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| Headline |
Author |
Published |
Section |
Alan Greenspan is very overrated: Part I
Greenspan on energy |
Joseph Romm |
22 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Greenspan is no polymath, to go by the discussions of energy and climate in his instant bestseller, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. During his nuclear power love-fest, he writes (p. 453): Nuclear power is not safe without a significant protective infrastructure. But then, neither is drinking water. Wow! That's an analogy I bet you never heard before. Greenspan is actually comparing drinking water infrastructure -- which is needed mainly to p ... |
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| Topics: books, energy, oil (all these topics) |
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Like hearing a Rolling Stones number during a chastity belt ad
New book praising biofuels has an unexpected author |
JMG |
20 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| There are combinations that are just too weird: chocolate cake and grape juice (to steal from an old Dick Van Dyke show), or hearing the Rolling Stones' music used to market chastity belts and abstinence pledges. Or like seeing the Worldwatch Institute's name on a book praising biofuels ... the very fuels Les Brown, WWI's founder, is crusading against. The gist of the book seems to be, 'We need a completely different kind of biofuels than we have or are likely to ever see, bu ... |
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| Topics: biofuels, books, energy (all these topics) |
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Environmentalism is so not dead!
Carl Pope reviews Break Through by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger |
Grist |
18 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| This is a guest essay by Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. Two years ago, Ted Nordhaus' and Michael Shellenberger's widely discussed essay "The Death of Environmentalism" predicted that the cause in which I've worked most of my life was about to gasp a grim last breath. The self-proclaimed "bad boy" authors must be embarrassed now. With their new book on the same theme about to land in bookstores, environmentalism is alive and perhaps ... |
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| Topics: books, environmental movement, politics (all these topics) |
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Bill McKibben: Can anyone stop it?
A review of Lomborg and Shellenberger & Nordhaus |
Grist |
18 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| This piece, which appears in the October 11, 2007, issue of the New York Review of Books, is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine. ----- CAN ANYONE STOP IT? Bill McKibben Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming by Bjørn Lomborg. Knopf, 253 pp., $21.00 Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. Houghton Mifflin, 344 p ... |
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| Topics: Bill McKibben, books, climate, environmental movement (all these topics) |
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Debunking Bjørn Lomborg: Part III
Lomborg's a real Nowhere Man |
Joseph Romm |
17 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| In Cool It, Lomborg writes about global warming -- but the globe he is writing about certainly isn't Earth. We've already seen in Parts I and II that on Planet Lomborg, polar bears can evolve backwards and the ice sheets can't suffer rapid ice loss (as they are already doing on Earth). On Planet Lomborg, the carbon cycle has no amplifying feedbacks -- even though these are central to why warming on Earth will be worse than the IPCC projects. I couldn't even find the ... |
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| Topics: books, climate, climate change impacts (all these topics) |
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Debunking Bjorn Lomborg: Part II
Lomborg misrepresents possible sea-level rise |
Joseph Romm |
15 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Lomborg is a champion cherry-picker when he isn't just getting his facts wrong, as I argued in Part I. He has a deceptively misleading -- and outright erroneous -- discussion of sea-level-rise projections in Cool It. Let's start with a few all-too-typical howlers: Antarctica is generally soaking up more water than Greenland is shedding, as the IPCC predicts. The IPCC estimates that the very worst additional increase to be expected from Greenland could be 8 inc ... |
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| Topics: books, climate, climate science (all these topics) |
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Debunking Bjorn Lomborg: Part I
The great polar bear irony |
Joseph Romm |
13 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| For debunkers, Lomborg's work is a target-rich environment. There is even a Lomborg-errors website, where a Danish biologist catalogs Lomborg's mistakes and 'attempts to document his dishonesty.' Lomborg's latest work of disinformation, Cool It, isn't out yet in Europe to be debunked, so I'll fill the gap for now. I will start with polar bears for two reasons. First, the nonironic reason: Lomborg starts his book with a chapter on polar bears, presumably because ... |
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| Topics: Arctic, books, climate, climate change impacts, polar bears, wildlife (all these topics) |
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Lomborg: The clever person's climate change skeptic
Debating Bjorn Lomborg on global warming |
Joseph Romm |
12 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| I taped a debate with Lomborg today on a Denver radio station. I'll post a link when it will be broadcast on the Internet. I'll be interested to hear your reactions. I have long thought it is pretty much impossible to win a one-on-one debate on climate change with anybody who knows what they're doing -- who knows the literature and is willing to make statements that are not really true but can't be quickly disproved. After all, the audience is not in a position to ... |
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| Topics: books, climate (all these topics) |
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Colbert does the Borg
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David Roberts |
11 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Lomborg never stood a chance: |
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| Topics: books, climate, energy, funnies, TV (all these topics) |
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Battling the Borg
Some reviews and criticism of Bjorn Lomborg's new book Cool It |
David Roberts |
10 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| I was all geared up to recommend this review of Bjorn Lomborg's new book Cool It, written by The Weather Makers author Tim Flannery, but it turns out to be pretty bad. It's kind of scattered all over the place a makes no coherent, forceful critique. Much better is Eban Goodstein's review in Salon, which drills in on the subject of tipping points, which Lomborg totally ignores: But this really is not the point. The glaring error in 'Cool It,' and the one that d ... |
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| Topics: books, climate (all these topics) |
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Now With More Gore!
