast majority of us who can do little about the aspect or design of our house this offers little useful advice. Few of us are about to rip up our floors to install underfloor heating. The section of Air Conditioning struggles to have any relevance in the UK. From the middle of the book we get on to simpler changes that can be retrofitted. There are a few interesting details about items most of us are already familiar with, such as light bulbs and plumbing fittings. However, there is almost nothing new here that you can't read about in a dozen other books. A very strange omission from the book is the near complete non-mention of Ground Source Heat Pumps. There is a brief mention of a "geothermal underfloor heating" which looks like a translation error. The layout of the book is pleasant and it is easy to read. However the scatter-gun effect of having lots of panels all over the page when the pages are so small is a little distracting. The foot notes should also have been at the back as they get in the way. There is a reasonably good resource section at the back and it is jammed with interesting facts and figures. However I would probably not recommend this to the UK audience or beginners. Getting hold of the Chris Goodall book is the best starting place in this more northerly position. Considering the cover price of £12 GBP this is also grossly over-priced for its tiny size. A small book can be good for someone who would be put off by a more mighty tome, but unless you are really interested in the maths, statistics, science & engineering, then this won't enlighten you. It would gather dust in a drawer. A wasted opportunity for FOE.

Not all suitable for Northern Europe. Mostly well-worn and overly-familiar solutions. Over-priced.
Full of facts and figures.

Dirk Thomas "The Woodburner's Companion"

ISBN 0-911469-28-1. "The Woodburner's Companion - Practical Ways of Heating with Wood" by Dirk Thomas published by Alan C Hood & Company, Inc in 2006 (3rd Edition). You get 163 pages including Foreword, Introduction 8 Chapters, three Appendices, Bibliography, Sources and Index. The sub-sub-title is "From the lore of an ancient art to the science of 21st century woodburning technology" which should give you an idea as to the modus operandi of this book. Probably the only reason this work should grace your bookshelf is out of utter desperation - there are so few books out there on the topic that you assume anything is better than nothing. This book barely qualifies, barely better than anything. Its major failing? This has to be one of the most North American-centric books I have ever read. The US seems to be so much like northern Europe in so many respects. However this book serves to expose only the differences. The homes described in this book are not the ones you will find in Britain. So its relevance is often questionable. The second disappointment is how poorly the author explains what he is babbling on about. This is largely a problem of the poor illustrations. The pictures that there are appear to be culled from numerous sources so all appear to be of different styles - from the roughest hand sketch to neat three-quarter artworks. Like other works on this topic it is written by a chimney sweep who makes the entire matter of burning wood so complex and fraught with danger that one wonders how mankind ever mastered fire in the first place. One does tire if the dire warnings about creosote. The author does voyage into interesting and novel territory such as how to design a house to be heated by wood or how the fire-wood business economy works. However these remain of academic interest only.  Most of it is simple common sense. There is a lengthy section explaining how to sweep your own chimney! No doubt most of us would skip that but it hold intriguing possibilities for the DIY enthusiast. This is a relatively easy and short read (being in quite BIG font) but it is ultimately extremely frustrating. If you need a book on using your own wood stove at home then you can't go far wrong with Chris Laughton's "Home Heating with Wood" published by CAT Publications 2006 (ISBN 1 90217 527 1) or Andy Reynolds' "Heating with Wood" published by the Low-Impact Living Initiative (LILI) 2008 (ISBN 978-0-9549171-5-9). These cover the basics for the UK.

Crafted for the North American market only. Very poorly illustrated.
Includes a few novel areas of covered that you might not see elsewhere.

Vandana Shiva "Soil Not Oil"

ISBN 978-1-84813-315-0. "Soil Not Oil: Climate Change, Peak Oil and Food Insecurity" by Vandana Shiva was published by Zed Books in 2008. The paperback has 144 pages consisting of introduction, four chapters and a conclusion but no notes, index or bibliography. Foot notes can be followed up at www.southendpress.org/images/cms/SoilNotOil_Endnotes.pdf so that saves some paper! The author was one of India's foremost Nuclear Physicists before giving it up for moral reasons to focus of sustainable development issues. She has become Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy as well as a leader in the International Forum on Globalisation. As rough guide you can consider Shiva to be at the opposite end of the scale from Nicholas Stern and Ted Nordhaus. Not for her the fixes of the free market. She is more closely aligned with the writings of Richard Heinberg and Rob Hopkins whom she quotes. The reason for this is clear - she sees the world through the eyes of developing nations of the majority south. If you expressed the sort of views that Shiva does in the western sphere then you would be dismissed as being out-of-touch and patronising. Many would argue that there is no way that all those wealthy westerners could go back to some agrarian existence. However this is almost exactly what Shiva proposes - at least for India.

Shiva praises the traditional Indian way of life, ie, a simplistic low-carbon way of life personified by the life of Gandhi. When those in the western liberal elite write about "poor" people they are often described as people in urgent need of 'development'. We are told that the poor can only care about Climate Change when they are as rich as Americans. It is thus assumed that they must have roads and cars. If they do not then they are "backward". This paradigm is so ingrained into everyone's way of thinking that even Indian Governments perpetuate this myth. It must comes as a hideous shock to find one the majority world's leading intellects contradicting them flatly. Maybe that does make her a romantic but she is far better placed to speak for a billion of her fellow country men & women than anyone in the north. Shiva quotes Gandhi who said "God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West.  [..] If an entire nation of 300 million (India) took to similar economic exploitation (as that of Britain) it would strip the world bare like locusts."

In Soil Not Oil Shiva lumps together what she views as the three crises of the modern world: Peak Oil, Climate Change and Food. Through western eyes we tend to define these slightly differently. We assume the triple crunch is Oil, Climate and Money. Food is often relegated to becoming a victim of the crises in the other three areas. Shiva promotes food up as front runner in her vision for a sustainable, "people-centred", fossil-fuel-free world. This is because she tends to focus on food production as an area of unequal globalisation which exploits the poor and dispossess them of their land. Transnational Corporations are accused of dumping commodities onto Indian domestic markets and destroying them. The profits of Cargill and Monsanto climb while in India thousands of poor farmers kill themselves. The solution is to reclaim food sovereignty. We get a swingeing critique of what Shiva dismissively calls "development". Trade liberalisation isn't the solution, it is the problem. She condemns western thinkers and their pseudo solutions of 'markets' and bio-fuels. To her these only perpetuate both the problem but also the inequality. Instead she calls for radical relocalisation and a return to local small scale food production. She argues passionately that bio-diverse farming is the only way to solve her triple crunch as they store carbon, produce crops resistant to disease and deliver a livelihood resilient in the face of drought and flood.

The author knows her stuff and gives good concrete examples of where so much 'development' is simply not working. She levels her guns at the "Clean Development Mechanism" (CDM) that she demonstrates is subsidising polluting industries such as 'sponge iron plants'. Why is it (she asks) that the CDM doesn't offer support to the humble farmer in the field who is genuinely working to sequester carbon and generate wealth? "A shift to ecological, non-industrial agriculture from industrial agriculture leads to a two- to seven-fold energy savings and a 5 to 15 percent global fossil fuel emissions offset through the sequestration of carbon in organically managed soil. Up to four tons of CO2 per hectare can be sequestered in organic soils each year." claims Shiva (page 98). If true then you can see what she means. Is it that we do not define food production as even part of the "modern" economy? Is it that we only understand that "modern" means "fossil-fuelled". Farming is clean development. "For farmers, soil is not a prison from which they need to escape to an industrial job." writes the author on page 38. Farmers are in peril because their traditional methods have been undermined by the green revolution and the transnational corporations and their GM Seeds and agrochemicals. The solution to climate change is not an energy shift, it is a paradigm shift. Indians do not need roads, they need soil. Shiva has no time for roads and accuses the World Bank and Indian Governments of promoting road and cars in the same manner that Adolf Hitler did in Nazi Germany in the 1930's. Likewise she destroys the case for biofuels with some carefully cherry-picked statistics that no doubt would cause uproar and much debunking in western circles.

