The Climate Casino

Author: William Nordhaus
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300203810
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 618

Book Description
Climate change is profoundly altering our world in ways that pose major risks to human societies and natural systems. We have entered the Climate Casino and are rolling the global-warming dice, warns economist William Nordhaus. But there is still time to turn around and walk back out of the casino, and in this essential book the author explains how.div /DIVdivBringing together all the important issues surrounding the climate debate, Nordhaus describes the science, economics, and politics involved—and the steps necessary to reduce the perils of global warming. Using language accessible to any concerned citizen and taking care to present different points of view fairly, he discusses the problem from start to finish: from the beginning, where warming originates in our personal energy use, to the end, where societies employ regulations or taxes or subsidies to slow the emissions of gases responsible for climate change./DIVdiv /DIVdivNordhaus offers a new analysis of why earlier policies, such as the Kyoto Protocol, failed to slow carbon dioxide emissions, how new approaches can succeed, and which policy tools will most effectively reduce emissions. In short, he clarifies a defining problem of our times and lays out the next critical steps for slowing the trajectory of global warming./DIV

A Question of Balance

Author: William Nordhaus
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300209398
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
How economic analysis can help us design economic policies to address the looming challenges of global warming As scientific and observational evidence on global warming piles up every day, questions of economic policy in this central environmental topic have taken center stage. But as author and prominent Yale economist William Nordhaus observes, the issues involved in understanding global warming and slowing its harmful effects are complex and cross disciplinary boundaries. For example, ecologists see global warming as a threat to ecosystems, utilities as a debit to their balance sheets, and farmers as a hazard to their livelihoods. In this important work, William Nordhaus integrates the entire spectrum of economic and scientific research to weigh the costs of reducing emissions against the benefits of reducing the long-run damages from global warming. The book offers one of the most extensive analyses of the economic and environmental dynamics of greenhouse-gas emissions and climate change and provides the tools to evaluate alternative approaches to slowing global warming. The author emphasizes the need to establish effective mechanisms, such as carbon taxes, to harness markets and harmonize the efforts of different countries. This book not only will shape discussion of one the world's most pressing problems but will provide the rationales and methods for achieving widespread agreement on our next best move in alleviating global warming.

The Global Casino

Author: Nick Middleton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134051034
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 639

Book Description
The Global Casino is an introduction to environmental issues which deals both with the workings of the physical environment and the political, economic and social frameworks in which the issues occur. Using examples from all over the world, the book highlights the underlying causes behind environmental problems, the human actions which have made them issues, and the hopes for solutions. It is a book about the human impact on the environment and the ways in which the natural environment impacts human society. The fifth edition has been fully revised and updated throughout, with new case studies, figures, and online resources such as downloadable figures and tables from the text and multiple choice questions for students, accessible at: www.routledge.com/cw/middleton. New topics covered in extended boxed case studies include payment for environmental services, ocean acidification, biofuels in Brazil, waste reduction through industrial symbiosis, and the long-term impact of natural disasters on vulnerable groups. Other approaches and concepts covered for the first time in this new edition include traditional ecological knowledge, environmental justice, the ‘resource curse’, and urban biodiversity. Eighteen chapters on key issues follow three initial chapters which outline the background contexts of the physical and human environments and the concept of sustainable development. Each chapter provides historical context for key issues, outlines why they have arisen, and highlights areas of controversy and uncertainty to appraise how issues can be resolved both technically and in political and economic frameworks. Each chapter also contains an updated critical guide to further reading and websites, as well as discussion points and essay questions. The text can be read in its entirety or individual chapters adopted as standalone reading. The Global Casino is an essential resource for students of the environment, geography, earth sciences and development studies. It provides comprehensive and inspirational coverage of all the major global environmental issues of the day in a style that is clear and critical.

Climate Shock

Author: Gernot Wagner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400880769
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Book Description
How knowing the extreme risks of climate change can help us prepare for an uncertain future If you had a 10 percent chance of having a fatal car accident, you'd take necessary precautions. If your finances had a 10 percent chance of suffering a severe loss, you'd reevaluate your assets. So if we know the world is warming and there's a 10 percent chance this might eventually lead to a catastrophe beyond anything we could imagine, why aren't we doing more about climate change right now? We insure our lives against an uncertain future—why not our planet? In Climate Shock, Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman explore in lively, clear terms the likely repercussions of a hotter planet, drawing on and expanding from work previously unavailable to general audiences. They show that the longer we wait to act, the more likely an extreme event will happen. A city might go underwater. A rogue nation might shoot particles into the Earth's atmosphere, geoengineering cooler temperatures. Zeroing in on the unknown extreme risks that may yet dwarf all else, the authors look at how economic forces that make sensible climate policies difficult to enact, make radical would-be fixes like geoengineering all the more probable. What we know about climate change is alarming enough. What we don't know about the extreme risks could be far more dangerous. Wagner and Weitzman help readers understand that we need to think about climate change in the same way that we think about insurance—as a risk management problem, only here on a global scale. With a new preface addressing recent developments Wagner and Weitzman demonstrate that climate change can and should be dealt with—and what could happen if we don't do so—tackling the defining environmental and public policy issue of our time.

