Anarchy and the environment

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Marilyn A. Brown and Benjamin K. Sovacool

Tackling climate change and improving energy security are two of twenty-first century's greatest challenges. In this book, Marilyn Brown and Benjamin Sovacool offer detailed assessments of most advanced commercially available technologies for strengthening global energy security, mitigating the effects of climate change, and enhancing resilience through adaptation and geo-engineering. They also evaluate the barriers to deployment of these technologies and critically review public policy options crucial to their adoption. Arguing that society has all technologies necessary for the task, Brown and Sovacool discuss options available today, including high-efficiency transportation, renewable energy, carbon sequestration, and demand-side management. They offer eight case studies from around the world that document successful approaches to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and improving energy security. These include the Danish approach to energy policy and wind power, Brazil's ethanol program, China's improved cook stove program; and the U.S. Toxics Release Inventory. Brown and Sovacool argue that meeting twin challenges of climate change and energy security will allow us to provide energy, maintain economic growth, and preserve natural environment.

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Christian de Perthuis

"Since the publication of the Stern Review, economists have started to ask more normative questions about climate change. Should we act now or tomorrow? What is the best theoretical carbon price to reach long-term abatement targets? How do we discount the long-term costs and benefits of climate change? This provocative book argues that these are the wrong sorts of questions to ask because they don't take into account the policies that have already been implemented. Instead, it urges us to concentrate on existing policies and tools by showing how the development of carbon markets could dramatically reduce world greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, triggering policies to build a new low-carbon energy system while restructuring the way agriculture interacts with forests. This provides an innovative new perspective on how a post-Kyoto international climate regime could emerge from agreements between the main GHG emitters capping their emissions and building an international carbon market"--

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Gordon Brown

Former British Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown believes the international financial crisis can be reversed, but that the world's leaders must work together if we are to avoid a decade of lost jobs and low growth. Brown speaks both as someone who was in the room driving discussions that led to some crucial decisions, and as an expert renowned for his financial acumen. No one who had Brown's access has written about the crisis yet, and no one has written so convincingly about what the global community must do next in order to climb out of this abyss. As he sees it, the crisis was brought on not simply by technical failings, but by ethical failings too. He argues that markets need morals, and suggests that the only way to truly ensure that the world economy does not flounder again is to institute a banking constitution and a global growth plan.--From publisher description.

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Edward Humes

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Humes (Eco Barons) offers a stirring story of how ecologically responsible practices are increasingly benefiting the bottom line, and how as Wal-Mart goes global (and tries to lure back the more green-conscious consumer decamping for Target), the biggest retailer in the world is, slowly but surely, encouraging a change for the better.