There is much here that could be considered controversial. Indeed you must ask yourself how many of us can survive on organic food produced on the small/local scale? Certainly all of us if we eat lower down the food chain. However Shiva has the answer and produces figures showing how bio-diverse organic farms in India produce much higher gross yields than do their mono-culture cousins. The missing element is labour-saving fossil fuel machines. Wouldn't more people be required to work the land? Undoubtedly. Would this lead to a revolution in the 'over-developed' nations where the people are used to watching TV and driving to work? Undoubtedly. This will be a paradigm shift. The green revolution is over. Petrochemicals have poisoned the land and produce no longer term benefits. They poison the micro-organisms in the soil and suck the environment free of essential minerals and (more importantly) water. "We have been made to believe that industrialisation of agriculture is necessary to produce more food. That is not at all true." claims Shiva (page 131). There is a cost to the green revolution. It was never sustainable. However it produces short term profits for the few hence it is in their interests to perpetuate it even in the face of its failure. The rising cost of oil must surely put paid to that fantasy. Food trade is largely counter-productive. "Spice are a perfect candidate for long distance trade" writes Shiva on page 128 "Tiny quantities are needed to add flavour to food. Spices grow in very specific ecosystems." What is more "Global trade [...] destroys the biodiversity of fruits and vegetables." Trade makes us more vulnerable not more resilient.

"Diversity and decentralisation are the dual principles needed to build economies beyond oil and to deal with the climate vulnerability that is the legacy of the age of oil." says Shiva (page 110). Biodiverse farms suffer less due to extreme weather events. However, does this translate into the western word without revolution? "Monocultures and uniformity are recipes for breakdown. [...] Monopolies and concentration of ownership of resources enhance vulnerability in periods of chaos." (page 121). There is page after page of this sort of analysis and opinion. You find yourself agreeing with almost everything. Shiva goes onto write "Authentic organic farming is based upon biodiversity, small family farms, local markets and fair trade." "Socially, self-organisation is encapsulated in Gandhi's swaraj (self rule, self-governance, self-organisation). It is the basis of food sovereignty - the right to produce in freedom." (page 125). It is all music to the ears of any western transition town member. "We want a post-oil world but do not have the courage to envisage a post-industrial world. As a result, we cling to the infrastructure of the energy-intensive fossil fuel economy and try to run it on substitutes such as nuclear power and biofuels." Perfect. It is easy to dismiss this world view but you cannot argue about the details.

Difficult to apply these lessons to the western world where the population is over-developed beyond the Gandhian agrarian model.
Dynamite. Shiva makes a convincing claim that the entire paradigm of our lives has to change if we wish to tackle climate change and peak oil. Many won't like this.

Ted Nordhaus & Michael Shellenberger "Breakthrough"

ISBN-13: 978-0-618-65825-1. "Breakthrough - From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility" was published by the Houghton Mifflin Company in 2007. This was the authors' follow up to the highly controversial 2004 essay "The Death of Environmentalism". For your money you get 344 pages consisting of introduction, ten chapters, notes, bibliography, index and lengthy acknowledgements. The authors are young and are described as "managing directors" of American Environics (describing itself as "a social values research and strategy firm"). This appears to boil down to policy advice to Congressmen on new and clever ways to get environmental policies into law by disguising them as something else and far more glamorous. This is sugaring the medicine basically. This is not to say that their work is without merit but they are overly sincere for most of the book. You don't half get the feeling that some "environmentalist" stole their ice cream when they were five years of age and they have never forgotten it. This is their revenge upon the whole rotten lot. The book is by Americans for Americans. Considering that they wish to address Climate Change, which is a global issue, you might think they would have taken a slightly more internationalist approach. Indeed vast swathes of this book deal with the cultural peculiarities of the United States.

For example they believe that American citizens might more relaxed about tackling Climate Change if the US had universal free healthcare. This is all part of their theory that affluent westerners are now unresponsive to environmental messages because we have all become insecure (they describe it as "insecure affluence"). A new social contract might return a sense of security and thus, their theory goes, return people's minds to higher things. Such as saving mankind from itself. Or Americans. This work seeks to articulate a new form of politics free from the "politics of limits" that environmentalists describe. Instead the authors propose a new way of dealing with environmental issues. They must be viewed holistically within the societies that spawned them and sold to the public by wrapping them up in a rich tapestry of other social niceties. For example, you don't just pass a law to improve US automobile efficiency. Instead you agree that the Federal Government should assist with automotive worker legacy healthcare costs. In return the car companies have to improve those MPG figures. All of which leaves those of us in Europe, Japan and the rest of the world scratching our heads and asking "what the hell is wrong with Americans?" Surely the free market should dictate that good miles per gallon sells cars. Likewise, the rest of the world has universal free healthcare but we have been no better at solving global warming.

Well, it is all relative, the authors are glowing in their praise for the European Union in contrast to the Bush Jnr regime. But we wonder how they would be writing this book after eight years of Barack Obama? We even get treated to Nordhaus & Shellenberger's theory that environmentalists would be more successful if they were organised like evangelical Christians. We can't see that of being a great use to Friends of the Earth in places like Tokyo. Maybe these two should just get out more? Clearly they are listening though. They call for the ending of odious third world debt. They often use the example of Brazil. Brazil is cutting down its rainforest to pay the interest on its debt. The debt was incurred by an undemocratic military dictatorship. Why is the whole world paying for this? Quite. Drop the debt.

Many of us will find this book highly frustrating. Whilst you find yourself agreeing with their central thesis, ie, that environmentalism has run out of steam and needs to reinvent itself, you find yourself disagreeing with them about so many of their examples. They are all for a clean energy bill that "would be a vehicle for telling a powerful new story about American greatness, invention and moral purpose". Fine words, but they then round on Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" on numerous occasions because they portray the author as some kind of evil doom-monger. Diamond only points out that it is physically impossible for this planet to support every living human being with the affluence of a modern American. Just because poor people aspire to be as rich as American doesn't mean that it is possible. Nordhaus & Shellenberger's numerous criticisms of Diamond are shocking, unfair and ridiculous. The problem with all of this is that it just becomes a battle of semantics. No one is going to formulate environmentally-friendly policy unless they understand what the stakes are. Hence we need education on how we can avert catastrophe. Hence we need history books such as those by Diamond. Library shelves groan under the weight of books on just how wonderful ancient civilisations are. Knowing how we succeed is only useful when you know how we fail. Hence these sort of criticisms seem pointless.

You have to be careful to pick out the meaning behind their language. They often describe the "politics of limits" as being some sort of failure implying that we have to adopt some "unlimited" policies. What might these be? Drilling for oil in Alaska and the Antarctic? Clearly not, these guys aren't nuts. Their heart is in the right place. They must understand that we are in a century of declining resources. To approach every problem as if resources were infinite would lead to catastrophe. When these guys talk about "limits" they seem to be describing a limit on the imagination and to human freedom. This suggests that if human potential was realised to its maximum then we would all live in a hydrogen-fuelled utopia in fifty years time. However such utopias don't happen by themselves which is why, as is typical of Americans since 1960, they propose lots of new Government spending. This might be fair enough if they were to raid the coffers of the world's largest military war machine to pay for all that clean energy. They do not. They never explain where the money will come from other that to assure the reader that these investments will somehow pay for themselves. The "breakthrough" they describe is in unlimited technology as a result of unlimited spending on unlimited human ingenuity.

However this book is not so much about the technology but more about the political philosophy that has to replace environmentalism. This new form of politics takes "nature" out of the equation. It isn't about "the environment" any more. Whereas Mike Hulme asked "What does Climate Change mean?", Nordhaus & Shellenberger ask not only what it means but "Which of global warming's meanings should we elevate into a pragmatic politics?" (page 222) Whereas Hulme's "Why we Disagree About Climate Change" proved to be empty philosophising, "Breakthrough" really does deliver on the policy. For Nordhaus & Shellenberger we have to talk about our dreams rather than our nightmares. Nightmares do not encourage a cynical public to change anything about their lives. You have to sell them something better. The authors tell us that the modern environmental movement was born of affluence. Before that nobody could afford to care. However, since the birth of modern environmentalism the movement has deluded itself that if only it could open people's eyes to the degradation of the planet then we would all rise up to stop it. Those days have long gone. That isn't what motivates people anymore. They have moved on.

"What is needed today is a politics that seeks authority not from Nature or Science but from a compelling vision of the future that is appropriate for the world we live in and the crises we face." (page 142) Nordhaus & Shellenberger tell us that we seriously need to start talking about climate change adaptation now as a means of engaging the public. Traditional environmentalists ignore this as a distraction from cutting emissions but the authors may have a point. Maybe we should come clean and admit that whatever happens now Global Warming WILL HAPPEN. If we engage the public with the process of getting ready they may move onto the wider picture too. "Properly preparing for disasters, and responding to them effectively, enhances one's self-image and sense of control." (page 223) What doesn't work is the story environmentalists tell to scare people into action. That only "provokes fatalism, paralysis and/or individualistic thoughts of adaptation, not empowerment, hope, creativity and collective action." (page 222) "We need a story that offers immediate, perceptible impacts that can be observed and directly addressed in the present, not the future." Could this be where Peak Oil fits in? Nordhaus & Shellenberger never mention Peak Oil at all. Our vision for how we tackle such problems must not make people feel guilty. Amen. These guys have hit the nail on the head. THIS is how you change the world. Recommended.

