An often insightful text with a fresh perspective that’s bogged down by disorganization and unnecessary detail.
Retired engineer Youssef aims to present “new ideas” in this discussion of climate change.
The author’s proposed ideas frame the debate as a worldwide issue. Youssef uses his experience living and working in Egypt, Canada, and the United States and numerous trips all over the world to interrogate the history and contemporary development of energy sources. He pays special attention to energy consumption differences in developed and developing countries, noting that some parts of the Middle East and Africa account for the least contributions to climate change but are the “most vulnerable to its impacts.” He highlights sources of energy, such as wood, that are still used in underserved communities, paying special attention to their health consequences. The book also calls for a renewed commitment by developed countries to create a united approach to addressing climate change, including supporting those countries that don’t have the economic wherewithal to make sweeping changes. Finally, the author states that climate change can’t be effectively mitigated without nuclear power, asserting that concerns about radiation and nuclear disaster are “exaggerated.” Overall, Youssef’s perspective is refreshing. Most debate surrounding climate change feels insular, highlighting individual responsibilities and quibbling over alternative energy sources; his global perspective reinvigorates larger issues at play. He also makes a special effort to address how industries can support displaced workers, how countries can accommodate building new facilities, and how the global community can support developing nations, thus preempting rebuttals that extreme changes would harm industry, the disenfranchised, and the underserved. However, his insights are undermined by meandering prose that spends too much time on finer details of how various energy sources work, their history, as well as usage, production, and export data. What results is a disorganized text that often loses track of its ideas. Furthermore, it uses data from sources with uncertain credibility, thereby muddying its assertions.
An often insightful text with a fresh perspective that’s bogged down by disorganization and unnecessary detail.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2023
ISBN: 978-0963242303
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Alpha Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2023
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
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
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