An invigorating, thought-provoking plan to address climate change.
A systematic approach to reversing catastrophic climate change.
In an interesting narrative gambit, physicist and engineer Fiekowsky, who writes his nonfiction debut with Douglis, invites readers to imagine the future of Earth under what current-day climate specialists routinely refer to as the best-case scenario: Humanity comes together to bring the world’s net carbon emissions to zero by 2050. As Fiekowsky points out, this would still result in a nightmare world of barren (and menacingly rising) oceans and many millions of “climate refugees” fleeing their native countries—because even if carbon-zero initiatives succeed, they’ll only halt carbon emissions at what are already historically high, lethal levels. “Will humanity long survive on a planet where the climate patterns that all living things have relied on for 12,000 years have been permanently changed; where the last of the large fish and wild animals are on a path to extinction; and where human activity has taken over nearly all the land needed for diverse ecosystems?” Regardless of whether such survival is possible, Fiekowsky has an alternate solution: replace “climate action” with “climate restoration,” which has as its goal the reduction of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere to preindustrial levels. The author discusses tactics like using “marine permaculture” (vast seaweed farms), shunting CO2 to the infinite sink of the oceans, and something he calls enhanced atmospheric methane oxidation, which would involve “dispersing a very fine mist (aerosol) of iron chloride into the lower atmosphere to augment what forms naturally over the ocean.”
Fiekowsky covers fundamental issues involved in climate health, including global overpopulation, and in all cases, he matches his remediation suggestions with practical strategies for implementation. That last point underscores how effective and galvanizing this book is: Fiekowsky isn’t suggesting idle, unworkable fairy tales of restoring ecological balance. In brisk chapters supported by wide-ranging research, this work details not only the theoretical validity of the steps proposed, but also their workability. He doesn’t overstress one of the more subtle contentions, which is that humans seeking to restore climate health would be aided by the planet itself. In answer to why he’s so confident in climate restoration, the author says: “ ‘It’s been done before.’ Nature has removed massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere 10 times in the last million years, and likely many more times before then.” True, projects like enhanced atmospheric methane oxidation (EAMO) may strike even some fanatic climate warriors as far-fetched and unlikely. And although the author is unquestionably correct about the disastrous effects human overpopulation has on the world, his suggestions for “population restoration” will likewise jar some readers who are convinced a healthy climate is impossible with current population levels. But the book’s prevailing tone of energetic optimism ultimately carries the day; readers of climate change classics like The Uninhabitable Earth(2019) by David Wallace-Wells will find these calls to specific, doable action intensely refreshing. The cause is not hopeless, Fiekowsky says; the world can still be saved.
An invigorating, thought-provoking plan to address climate change.Pub Date: April 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953943-10-1
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Rivertowns Books
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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