There are a lot of good ideas in this book. 1) Prosperity requires cheap energy. At the present moment, no “green” energy is cheap. Preventing poor people from using “non-green” energy keeps them in poverty. And this isn’t Americana poverty, where the poor have cars and televisions. It is third world poverty where people live on the edge of starvation. 2) Genetically modified organisms make it possible to grow more food more cheaply, or to provide nutrients missing in more conventional crops (e.g., the beta-carotene in GMO “golden rice” prevents blindness). This is tremendously important for poor people. 3) Spraying the inside walls of a building with DDT keeps away mosquitoes, the carriers of malaria, a disease which is absent from rich countries but which kills and weakens millions of poor people every year. By their influence in rich countries, environmental organizations have fairly successfully kept spraying from happening in poor countries. 4) Non-profit organizations are able to do things that would be considered fraudulent or otherwise illegal by for-profit organizations.
However, these ideas are terribly developed. Less than half of this short book (163 pages, including notes) is taken up with 1) - 3). Way too much is about “corporate social responsibility” and how BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” campaign was phony, and similar things.
Symbolic of the book’s failure is a chart on page 86: “Environmentalism’s Death Toll, Radical Environmentalism–a partial global summary for developing countries.” The first line is “Dysentery and diarrhea 3,000,000 million children deaths 1,000,000 adult deaths.” Wow, that’s a big deal! Does the book tell you how that occurred or where the numbers came from? No. In fact, the chart is never referred to in the book. It just shows up after the notes for chapter 6 and before the first page of chapter 7. Aside from the entry for “Vitamin A Deficiency 500,000 children blinded,” nothing from the chart is explained in the book. The credit line at the end reads “(Based on 2001 data from World Health Organization and other sources).” Not very helpful.
Even the good parts are weighted down by too much name-calling and not enough analysis.
P.S. The book I read was published in 2003 and contains information current to that date. Though Amazon shows a 2010 date for this book, the front and back cover are exactly the same as mine, with no indication that it has been revised.
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