Endless pages of American parochial waffle and pretentious political philosophy that will be largely lost on most readers.
They seem to have come to the right answer through lots of the wrong reasoning. But they got there in the end.

Nicholas Stern - "A Blueprint for a Safer Planet"

ISBN 978-1-847-92037-9 (hbk). "A blueprint for a safer planet - how to manage climate change and create a new era of progress and prosperity" by Nicholas Stern was published by The Bodley Head in 2009. Stern is of course the famous author of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change and former Chief Economist at the World Bank. One may think that Stern would be slightly away with the fairies in this 246 page book (including acknowledgements, introduction, ten chapters, notes, bibliography and index). However a stint in the World Bank doesn't seem to have cured him of his fanciful sense of morality that may so alienate him from what might be considered the mainstream of Economic study. Indeed we might believe Stern as somewhat of a maverick if viewed through the eyes of neo-liberal-market-takes-care-of-all-economics of the Chicago School. Stern's experience with development in Asia and Africa over a thirty year period obviously leaves a deep impression and he puts third world development at the core of much of his message. There is not a great deal here that you probably won't get from Oliver Tickell's "Kyoto 2" but you do get to see the world through the eyes of an economist. His view is undoubtedly distorted, imperfect, but refreshing.

If you believe in infinite growth on a finite planet then you are either mad... or an economist - as the old saying goes. Stern shares the gentle madness of his profession. He cannot abandon growth. This may be fair if viewed through the lens of third world development but he pretty much assumes global economic growth through the duration of the next forty years. This is not to say that he is unaware of peak oil. Indeed it is mentioned buried in the text in a few places. We do get treated to his view that mitigating climate change will decarbonise the economy so that it is more resilient to future fossil fuel shortages. However this point only arises in a few brief passages. Stern is still at the foothills of his understandings of the limits to growth. Maybe they just don't teach this concept in economics? Clearly he is slightly blind-sided by his unswerving faith in "low-carbon growth". For him technology and markets will sort everything out. Climate change is the result of a market imperfection hence governments must intervene to smooth out the imperfections This is all pretty much standard fair for all those who have flown too close to the bright burning heart of government and felt themselves slightly tinged. It is very new Labour. Very "third way".

Stern has no time for climate change sceptics. He is actually quite dismissive which doesn't show him in a good light. So the second weak point of the book is Stern's lack of concern for the science. Don't get me wrong, he is very concerned about the IPCC version of the "science" but he doesn't question it. For him it is all about mitigating risk. For this we heartily cheer him on but there is an air of dogmatism about it that suggest he will never meet his "debunkers" half way. If he cannot see the other side of the argument it may trip him up. For example, this book was written in 2008 whilst Stern was looking forward to Copenhagen COP15 in December 2009. He writes as if it will be the greatest and last chance to save the planet. Writing in March 2010 I guess it is easy to be somewhat sneering about Stern's enthusiasm for what turned into an utter fiasco. Maybe he should have been more familiar with the Realpolitik? Stern shows us that a deal is possible and gives us yet another framework. Yet the deal didn't happen. Why? There is more to this than meets the eye.

Stern takes time in this book to answer some of his critics. This has been his chance to absorb what he has learnt since he published "...the Economics of Climate Change" and update it in a user-friendly form. He comes out fighting on the matter of discounting. I doubt if this will sway the critics because the entire topic of discounting is an area of economics shrouded in value judgements. However, having read a great deal about what his critics had to say it is worth a read of his self-defence. The defence is actually very robust. He really HAS thought hard about why he projected discounting in the Stern Report in the way he did. Towards the end of the book Stern comes up with an idea for the restructuring of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. He suggests merging the World Bank with the IMF (as if anyone really understood the difference) and then creating a new third body to over-see the international economic work to combat climate change, decarbonise the economy and help poor people adapt. This is a typical Stern-type solution. However, it is novel. It just might work. Maybe we really have a crisis of governance at an international level? Maybe such a body could actually punish countries for not getting on board? And maybe such a body could finally extinguish third world odious debt? Stern doesn't much mention the forgiving of debt as a method of allowing poor countries to adapt to climate change and grow low-carbon economies. However it is a vital element. What is the purpose of using CDM (Clean Development Mechanisms) to siphon Western money into the Majority South if it is only sucked right back out again as debt repayment? Shameful. Drop the debt Stern. Make it policy.

Finally Stern ridicules his critics for completely failing to understand the very nature of the risk that climate change brings. He also (finally) points out that high discount rates assume endless economic growth based upon the endless availability of cheap fossil fuels. You simply cannot stick the money in the bank and hope that we will become so rich in fifty years so as to conjure away the damage that climate change may have caused - and will cause. Here he uses the projection of the IEA (International Energy Agency) to pour cold water on the idea that our economic growth is secure. Since oil prices will rise then the only growth sectors will be those that are ready and resilient. For Stern the economy can only grow in a post-peak oil world if it using post-carbon technology. In this he is spot on even if he underestimates just how difficult a task that conversion will be. Chapter 7 does mention the roles of communities and individual actions but Stern offers nothing new. There is no mention of Transition Initiatives. One suspects that, for Stern, it is a matter for the big boys in Government and the World Bank to manage this transition. But we wouldn't expect him to belief anything else would we? This book is a work slightly flawed but with it heart in all the right places. Recommended but a dry read.

The result of the field of economics. It makes no new leaps in imagination. Rather misses the point on economic growth and debt relief.
A useful deconstruction of the discounting argument. It is nice to know that some economists are good guys and some even want to fight poverty AND climate change.

Stuart Sutherland "Irrationality"

ISBN 978-1-905177-0703. "Irrationality" by Stuart Sutherland was published originally by Constable and Company in 1992 but this review refers to the 2009 reprint published by Pinter & Martin Ltd. Sutherland was a Professor in Psychology at the University of Sussex but died in 1998 at the age of 70. He was also a prolific columnist in the Observer and Daily Telegraph. This was his best known book. So, why pick up a 18-year-old pop psychology book? What has it got to do with post carbon living, peak oil or climate change? Well, we have often pondered why it is that people and Governments appear to behave so oddly when faced with information about these topics? Why don't people heed the warnings and seize the opportunities? Why do people deny or seek to ignore the evidence? In short, why are people so irrational? Sutherland's book is 258 pages long including preface, acknowledgements, 23 chapters, bibliography, notes and index. Actually, given its vintage you will find climate change is mentioned early in the work - page 13 to be precise, although it is only mentioned one more time elsewhere. This book belongs to a different time so we should only expect some general lessons about our current situation. However, you will be surprised and maybe discomforted.

Sutherland reveals that the political brinkmanship in Climate Change negotiations is known as "The Prisoner's Dilemma". Multiple parties could cooperate for maximum mutual benefit but they do not trust each other so fall back on "defecting". There is quite a sophisticated game theory behind this. Sadly, real life is not a game. On the flip-side we also get to learn a lot more about the manner in which science works. Much is written and claimed for the "peer review" process and whether critics and sceptics are "published". Researchers took genuine scientific papers published in Harvard or Princeton then disguised their origin. They then sought to get them republished only to find they could not. As the original author and their University had been replaced by a fictitious one then the publishers simply refused to publish the work as they didn't trust it. This is despite the fact that the work was absolutely genuine and of the highest merit. It mattered more WHO wrote it and who they worked FOR than the truth inside their work. This can lead us to disturbing thoughts about how climate change science is handled. In the field of physics works get published because they are by a member of the "current in-group of well known physicists". This, of course, is not quite how it should work. Remember that Sutherland is not writing about climate change. He isn't a climate change denier but this research strongly suggests that we should be more questioning about what the science establishment treats as "good" or "bad" science. There may well be something in the cries of 'foul' from the sceptic community when they find they cannot get published let alone research grants. We dismiss their concerns as irrational but scientists are, sadly, irrational.

