A rousing condemnation of a system bent on short-term gain against long-term health.
A real-life legal document that, absent the requisite love story, could be a James Grisham whodunit.
Acting as an expert witness, former government official Speth provides a background chronicle for the constitutional case called Juliana v. United States (2015), which “is no ordinary lawsuit.” The case holds that the government has known since at least the early 1960s that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide causes climate change. In almost every administration, environmental scientists and federal officials have issued relevant reports, and Congress has mulled over them, so that any protestation of ignorance (no excuse in any event) is simply not true. Moreover, in Juliana, the plaintiffs are young people who “are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.” Some children mentioned in the case live in places such as Hawaii, where storm patterns are intensifying in strength; some have had to abandon their homes in low-lying coastal areas in the face of rising sea levels. Speth, who co-founded the National Resources Defense Council, convincingly establishes that the government knew long in advance that these eventualities were likely to occur: He recounts that Daniel Patrick Moynihan told Richard Nixon in 1969 that the trends in rising temperatures were likely to raise sea levels by 10 feet. Wedded to the fossil-fuel economy, however, several administrations simply tucked the reports into a desk drawer. Others, particularly the one headed by Donald Trump, seemingly took delight in contravening any efforts at conservation and instead opened federal lands to further extraction. Ronald Reagan’s government essentially did the same while George H.W. Bush, despite talking a good game, helped weaken international conventions so that they contained no binding targets. Not surprisingly, Barack Obama “did more than any other president to address [climate change].” Though the case was dismissed in 2020, the Juliana argument is convincing, and even if an appeal is denied, it makes for eye-opening reading.
A rousing condemnation of a system bent on short-term gain against long-term health.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-262-54298-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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