A book full of welcome, practical solutions to the energy—and, consequently, climate—crisis.
A well-considered manifesto for equity in the distribution of power—that is, the kind that fuels our vehicles and lights our homes.
“Our most economically distressed neighbors pay too much to keep their households afloat, and they have been willfully ignored as others move into the clean energy future.” So writes Baker, who gained experience early in her legal career in energy project finance. Along the way, she learned that energy development favors those with political and economic power while even “clean” energy projects are often undertaken at the expense of the less powerful: the people of a small town in southern Mexico, for example, who were being displaced by a wind farm. Baker insists on a course that incorporates “an approach of justice first in pursuit of averting catastrophic climate change rather than one of climate first, justice later.” This justice is largely intended to level a distinctly uneven field. Why do poor neighborhoods seldom feature solar panels? Because, writes the author, the models for financing solar power privilege the well-to-do over the poor, a situation that could change if utility companies allowed month-by-month payment, as with any utility bill. On that score, the financial structure of most utilities, demanding shareholder returns, does not favor clean energy so much as it does cheap energy—if that happens to come from fossil fuels, so be it. Baker proposes decentralized, publicly owned renewable systems that feature the further benefit of being capable of operation in situations of natural disaster: A hurricane can knock out a centralized grid but not necessarily a solar panel or wind tower. The author’s proposals center on “five key areas as ripe for community intervention and structural change,” including moving quickly toward clean energy, developing equitable community energy policies, and easing the “energy burden” so that it becomes affordable to all constituencies—and so that utilities are rewarded for going not just for cheap, but also clean sources.
A book full of welcome, practical solutions to the energy—and, consequently, climate—crisis.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64283-067-5
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Island Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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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