Further insight is gained of studies on what motivated people to save energy. If people agree to have their names published in a newspaper then they genuinely do cut their wastage. However if they are offer anonymity and take it - then the subject was far more likely to undergo no behavioural change. The important lesson here is that everyone really should know how everyone else is doing in the post-carbon stakes. Making each home's energy efficiency rating available on the internet is not such a daft idea afterall. Of course there are some who cry out in horror of the very idea that peer-pressure should be used in this fashion. But who cares? There are also disturbing insights into "in-groups". For our purposes we can assume that climate change sceptics are an "in-group" whilst "warmer zealots" are in the opposite camp. Neither need, necessarily have "science" on their side. Group dynamics usually mean that such people will seek out people with similar beliefs so as to reinforce their own. Members do not seek out contradictory evidence. They do not see the flaws in arguments that promote their own belief system, but readily see similar flaws in the arguments of their opponents. They only remember the points that agree with their preconceptions. They stop learning. They read only books and newspapers that agree with their point of view therefore become convinced that "the debate is over" or that members of the other party are clearly deranged. It has been proven to lead to outright hostility between the camps just as we have seen in the climate change debate. This can be overcome by taking part in common tasks. The unity of different parties in defeating Hitler in World War Two is cited as an example where people put their differences to one side for a common cause. Amusingly Sutherland also demonstrates how parties can cause disadvantage to themselves just as long as they perceive that they are 'getting one over' on the opposing camp. Not healthy. It just might be better if we all got on with turning the inspirational vision of post-carbon living into a reality - because it is worth doing for its own reasons.

Other sections of this book start to resemble Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science". Indeed it is no surprise to see Ben Goldacre quoted on the back cover of the book as saying Sutherland's work was "Superb!". Ben's writing on the failings of the public's understanding of both science and statistics is compulsory reading and makes a far better (and more up-to-date) case. Both show how the media distort statistics in order to manufacture good headlines regardless of the truth. However I think Sutherland's criticism of "Which?" magazine for comparing different consumer products without first sampling hundreds of the SAME product is not justified. It is entirely rational to believe that modern manufacturing churning out thousands of the same product is likely to churn out a quality consistent product. I think we would all be profoundly disturbed to find that it was a lottery if our new DVD player ever worked when we got it home. High engineering tolerances tend to make for a consistent build.... But Sutherland is a Psychologist not an engineer. However, in his own field he excels. He completely demolishes an icon of his field - ink-blot tests. How many of us believed these were still in use today? Well they shouldn't be after they were proven to be useless. It was proven that the diagnosis they offered was utterly random and at the whim of the Doctor's own false preconceptions. Elsewhere we learn that in 1955 scientists became convinced that certain personality types were more likely to develop heart disease. Most published scientific papers seemed to agree with this idea, but, slowly over time, it faded from popularity as more and more scientific papers disproved the link. Why should it be that in one period of time it looks like "the science is decided" only for it to fall out of fashion? Papers originally disproving the link were simply rejected from publication because they were not deemed interesting - so much so that researchers wouldn't bother to publish their results if they disagreed with the "consensus" of the times. However this consensus was overcome eventually.

This book as scattered with little gems like this. Little nuggets of knowledge that you will feel is worth knowing. For example; we learn of the work of philosopher Karl Popper who pointed out that no general hypothesis can ever be completely proven. To establish 'truth' you have to prove it is false. This is the scientific method so quickly forgotten by so many in the climate debate. Interestingly the author then forgets this himself when on page 225 he states that belief in God or the paranormal is irrational. This, by his own assertion, is erroneous. Neither the existence of God nor the paranormal can be disproven. Just because they cannot be summoned upon demand in a laboratory is insufficient as evidence of existence or otherwise. Indeed, to prove the existence of such undiscovered science would require a paradigm shift. For example, it is easy to debunk telepathy but it has been suggested that what we have learnt in Quantum Physics could show us how such communication might work. Science that is "settled" is stagnant. Sutherland deals directly with "overconfidence" where, once a belief system is established it is difficult to overcome. New evidence is believed to back the original assumption even if it doesn't. "A lot of knowledge is a dangerous thing" concludes Sutherland (page 176). I wonder if the IPCC and their critics have read this book? Recommended - if you like pop psychology.

Probably not overly relevant in places. Author shows hubris in some of his sweeping assumptions.
A fun read. Enlightening of all our human frailties'. A lot of indirect bearing upon the modern debate.

David Boyle & Andrew Simms "The New Economics - A Bigger Picture"

ISBN 978-1-84407-675-8. "The New Economics - A Bigger Picture" was written by David Boyle and Andrew Simms and published by Earthscan in 2009. (You get 192 pages including acknowledgments, eleven chapters, appendices and index.) The "New Economics" describes itself as being about "changing the rules by which economics works [...] about making things happen locally...". It all sounds reasonable until the authors too easily shift into describing it vaguely as something to do with "people and planet". We have become so used to the near-scientific certitudes of conventional economics that when somebody takes such nebulous concepts as 'ethics' and 'ecology' and describe them in economic terms it all sounds... Well, woolly. The new economics has found mainstream success. For example the European Union has a task force looking at redefining GDP whilst the growth of the Transition Towns movement is testimony to how everyone from politicians to ordinary people can embrace these exciting new concepts. Oddly enough neither example appears anywhere in this book.

Written as it was during the crash of 2008 it has an air of "I told you so" even if there is no triumph in any of this. Indeed, the more you read the more you understand that tackling Climate Change, monetary reform and Peak Oil conventionally all seems easier than trying to implement the theories of the new economics. It all seems like so much hardwork. And complicated to-boot. There are no certainties, only new theories. Those of us who lived happily through the new certainties of the neo-liberal economics of the Thatcher years will know how easy it is to get caught up in new economic panaceas only to see them crumble to dust in our hands. Why should the theories of the nef be any different? Of course there is a difference. Thatcherism was possible to implement because it was in people's selfish self-interest to make it happen. That juggernaut has been rolling for years under the careful guidance of Reagan, Bush and Blair one wonders if it can ever be turned around. Afterall it has been 6000 years in the making according to this book.

One of our favourite stats from this book (pages 39 & 40) concerns the demonstrable ineffectiveness of trickle down theory. "The trouble is that economic growth is an extremely inefficient way of achieving poverty reduction, and is becoming even less effective. Between 1990 and 2001, for every $100 worth of growth in the world's income per person, just 60 cents found its target and contributed to reducing poverty below the $1-a-day line.... Using this model [...] getting everyone in the world onto a modest income of $3 per day would require the natural resources of around 15 planets like Earth." That is certainly one in the eye for the likes of Lomborg and Stern. Vandana Shiva would no doubt agree. Here we have solid evidence (albeit referring to a paper also co-written by Andrew Simms in 2006) that shatters the paradigm that has been held sacred in every discussion about Climate Change and conventional economics. Economic growth cannot be sustained and the kind we have is a machine that makes poverty. It can't solve Climate Change. It sucks money from the poor into the hands of the rich and impoverishes the planet. What is more, due to the faulty way we measure wealth, it looks like we are richer whilst we are less and less happy. If this book was chock full of such paradigm-busting killer facts then this work would be a monstrous broadside through the armoured hull that is conventional economics. However, it is only a highlight. It is more or less downhill from there-on in. The rest of the book is what the old Bush Jnr Presidency might describe as a "wish list to Santa" or what Bjorn "skeptical environmentalist" Lomborg might call "the litany". It lists every worry in the world and pretends it can solve them. However, they cannot solve greed.

Reading it you tend to get bedazzled that all of life's problems are caused by conventional economics and that the New Economics can ride to the rescue. It isn't always overly-convincing. It is almost as if the authors themselves seem nervous about discussing this in public. This may be a criticism of the style of writing. Contrast it to Michael Rowbotham's "The Grip of Death" (ISBN 978 1 897766 40 8 Jon Carpenter Publishing 1998) where the author's utter enthusiasm for his concept (that the money system creates ALL of life's ills) sweeps the reader of his/her feet in its breathlessness. The problem maybe the fact that two author's worked on this and it appears to go around in dizzying circles. The amusing chapter headings appear to give the impression that it has been nicely segregated up into neat areas. However each tends to return to the same view of the problem with the same ideas being repeated over and over again until the reader gets a touch of deja vu. That probably is the extent of the criticism of this book - its ideas are extremely broad and it is difficult to pick out a clear framework nor even a roadmap to the future. It is lots of ideas thrown at the page. The new economics is a work-in-progress waiting in the wings. It needs a political party to invest it into policy. When written large into our communities we may well know if any of this theory works.

