Customer Reviews

Fast Forward: Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming (Brookings Focus Books)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

...they'll wonder why we didn't heed the cogent and thoughtful message of Antholis & Talbott's brilliant book. I'm no global-warming expert, and I found myself riveted right up to the sobering final pages. (The global-warming expert I *do* know is using this book in his Princeton class this fall.) With Cassandras this pitch-perfect, we can no longer say we weren't warned about our destructive habits. And if policymakers heed the reasonable prescriptions here, those historians' generation will salute rather than despair.

While the science on global warming is clear, its politics are murky. Foreign policy experts William Antholis and Strobe Talbott contend that national affairs of state must take into account ethical global concerns over the Earth's future. They reach back to the ancient Greeks, the Founding Fathers and the joint US-Russian efforts on nuclear arms control to portray modern climate change as a matter of overarching significance. While their principled arguments may not totally convince opposing sides, what remains, however, is valuable: a journalistic, blow-by-blow chronology of the global warming debate and its diplomatic failures to date. This detailed presentation makes the case - at times ploddingly - that a new way of thinking is necessary to reduce greenhouse gases before the planet suffers irreparable damage. The subject matter occasionally can get eye-glazingly technical, but its consequences are crucial. getAbstract believes that policy wonks and environmental activists will lap up the book's points, and recommends it to students of global governance and every other citizen of planet Earth.

This is an exceptional book. It is clear and concise, a fairly quick read that packs a powerful knowledge punch. It has some really fascinating behind-the-scenes tidbits that any reader can enjoy, no matter how much (or little) one knows about politics. Lays out clear goals (and the reasons for those goals) for short and medium term US environmental policy. Helps to explain the political deadlock on this issue and the reasons why not-so-subtle pressure TODAY has a chance to make a real difference. Read it, then call up your representatives and demand that they make energy and climate legislation happen NOW, while we still have a chance to preserve our climate as we know it for our children and grand children.

Back in the 60s, when I was a liberal hippie, I was very much into Earth Day and the need to abolish the evils of corporations and capitalism. For decades now the liberal environmental movements have dreamed of a giant bureaucracy that could regulate the industrial production of the whole world and in the process force all of us to live by what they imagine is an ethically correct and natural lifestyle. This giant bureaucracy would have the power to control the evil corporate entities and their devilish pursuit of the root of all evil; yes I speak the unspeakable, that demon called profit. It would have the power to redistribute wealth and level the economies of the world so that all of us would be "equal"; no one having more wealth than the other. "Climate change" and the hysteria behind it are the tools that those at the top of this movement are counting on to make this possible. The problem is that it's a scam pure and simple.
Talbott simply dismisses the skeptics of CO2 driven global warming as a fringe group and asserts that the issue is settled and the overwhelming scientific consensus supports Al Gore and his ilk. Well that assertion is the biggest lie in the history of science. The scientific establishment that pushes Gore and Talbott's view is so contaminated by politics that it is almost beyond the ability of one to imagine. But even if Talbott were correct, he has no practical plans to control CO2. Even if we destroyed the economies of ever industrialized nation on earth trying to hold back CO2 it would amount to no practical alteration of the climate. What it would do is nothing less than the destruction of civilization as we know it and plunge the whole world into an Orwellian climate bureaucracy that would control every aspect of our lives and make prosperity virtually impossible. It would kill far more people with devastating economic fallout than all the horrors the climate alarmists can project.