Al Gore will pen a solutions-focused sequel |
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07 Sep 2007 |
News |
| Posted at 3:15 PM on 07 Sep 2007 Al Gore is writing another book -- and you can bet that climate change is shakin' in its boots. The Path to Survival, a solutions-focused sequel to the groundbreaking Inconvenient Truth, is slated to hit shelves on Earth Day 2008. (Where was that impeccable timing when you were campaigning, Al?) Billed as "part scientific manual, part exposé, part visionary call for a new planet-wide political ... |
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| Topics: Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, books, climate, climate change mitigation, news (all these topics) |
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More inconvenience
Coming Gore book to spell out climate solutions |
David Roberts |
07 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Gore to pen a sequel: The Path to Survival will be published next spring to coincide with Earth Day on April 22. According to the publisher, Rodale Books, Gore will spell out a blueprint for the changes that individuals and governments need to make to avoid catastrophic climate change. I expect the book will be built around Gore's 10 policy recommendations to Congress, which remain the gold standard as far as I'm concerned. |
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| Topics: Al Gore, books, climate, climate change mitigation, politics (all these topics) |
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Upgrading capitalism's operating system
A review of Peter Barnes' Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons |
Gar Lipow |
05 Sep 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Peter Barnes' Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (also available as a free PDF at Barnes' site) suggests that flaws in capitalism lie at the root of the environmental and social problems we face today; his solution, as a retired corporate CEO, is not to discard capitalism, but fix those flaws. As he puts it: Eventually, after retiring from Working Assets in 1995, I began reflecting on the profit-making world I'd emerged from. I'd tested the system fo ... |
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| Topics: books, business, politics (all these topics) |
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Eye on the storm
Thoughts on Chris Mooney's Storm World |
Andrew Dessler |
31 Aug 2007 |
Gristmill |
| I recently finished Chris Mooney's great new book Storm World. There have been lots of reviews (see Chris's blog for a pretty complete list), so I won't write another one here. Instead, I thought I would highlight the part I particularly appreciated, and what I think needed more emphasis in the book. First, the high point: The book does a great job of detailing the turbulent interface between knowledge and ignorance where science operates. Science is a contact sport, ... |
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| Topics: books, climate, climate science (all these topics) |
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Risk mismanagement
Bjorn Lomborg's new book misunderstands risk and investment |
David Roberts |
23 Aug 2007 |
Gristmill |
| This is a guest essay from Jon A. Anda, President of the Environmental Markets Network, an organization within Environmental Defense focused on legislation to create an efficient carbon market. He was previously a Vice Chairman of Morgan Stanley. ----- Bjorn Lomborg's forthcoming book says to Cool It about global warming. I am anxious to read the detailed rationale when the book is released in September. Based on his interviews about the book, as well as insigh ... |
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| Topics: books, carbon trading, climate, climate change mitigation, greenhouse-gas emissions (all these topics) |
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BioWillie pens a biodiesel book
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Sarah van Schagen |
19 Aug 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Willie Nelson is talking about biodiesel again. This time in book form, and the result is On the Clean Road Again: Biodiesel and the Future of the Family Farm. The 90-some-page pocket-size book (it's like a li'l Willie you can carry with you everywhere!) is divided into two parts: the past (or the history of petroleum) and the future (in Willie's world, that's biodiesel). Thankfully there's also an afterword to talk about the other future ... you know, wind and ... |
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| Topics: biofuels, books, celebrity, energy, green living, oil (all these topics) |
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Shameless self-promotion Friday
Writing about Mooney, writing about storms |
Kate Sheppard |
10 Aug 2007 |
Gristmill |
| I reviewed Chris Mooney's new book, Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, for The American Prospect, and it's up today. Gristmiller Kit Stolz reviewed it here a while ago, but uh, mine is ... longer. Anyway, the book is good, though not the galvanizing polemic that made his first book, The Republican War on Science, a bestseller. But Mooney's got quite the knack for telling the back story on how science and politics became friends w ... |
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| Topics: books, climate, climate change impacts, severe weather, shameless self-promotion (all these topics) |
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Can enviros learn to tell stories?