Sure there are plenty of good examples of it working. However, recall again the point I made earlier about the early euphoric years of Thatcherism and the neo-liberal economics that had its examples of its voodoo apparently working. Everything works somewhere and sometime. But, beyond the cherry-picking... Can we write this across the face of civilisation and make it stick? Beyond this lack of 'concreteness' there is nothing wrong with this book. You find yourself turning page after page and agreeing with everything these authors have written. Of course it will appeal to those people who work on Transition Town projects. Towards the rear of the book the authors turn to the new localism to explain why some towns are killed by Walmart whilst others thrive with numerous locally-owned shops. But how do you get from Walmart-hell to local-retail-paradise? What is the roadmap? Is there any place that has been turned around? Where are the turn-key policies that politicians crave? The New Economics Foundation needs to take on the Chicago School of Economics at their own game. They need some metrics for such ideas as "moral coherence", "human contact", "authenticity" and "spirituality". However they spurn traditional monetary measures and this is their weakness. The authors make numerous lists of their central tenets but these often get watered down into unrealistic wish lists. Take page 46 for example where they talk about "Create a holistic educational system that promotes creativity" and "Discourage materialism and clamp down on damaging advertising". Lovely, if cringe worthy. (If you want more of this wishy-washy tosh just see pages 74 and 75.) OK, OK - I agree that the authors are right but this kind of talk is going to consign the new economics to oblivion. You wish they would get real.

However, if you can manage not to get too distracted by the woolly-thinking then there is a great book here screaming to be let loose. The discussion about multiple concurrent currencies is powerful. It is interesting to note here that they do not strongly advocate local currency. This Transition Town paradigm is twisting what Boyle and Simms are really saying. They are all for local currencies but it doesn't mean that each town should have one. The purpose of such a currency is to boost the multiplier effect inside a community. A local currency is a simplistic implementation of a solution. There are other ways of creating money that sticks. It is conceivable that we could develop "community money" that is the same across the UK but can only be spent, like vouchers, only in local shops. As long as there is reciprocity this will work the same way. Likewise there is nothing wrong with a "single currency" for international trade. Each currency should have its purpose. There is also much talk about the debt money system although the concept of monetary reform is soft-peddled by the authors. Rather than advocating a widescale change to debt-free money via a citizen's income they only suggest that the government creates money for specific capital projects.

Monetary reform should be at the heart of any 'new economics' alongside the reprioritising of human happiness into the centre of wealth measurement. The latter the authors cover very well with their Happy Planet Index (a case of nef genius at work). If you can measure it then it matters. There is so much to this book - so many great ideas - that this review can barely scratch the surface. You need to read it to understand exactly how we ended up in the mess we are in. The mess is a natural outcome of a flawed economic paradigm and it can be reversed IF people understand the problem and are given options. For example, the pursuit of pure monetary efficiency often achieves the opposite of what was intended. Just look at that shiny new Walmart that is undermining local social capital. The intention was to bring local jobs and prosperity. Instead they brought social decay. It didn't work. The policy makers just can't see the dots between the two. This book should be compulsory reading for every undergrad economist, every politician, every civil servant, every banker, everyone. We have to join the dots. This book joins those dots. So should we.

Seems a little shy and buries its genius in aimless wish-lists as if the New Economics was built by a committee of Guardian readers.
If you dig hard enough this book is genius. It's all there - the reasons why our economics fails and how we can turn our local economies around. A must read.

Oliver Tickell "Kyoto 2"

ISBN 978-1-84813-025-8. "Kyoto2 - How to Manage the Global Greenhouse" by Oliver Tickell was published by Zed Books in 2008. It seems odd reading this 293 paperback book in the period after COP15 at Copenhagen (early/mid-December 2009). The book we reviewed BEFORE reading this, was Chris Goodall's "Ten Technologies..." which dealt with the leading technology that offers hope of a decarbonised world. Chris's work was completely devoid of any global political dimension but he gave us hope that we had the tools at our disposal (now or in the near future) to tackle the decarbonisation of advanced, industrialised, western, northern, nations. Tickell rather picks up where Goodall leaves off and takes us into the global economic policy zone with the market mechanisms whereby change will be encouraged. Whereas Chris's work was very easy reading Tickell has chosen a rather more tortuous route. This is not easy reading and should come with a 'layman-buyer-beware' sticker. This book will seriously confuse you! The front cover boasts a quote from George Monbiot who acclaims Tickell's "intelligent treatment of the politics and economics of climate change". Certainly it is "intelligent" if he mean "largely non-intelligible" but I would not go as far as to claim that it deals with the politics of climate change.

In fact this book does not go into the politics at all so if you wish to understand WHY COP15 was such a miserable failure then don't buy this book. However, in its favour it certainly shows two things: firstly that there is no insurmountable obstacle to forging a global deal of climate change and, secondly, there is no problem with getting the free-market heavily involved, even if its past history has been nothing short of a disaster. This book represents a harsh criticism of the failure of the market mechanisms so far adopted. The author attacks failings in both the European Emissions Trading Scheme (EUETS) and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) but, after demolishing past efforts, he goes on to suggest market mechanisms for carbon trading. Praise for Caesar indeed. The explanations of the economics of these market mechanisms (ie, Taxes versus subsidies and so on) goes into a level of detail that few will see outside of a Degree-level economics text book. I know - I studied economics until the age of 18 but have not seen some of the theories described here. This is why we believe this book is certainly not for the casual reader, which is a shame because the author is demonstrating (in the most difficult way possible) that we know everything we need to know about how to deploy economic policy to rid the world of its carbon-fuelled legacy. It is highly plausible. He also makes room for non-market mechanisms and shows how different approaches yield different cost-benefits. For example it can be cheaper to legislate against certain types of emissions whilst in other cases the Montreal Protocol to deal with ozone-depleting gasses has been far more successful and far cheaper in eradicating emissions of potent Greenhouse Gasses than Kyoto1 ever was.

So we know what can be done. We know what has to be done. It isn't rocket science even if it looks like it. However, none of this explains why the December 2009 opportunity to use all of this know-how failed to do so. Somehow economics meets politics and everyone loses. Which is a massive shame as the author tries very hard to demonstrate that there should be NO losers in his scheme. He suggests choosing the cheapest methods to guarantee emission reductions mostly through auctioning emission rights. This will raise $1trillion per year which will be spent on an entire shopping list of measure which include research into renewables, adaptation in the third world and disaster relief. Some measures will surprise the more 'green' of our readers. Investing in fusion power and geo-engineering research might annoy a few.... Whilst Tickell's praises for the voluntary offset industry might just set George Monbiot's head spinning.... But this is the strength of Tickell's work. He know what will work and it is free of any specific dogma or ideology. Maybe it is for this reason that the politicians will not use the Kyoto2 solution. It seems we have leaders who demand that somebody has to lose. With this one false belief we are all losers. Recommended.

A very complicated read. It demands your attention.
Demonstrates what can be done with an intelligent treatment of economic policy. Beautiful.

Kingsley Dennis and John Urry "After the Car"

ISBN-13 978-0-7456-4422-6. "After the Car" written by Kingsley Dennis and John Urry was published by Polity Press in 2009. The paperback has 212 pages including preface, notes, index and 7 chapters. The authors are social scientists from Lancaster University rather than technologists. This could be a really good thing or a really bad thing. It would be good if it gave us a fresh perspective on the future of personal transport - in this they are reasonably successful. It would be bad if they were to underestimate the difficulties of developing hi-tech solutions in a low-energy world. This they also do. However it would probably be a mistake to think of this book being just about cars. Taken in its totality this book is far better than the failings within its individual components. Never before has the consequences of Peak Oil and Climate Change been applied and analysed for just one technology. The car would be an obvious starting point, we guess, but only as a by-word for almost all the technology that we take for granted in wealthy, industrialised, over-fed, northern/western countries. This book largely comes into its own when it isn't talking about cars. When it considers the wider aspects of technology in general and their inter-relationships with society, this book is on solid ground. However the authors' failure to understand the profound problems of a post-oil world is their greatest failing.

The authors accept the traditional orthodoxy of man-made climate change without question - but, heah, they are social scientists not climatologists. Their approach is less about understanding risk and more about examining systems. They describe climate change as the result of "enormously powerful systems" accelerating towards a precipice. It needs an equally powerful system to avert the abyss. What is needed "after the car" is a system that can provide the flexibility, comfort and secure personal mobility of a car, yet is entrenched in a low-energy, low-carbon world. In simple terms, it has to be sustainable - although these are our words not theirs. The authors do not underestimate the scale of what they are suggesting. On page 59 they write "Unlike the bus or train system, the car system is a way of life, an entire culture." They go on to point out how it has changed the "landscape for all other mobility systems that have to find their place within the landscape predominantly sculpted by the car system." Putting it simply; we live in an autotopia. We made the world in the image of the car. As the system is entrenched then it will take an unpredictable change (a "chaos point") to sweep it away. They also point out how dated the technology now is: "Well over a century old, and increasingly archaic because of its dependence on oil-based combustion, the car system is able to 'drive' out competitors... many homes in the rich north filled with the latest electrical and digital gadgets, and yet they sat alongside the oddly outdated petroleum-powered car." You could think of the car as an appropriate metaphor for our culture's entire addiction to fossil fuels. We should have moved on years ago if we hadn't moulded our society around an artificially created system of dependency. It isn't the car that needs to change - it is our relationship to it.