Learning from masters in other fields: What a concept! |
JMG |
09 Aug 2007 |
Gristmill |
| David Mamet (author of The Verdict and Glengarry Glen Ross, among other fine things) writes this in his new book Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business (a great book just loaded with great snark:As we enter the cinema, we relax our guard. We do so necessarily, because to resist, to insist on reality in the drama, is to rob ourselves of joy. For who would sit through he cartoon thinking constantly, 'Wait a second, elephants can't fly!' ... |
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| Topics: books, environmental movement, messaging, politics (all these topics) |
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No child left inside
Prying kids away from TV and video games costs ... $100 million? |
Erik Hoffner |
07 Aug 2007 |
Gristmill |
| Here's a quote from one of today's electronic-gadget-loving kids: "The reason I prefer playing indoors is because that's where all the electrical outlets are." That was shared by Richard Louv (Grist interview here), author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, during a conference call I hosted recently for the Orion Grassroots Network, to catch us up on what's new in the "getting kids back into nature" move ... |
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| Topics: books, green living, parenting (all these topics) |
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The best clean-tech book
If you only read one book, pick this one |
Joseph Romm |
06 Aug 2007 |
Gristmill |
| For years I've been looking for one book to recommend to people who want to get up to speed on what's happening in clean technology. I have finally found it: The Clean Tech Revolution: The Next Big Growth and Investment Opportunity, by Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder. It is the only book I've seen that covers the whole gamut of the latest in clean energy -- including such cutting-edge areas as concentrating solar power and microalgae -- and isn't swept up in fads like h ... |
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| Topics: books, energy, tech (all these topics) |
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New food book
Where your dinner is mined |
JMG |
06 Aug 2007 |
Gristmill |
| A friend sent me Tyler Cowen's thoughts on a new food book from Steve Ettlinger. I don't know who Tyler Cowen is, but he made me want to read the book: There are entire companies which do nothing but break eggs open for other companies; the largest such egg-breaking company is based in Elizabeth, New Jersey. That is from Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What Am ... |
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| Topics: books, food, green living (all these topics) |
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The Upside of Down, by Thomas Homer-Dixon
A review |
John McGrath |
24 Jul 2007 |
Gristmill |
| For a few days after reading The Upside of Down, I annoyed most of my friends and family by reciting chunks of Homer-Dixon's work back to them -- I couldn't get it out of my head. I do this a lot to people, but not usually for days and days on end after reading a book. The Upside of Down isn't an environmental book, exactly, though it does deal with environmental and energy issues. While it shares some themes with more explicitly environmental books (like Jare ... |
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| Topics: books (all these topics) |
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The great Harry Potter scandal of '07
We didn't give away the ending, honest! |
David Roberts |
23 Jul 2007 |
Gristmill |
| On Friday, a Daily Grist blurb about the final Harry Potter book ended with this: Which totally makes up for the fact that Harry dies in the end. Oops, did we say that out loud? We didn't think much of it. I mean: The book wasn't even out yet, and getting an advance copy was more difficult than breaking into Fort Knox. If we'd really known the ending, it would have been international news, not something to sneak in at the end of a blurb. Daily Grist is fun ... |
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| Topics: books, green living (all these topics) |
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Welcome Back, Potter
Final Harry Potter tome is 'greenest book in publishing history' |
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20 Jul 2007 |
Daily Grist |
| Welcome Back, Potter Final Harry Potter tome is "greenest book in publishing history" Feel that crackle in the air? That's millions of Harry Potter fans trying not to fidget as they wait for the book's midnight release. (Or trying not to freeze, in the case of an Australian fan who was rescued after diving into a frigid lake to retrieve his pre-purchase receipt.) The final insta ... |
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| Topics: books, consumerism, green living, green products, news, shopping (all these topics) |
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Next thing you know, even Voldemort will be hugging trees
Harry Potter is way greener than your average book |
Kate Sheppard |
18 Jul 2007 |
Gristmill |
| I wrote last week about Harry Potter going green in the seventh and final installation of the series. Turns out, it's even greener than we thought. It might just be the greenest book of all time [PDF] (except for all those books that have never been published, I guess). Production of the book spurred the development of 32 new ecological papers, six for Potter exclusively, and prompted 300 publishers to adopt new environmental policies, according to Markets Init ... |
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| Topics: books, green living (all these topics) |
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