The chapter on "Technologies" covers just 30 pages. Of this space most of the technology is considered for its social impact. For example the geopolitical whelm is often invoked when describing the limitations of biofuels. There is not much in this section that most readers will not be already familiar with. It is all here from plug-in hybrids to hydrogen. What is also here is the "systems thinking" of the authors. Whereas we think of the car's technology being the nuts and bolts of the vehicle, these authors take a more holistic approach and consider the way cars relate to other cars within the road system. Future cars will know where they are and will know where all the other cars are around them. Hence a suitably intelligent car will know how to get you from A to B and may well know your priority in the pecking-order of the roads. If you can pay more you might get there a bit quicker - but only at the expense of other, poorer, road users. It is of concern to the authors that such systems might not come about because of the ethical dilemma of people sharing their private information in public spaces. On the face of it such a "social" consideration is the least of a future car-using society's problems. The car-system cannot become more complicated in a low-energy world. This is working against the rules of thermodynamics. Cultures that tend to increasing complexity in order to address resource constraints also tend towards instability and eventual collapse. This we know from the work of Jared Diamond. The authors of "After the Car" pay lip service to peak-oil only to act as if the problem is one of CCTV coverage. Where you are in the pecking order seems irrelevant if no one is on the roads because no one can afford to drive. The "systems thinking" here need to concern the transition to a world with a lot fewer cars. Indeed the authors don't actually explain how a digitised smart car system would solve any resource depletion issue. How does it save energy? Such systems are designed to shoe-horn MORE cars on the road and enhance safety. They are perfect for a packed planet with loads of energy. Only one of these two facets will remain true.

Thankfully, by the next chapter on "Organisations" the authors land on their feet and normality is restored. Here they actually consider our urban and country landscapes. We won't need cars if you can walk and cycle to work and the shops. Why go THERE when THERE can be HERE through the redesign of our cities? On page 102 we learn about the Stockholm Environment Institute Report that recommends "urbanscapes that encourage closer proximity between places of home, work, shops and leisure activities. This would reduce car dependence while strengthening community." The authors note a page later that "the EasyJet generation in the rich north of the world is not easily going to accept the notion that friends should be chosen from among those near at hand". Therein lies the difficulty for the Transition Towns movement. To move forward we need to take note of the 2007 report "The Disrupters. Lesson for Low-carbon Innovation from the New Wave of Environmental Pioneers" (London: Nesta. Authors: R. Willis, M. Webb & J. Wilsdon): "In short we need disruptive forms of innovation - cheaper, easier-to-use alternatives to existing products and services often produced by non-traditional players..." This is a question of "wider forms of innovation, such as innovation in organisational forms and business models". Thus we need a movement towards the "new urbanism" or "transit-orientated development" (TOD); "The TOD movement promotes itself as a 'major solution to the serious and growing problems of peak oil and global warming by creating dense, walkable communities connected to a train line that greatly reduce the need for driving and the burning of fossil fuels'."

The Transition Movement itself gets a slot on pages 121 through 123 although the authors are largely dismissive: "this innovative movement is largely restricted to smaller towns, where civic engagement and localised sustainable practices from the ground up have some chance of success." There is a lot of merit in this sort of conclusion and the authors return to this critique later in the book. By Chapter 7 the authors move on to "Scenarios" where they describe the global issues that face humanity. This really is the "Oil Wars" section of the book where Urry & Dennis cannot contain their dislike for the neo-liberal foreign policies of the recent US administration. For the authors the war on Global Warming replaces the War on Terror and the USA is lagging behind the rest of the world in trying to fight the latter rather than the former. If anything, US attempts to keep their SUV's running on foreign Oil is increasing their insecurity, not enhancing it. This hubris must end. The War on Terror is, as the authors conclude, "outdated". On page 132 this "such high carbon forms of life cannot continue; there will be an ending to the carbon hubris that has been the overwhelming legacy of the last century." By page 149 they have returned to their critique of "Local Sustainability" which they conclude is "possible and not probable" simply because it requires "huge reversals of almost all the systems of the twentieth century". Of course it hasn't occurred to the authors that this transition is far easier in a low-energy world than attempting to create the more complicated high-energy system that they suggest in their "more probable" hi-tech scenario. The next scenario they consider is "regional warlordism" which is the "Mad Max" scenario by anyone else's language. It leaves little to the imagination. Then there is their favoured hi-tech "digital networks of control" that fails to convince the reader of how it solves any problem and how it can be implemented. In fact the three scenarios are not mutually exclusive. In the real world they will be laid over top of each other.

The inevitable destination on our journey will be a low-energy world sustained by a renewed localism. Sadly the political system may resort to the warlordism model whilst a few lucky places might attempt the hi-tech model only for it to not sustain and collapse. Does the work of these two social scientists boil down to Heinberg's "waiting for the elixir"? Their assumptions about what is 'probable' and 'possible' seems to be reduce to what people will accept as requiring this least amount of change or personal discomfort. This confuses what is nice to have and what is essential. The future of the car cannot be business-as-usual. This book gets so much of the analysis correct but then seems to reach the wrong conclusion. It is sublime of them to state that (on page 162) "the global war on terror may be 'won', but only by losing the war on climate change." There may also be a fundamental truth behind their assumption that the hi-tech solution is the least likely to lead to the Mad Max scenario. The post-oil localism is compatible with warlordism and this is the inconvenient truth of the Realpolitik. The car system needs taming through multiple measures such as personal carbon allowances. Their final analysis is spot on "if climate change became a matter of democratic politics and not just the opportunity for new corporate investment, then it is possible to avoid both regional warlordism and digital networks." It is up to us.

Unfortunate preference for the hi-tech solution versus the simple low-energy option.
Very definitive analysis of where we stand as a high energy society in transition to a low energy, post-oil, future.

Peter Taylor "Chill - A reassessment of global warming theory"

ISBN 978 1 905570 19 5. Peter Taylor's "Chill - A reassessment of global warming theory - Does climate change mean the world is cooling, and if so what should we do about it?" was published by Clairview Books in 2009. The publisher is based out of Forest Row in Sussex and have brought us all the works of Richard Heinberg and Gore Vidal. This should give us a bit of a clue that this is no ordinary Climate Change sceptic book. Indeed, far from it. If there is one book about the current state of Climate Change science that we recommend everyone reads it would probably be this one. We have reviewed other books here that have been sceptical about human-induced climate change. Those such as Lawrence Solomon's "The Deniers" (Richard Vigilante Books 2008) and Patrick Michael's "Meltdown" (Cato Institute 2004) have been well written and enjoyable. They have given us a side to the story that was useful even if didn't change anything. Others, such as Ian Plimer's "Heaven and Earth" (Quartet Books 2009) and Ian Wishart's "Air Con" (Moon Publications 2009), were nothing but rants by representatives of the fossil fuel industry or those with crazy extreme right-wing conspiracy theories. "Chill" is certainly not the latter and probably has most in common with Solomon's book.

Whereas fellow-environmentalist Lawrence Solomon started his work questioning the authenticity of human-induced climate change, because he believed it was being used as a vehicle to promote the Nuclear Industry, Peter Taylor started to question the findings of the IPCC because he was an insider. He became concerned that some bad science applied to bad politics and bad policy could lead to bad decisions that would effect communities, rural life and biodiversity. It sounds a little like he is worried that all those wind farms, wave machines and tidal barrages might effect a few bunny rabbits - but his concerns a far deeper. If he was only concerned about "biodiversity, rural life and communities" we could quickly dismiss him. We see no evidence that the work of the IPCC either threatens nature or people in any significant way or is being hijacked by any specific industry lobby group. If anything the agenda of the last 30 years has been dominated by the Fossil Fuel lobby. Hence we should be suspicious of anyone who maintains otherwise (Plimer, Wishart, et al). Taylor may be concerned about the destruction of habitat to support bio-fuel farming but his fears are no different from those of other environmentalists. It is just that other environmentalists don't thus turn around and question the authenticity of the work of the IPCC - they just blame politicians and private corporations for distorting the message to their own advantage. In this Taylor approaches the problem with almost nothing to gain. He has no over-riding ideology and this is quite unusual. It makes him worth listening to. He could have just shut up and do the same as all the other environmentalists - follow the existing orthodoxy without question whilst tackling the politicians & corporations as a separate systemic problem. But he chose not to. He has decided to pull the mat out from under the entire circus. In this he has chosen curious bed-fellows. Much of his book reads like a better-written version of Plimer's "Heaven and Earth" but the two authors are ideologically poles apart. The content of the book may not be novel but, because of who wrote it, this is game-changing. Taylor sometimes refers to the work of other climate change sceptics but then immediately lambastes them for their laissez faire politics. This isn't some conspiracy for him. It's just a mistake or, as he puts it, "a collusion of interests". Taylor does not accept that doubts about the science lead us to conclude that we need do nothing. He believes the opposite.

Taylor is a genuine environmentalist  who is experienced in helping Governments (including the UK, European Parliament and the UN) turn science into policy. His experiences have shown him two things; firstly the system of UN quangoes can lead to distortions of the science, and secondly; computer models are dressed up as science whereas they can be the creations of their makers and subject to human influence. Taylor has a scientific background (he is a genuine scientist) but his career has taken him into the Policy-making backrooms. He has worked in diverse fields from 'alternative energy' to the modelling of the effects of pesticide run-off. He has seen policy formulation from the inside. His stint at Greenpeace no doubt will earn him the reputation as an "environmentalist" - the type that no doubt Ian Plimer would therefore condemn as not being a 'real' scientist (maybe an "environmental romantic"). He stands for sustainable development and appropriate technology. Unlike other climate change sceptics Taylor is certainly NOT arguing for 'business-as-usual'. In fact he strongly believes that we are all threatened by climate change but that it might not be all man-made or even going in the direction we think. We could be threatened by global cooling. If so then we have engineered our ecology and culture so as to be highly vulnerable to ANY changes in climate.  If it is one thing we learnt from the lamentable work of Ian Plimer and it was that Global Cooling is far worse than Global Warming. Natural cycles are poorly understood and modelled. Natural swings in climate could drown out any human-warming signature. Our eye is simply on the wrong ball. It would be nice to be right for the right reasons rather than the wrong ones. We should decarbonise, depopulate and relocalise to toughen ourselves up for whatever nature can throw at us. We should be open minded to other possibilities and not reject scepticism for fear that it is motivated by money. In this case it certainly is not!

The book has its low points that somewhat distract from a well-thought-through study. Chapter 14 "Urgency and Error" descends into farce with Taylor coming out with such rhetoric as "the low-carbon economy is a myth". Some of the statements made in this chapter simply do not square with what he says in most of the rest of the book. You might think he had Plimer do a guest-spot. Taylor does not hide his disdain for the very environmental groups he used to work with and for. He accuses them of all becoming global corporations and losing touch with communities and grass-roots involvement. Hence they are pushing a corporate-style agenda without thought to what humanity needs nor any regard for what the science says. He particularly picks on onshore wind turbines and biofuel plantations again and again to justify this. Sadly this suggest that the author should simply get out more. There is nothing here you cannot read on regular occasions in the public domain in such magazines as The Ecologist or New Internationalist. Environmental groups are well aware of the limits to growth and the corruption of the development model. For a man who once worked closely with Tim Jackson, on the development of the precautionary principle, Taylor seems to have spent the last ten years loose in a sea of cynicism. We suggest he spends less time reading New Scientist (which he quotes at length) and a bit more time studying the actual campaigns of Environmental Groups. He may also care to write a few words about the Transition Town movement that he appears to have never heard of. It seems the world has moved on since the mid-1990's and Taylor remains ill-informed. Although he often refers to Peak Oil he also appears to know little of the urgency in which fossil fuel depletion needs mitigation. It only lags behind Climate Change scenarios by a few years. We may choose to slow down the pace at which we reduce our carbon footprints but the case for securing our energy security has never been more urgent.

The very final Chapter 16 "Reflections from Anthropology" adds nothing to this book and should have been ditched. In fact the further Taylor gets from the basic science the further he wanders off into his own fanciful universe. This is a shame because there remains a fundamental "rightness" to his work. However it is so deeply flawed in many of the details that most readers will be infuriated. This book, with a bit of editing, could easily be one of the most important books on climate change and local resilience you could ever read. It just falls short. The big problems are in the second half of the book when Taylor tackles "The Politics". Even then the first half on "The Science" is very hard to read and you need a PhD to understand any of it. All that most people will learn is that climate is complicated! The science is rapidly evolving and several strands are evolving away from the predominant orthodoxy about human CO2 and temperature rise. Our contribution may be smaller than we first thought and we may be riding a set of natural cycles that could give us a bumpy ride. The IPCC largely disregard this new evidence as it doesn't fit with their previous Policy Statements. Once they made a commitment to one over-riding theory it has been difficult for new knowledge to get a look-in. This is the danger of politics meeting science. Politics wants certainty. Science can only deliver probability. As Taylor says "Once a science is 'settled' it is liable to stagnate". At times Taylor compares the "war on Climate Change" to the "war on terror" or the equally ill-fated "war on drugs". Ouch.

Taylor writes (page 11) "Past cycles of cooling have brought severe famine at times when the global population was very much smaller and less vulnerable to climate fluctuations. Sixty-seven countries are now dependent upon external food aid... coming from surpluses in the northern grain belt... the world population is set to double... at the same time as oil production, upon which agricultural surpluses depend, begins to decline." Here-in lies an important point. It matters not whether you believe in the dogma of human-induced global warming. That is semantics in comparison to the challenge we face in our oil-addicted culture. If anything changes, for whatever reason, then we are not resilient to these changes any more. We are at risk. When we are at risk we need to know what is going on and how to prepare for it. Hence IF the consensus on the human causes of climate change is wrong, OR if we have got warming confused with natural cooling, then we are planning to offset the WRONG disaster with the wrong tools. Transition Towns might want to be careful about the claimed causes of Climate Change for fear of being seen to cry wolf once too often. We have to pitch the right message. Taylor's reassessment suggests that we cause only 20% of climate change. He goes on to suggest that, realistically, an 80% cut in CO2 emissions will only reduce the driving force by 9%. We hope he is right. Recommended.

Statements about renewable energy are largely unjustified and criticisms of the environmental movement bear to relationship to reality.
A really, really good book that we should all be reading. We should be open minded to the idea that resilience to climate change is more important than carbon footprints.

Nicola Terry "Energy and Carbon Emissions"

Stuart Sim "The Carbon Footprint Wars"

Jeremy Rifkin "The Third Industrial Revolution"

Ruppert "Crossing the Rubicon"

ISBN 0 86571 540 8. Michael C. Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon - The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil". Published by New Society Publishers in 2004. This book weighs in at 674 pages (paperback) and it will put you back some time to wade through it all.  The Title suggests scholarly insight on the scale of Noam Chomsky. This is misleading. There is nothing in this book about the "decline" of the American Empire. Indeed - entirely the opposite. The author sets about proving that the US is at the zenith of is power and, as he believes, is orchestrating a careful plan to seize control of the World's Oil supplies as they start to run out. They will use the cover of security operations against Terrorism to do this. The events of September 11th 2001 will be their Battle flag. As such there is nothing original here as this is generally believed by the majority of the World's population. Where Ruppert goes further is in his detailed evidence search to back up his beliefs in a multitude of layered conspiracy theories. He starts with largely groundless beliefs that the US money Markets run on drug money. Then he waxes lyrical about some completely irrelevant database-linking software called "PROMIS" in which the US Government built 'back doors' in order to spy on everyone. Then he goes on to his set piece that dominates most of the Book - his 9/11 Conspiracy theories. He believes that the US Government conducted events that day with Radio-Controlled Airliners and phantom radar blips. This is undermined by his lack of hard evidence. It is all vague. He uses innuendo & rumour. He connects unconnected events & peoples to build his case. He has no case. He claims that the Pentagon attack was never witnessed although this is not true. The BBC interviewed a witness on a documentary in 2006. Ruppert was a former LA Cop who personally witnessed CIA involvement in Drug running. In this he is undoubtedly sincere and he was probably a good cop. However he will never serve in the legal profession if he thinks this passes as evidence. Sadly all the noise he generates can only distract the reader from the REAL scientific facts on Peak Oil. Peak Oil is an internationally recognised scientific and geological fact that is undisputed. 9/11 conspiracy theories are just that - theories. The book is a very personal work and totally based on the authors work at the "From The Wilderness" Publication. He see no irony in labelling his critics as CIA cronies simply because they do exactly what he does - overload the reader with nonsense so as to bury the genuine facts that we should all be concerned about. Believe it, the USA will destroy anything that gets in its way for the last Oil on the Planet. Probably any other Nation in their position would do the same. A lot of blood is going to be spilt for Oil which is why we must turn our back on it and soon. A Book not recommended unless 9/11 conspiracies are your thing. Disappointing.

Paranoid conspiracy theories linking Peak oil to 9/11.
Thick slice through the American power system. He might be right.

Solomon "The Deniers"

ISBN 978-0-9800763-1-8. "The Deniers - The World-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution and fraud (and those who are too fearful to do so)" was written by Lawrence Solomon and published by Richard Vigilante Books in 2008. Any stalwart believer in man-made climate change is going to have to over-come a couple of hurdles before they pick up this book. Firstly, the ludicrous title! Although the book suggests anecdotally that several scientists may have been isolated, for their beliefs, there is not much here that would have you believe in either "hysteria", "persecution" or "fraud". Solomon blows it right there on the front cover. Although the scientific mainstream may have cold-shouldered some individuals it is well documented that within politics (and specifically under the George W Bush regime) the men with power (mainly oil-men as it turned out) cold shouldered the entire scientific establishment on the matter. Anyone who has been pressing for action on climate change would have given their right arm for just a little "hysteria" on the matter. Clearly there has not been enough. Yes, some newspapers have indulged in their fair-share of 'climate-porn' but even this has done little to stir the political elite into anything resembling action. As for fraud? Well, this book presents no evidence of fraud whatsoever. So you have to wonder why Solomon (a Canadian anti-Nuclear Environmentalist) would deliberately come up with such in inaccurate, provocative and absurd title? This never really gets answered but if you were brave enough to get past the front cover then you would get the quick impression the Solomon has a big axe to grind with Al Gore (who he contemptuously cores "Mr Gore" through the book), the media and the UN. As we have seen from "An Inconvenient Truth" the Media can't win as they get cruelly denounced by both sides of the argument. The effect is to cancel each other out only leaving us with criticism of the IPCC and the scientific establishment. So if you were brave enough to get past the front cover, the dust cover blurb and Chapter One (plus, I might add, a scornful George Marshall blog) you will have penetrated the meat and bones of Solomon's writing on the matter - and you will be richly rewarded. This is actually a very interesting book. It is probably best if you review each chapter in the light of a little internet research but this is well worth a read. Of course for anyone who holds onto climate change with a dogmatic, faith-based, vigour then even acknowledging such a book exists counts you as the spawn of the devil. However if you really want to acknowledge that a little debate is a good thing then get yourself a copy of this and read it with an open mind. Solomon is an old-school environmentalist who campaigned against Canada's Nuclear expansion. Back then (the 1970's) he remembers clearly his own lobby group being smeared as the stooges of the Oil industry - hence his interest was piqued when the, so-called, climate change deniers were tarred with the same brush. His research (he is a journalist) suggested to him that the IPCC may be stampeding political opinion towards unwise action to brake climate change. This includes expanding nuclear power. To be fair to him he does not attempt to settle any arguments. He only gives room for the dissenting voices and looks at their academic credentials. Most of these skeptics actually genuinely do believe that man-made Carbon emissions are warming our atmosphere. However they admit that their own research either shows no proof of this or indicates that it will be nothing like as bad as we may have been bought to believe. Most admit that the decarbonisation of the economy is inevitable and a good thing, so they don't care if the science is imperfect. This seems reasonable. Other analysis suggests that the IPCC processes are flawed and set out on its mission to proof that mankind was effecting the climate and tended to ignore any evidence to the contrary. Some of the IPCC gaffs were completely laughable but were later corrected. All of which leave us wondering exactly what to conclude? This is the flip side of the coin and it healthy to see this side once-in-a-while. However it all largely proves nothing other than that the Climate is really, really, complicated and that we barely understand it at all. The fact that the scientific establishment have established a mechanism for how mankind can geo-engineer the climate leaves us to conclude that we should not, henceforth, set about it with gusto. We are better off without fossil fuels - period. Many dissenting voices fear that the cost of coming off this addiction is so high that we should be more conservative and do less cutting back - or try and adapt more. This is utter rubbish. There is no future in the carbon-economy. We do it now or later. The longer we leave it the harder it will be. So we may as well roll up our sleeves and get on with it. A recommended read.

Author motivated by extreme hatred of Nuclear Power as a solution to anything.
An eye-opening and refreshing book. Worth a read.

Speth "Red Sky at Morning"

ISBN 0 300 10232 1. Yale University Press published in 2004. "Red Sky at Morning - America and the Crisis of the Global Environment - A Citizen's Agenda for Action". James Speth was an environmental adviser to both Carter and Clinton Presidencies. He has also been CEO of the UN Development Programme. However, beware any book with two subtitles - it smacks of 'looking for an audience'. Speth writes about the initial success in the USA on government action to protect nature during the 1970's and then looks at how such success did not materialise on a global scale. As an "insider" he provides interesting insight into various successes and failures from the 70's until the present day. On the way he takes in various initiatives from the protection of endangered species through to Global Warming and Kyoto. He cites numerous facts and figures making this a useful source book. However, a guide to 'action' it is not. He hastily shoved a few pages on the back with list of web sites to visit. It is very much an after-thought and reminds you of the end of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" where he completely forgot to talk about solutions. Speth probably has much in common with Gore in that he has spent time in the Whitehouse at Presidential level and rose to that level of seniority through his ability to use the appropriate Economic and Political language to define what is wrong with the world. Greenpeace activist he is not. This is actually a positive feature of this work and we recommend this for its novel point-of-view. Beware - it is based at a US audience. It is a perfect briefing as to the workings of the UN and inter-governmental climate-change initiatives as well as a critique of these global bodies.

Not really a guide for action at all.
An Al Gore-type eye view of the world.

Rowbotham "Grip of Death"

ISBN 978 1 897766 40 8. "The Grip of Death - A study of modern money, debt slavery and destructive economics" was published by Jon Carpenter Publishing in 1998. This is Michael Rowbotham's predecessor to his 2000 work "Goodbye America" with which it has so much in common. Much of "Goodbye America" was lifted straight from the work he wrote only two years before. Whereas the latter book focussed on Debt in the international arena "The Grip of Death" looks largely at domestic British economics. The author develops a framework for the adoption of an alternative money supply system to be phased into UK macro-economic policy in stages. However to get to this section of the book the reader has to wade through large sections of the author's flights of fancy in which he imagines that nearly all of life's problems are caused by debt finance. The reason we work so hard? Debt. Inflation? Debt. International Trade? Debt. Any poverty? Debt... And on it goes. On and on for 326 pages of what most readers will find to be utterly dull writing. No wonder most people have no idea how the finance system works. This could be genius but it is so impenetrable and difficult to understand that few will take the time to study its meaning in depth. Of note is the section on modern farming. Rowbotham maintains that "shortage of purchasing.... can be shown to be responsible for the reliance of the modern economy on constant growth, distorting that growth towards a low-price market, fostering excessive commercial transport and conferring and undue advantage upon corporate business in the international arena." However his theory that debt finance forces manufacturers to make low quality goods is quite beyond belief and experience. Mass production has made products available to most people in quantities unimaginable to our forebears. This is not a bad thing. People would rather have a disposable product than none at all. The author falsely believes that the quality of goods is falling and that there were some high quality goods, made in yesteryear, that lasted forever. This is a gross generalisation substantiated by nothing more than Rowbotham's opinions. Indeed each chapter is backed up by barely a handful of references. It is not a well researched work in the manner of a Noam Chomsky book (where the references section often takes up a third of the entire book!). Rowbotham concludes that "What currently dominates world politics and economics is not true conspiracy; it is a mistake. It is a conspiracy of error. We are witnessing the collective pursuit of an inoperable political ideal and an erroneous economic paradigm, built on a totally inadequate, misunderstood and almost unchallenged financial system.... the entire edifice of their economic and political practice is wildly misguided. And for them to realise it is false, they need to be aware of the practical alternatives." The author sees this as a political and macro-economic problem solved by Governments creating money and partially removing this power from the banks. Although there is tremendous wisdom in this idea it is not clear if Rowbotham fully understands its importance. For him it appears to be a mechanism to support the people's ability to consume. However, it is the current system's need for perpetual growth and its inability to contract that is its weakness. We consume to the detriment of our own future. We consumed the oil and spoilt the climate so the growth must stop and be replaced by a sustainable contraction. Hence the money system must change. This is the importance of credit finance to our future. Sadly this author seems to miss this most obvious of points. He makes a very poor ambassador for monetary reform. Which is a shame. Read this book if you can.

Sometimes miles off topic and self-indulgent. Will lose most readers. Lacks objectivity.
Monetary Reform for the UK reader.