Climate Change Justice

Author: Eric A. Posner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400834406
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
A provocative contribution to the climate justice debate Climate change and justice are so closely associated that many people take it for granted that a global climate treaty should—indeed, must—directly address both issues together. But, in fact, this would be a serious mistake, one that, by dooming effective international limits on greenhouse gases, would actually make the world's poor and developing nations far worse off. This is the provocative and original argument of Climate Change Justice. Eric Posner and David Weisbach strongly favor both a climate change agreement and efforts to improve economic justice. But they make a powerful case that the best—and possibly only—way to get an effective climate treaty is to exclude measures designed to redistribute wealth or address historical wrongs against underdeveloped countries. In clear language, Climate Change Justice proposes four basic principles for designing the only kind of climate treaty that will work—a forward-looking agreement that requires every country to make greenhouse-gas reductions but still makes every country better off in its own view. This kind of treaty has the best chance of actually controlling climate change and improving the welfare of people around the world.

Love in the Time of Climate Change

Author: Brian Adams
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780996087209
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Meet Casey, a community college professor with OCD (Obsessive Climate Disorder). While navigating the zaniness of teaching he leads a rag-tag bunch of climate activists, lusts after one of his students, and smokes a little too much pot. Quirky, socially awkward and adolescent- acting, our climate change obsessed hero muddles his way through saving the world while desperately searching for true love. Teaching isn't easy with an incredibly hot woman in class, students either texting or comatose, condoms strewn everywhere, attack geese on field trips, and a dean who shows up at exactly the wrong moments. What's a guy to do? Kidnap the neighbor's inflatable Halloween ghost? Confront evangelicals and lesbian activists? Channel Santa Claus's rage at the melting polar ice caps? Shoplift at Walmart? How about all of the above! Who would have thought climate change could be so funny! Actually, it really isn't, but Love in the Time of Climate Change, a romantic comedy about global warming, is guaranteed to keep you laughing. Laughing and thinking.

Adapting to Climate Change

Author: Matthew Kahn
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300258577
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
A revelatory study of how climate change will affect individual economic decisions, and the broad impact of those choicesSelected by Publishers Weekly as one of its Top Ten books in Business and Economics for Spring 2021 It is all but certain that the next century will be hotter than any we’ve experienced before. Even if we get serious about fighting climate change, it’s clear that we will need to adapt to the changes already underway in our environment. This book considers how individual economic choices in response to climate change will transform the larger economy. Using the tools of microeconomics, Matthew E. Kahn explores how decisions about where we live, how our food is grown, and where new business ventures choose to locate are impacted by climate change. Kahn suggests new ways that big data can be deployed to ease energy or water shortages to aid agricultural operations and proposes informed policy changes related to public infrastructure, disaster relief, and real estate to nudge land use, transportation options, and business development in the right direction.

Casino

Author: Nicholas Pileggi
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504041623
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
The true story behind the Martin Scorsese film: A “riveting . . . account of how organized crime looted the casinos they controlled” (Kirkus Reviews). Focusing on Chicago bookie Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and his partner, Anthony Spilotro, and drawing on extensive, in-depth interviews, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of the Mafia classic Wiseguy—basis for the film Goodfellas—Nicholas Pileggi reveals how the pair worked together to oversee Las Vegas casino operations for the mob. He unearths how Teamster pension funds were used to take control of the Stardust and Tropicana and how Spilotro simultaneously ran a crew of jewel thieves nicknamed the “Hole in the Wall Gang.” For years, these gangsters kept a stranglehold on Sin City’s brightly lit nightspots, skimming millions in cash for their bosses. But the elaborate scheme began to crumble when Rosenthal’s disproportionate ambitions drove him to make mistakes. Spilotro made an error of his own, falling for his partner’s wife, a troubled showgirl named Geri. It would all lead to betrayal, a wide-ranging FBI investigation, multiple convictions, and the end of the Mafia’s longstanding grip on the multibillion-dollar gaming oasis in the midst of the Nevada desert. Casino is a journey into 1970s Las Vegas and a riveting nonfiction account of the world portrayed in the Martin Scorsese film of the same name, starring Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Sharon Stone. A story of adultery, murder, infighting, and revenge, this “fascinating true-crime Mob history” is a high-stakes page-turner (Booklist).

International Climate Change Law

Author: Daniel Bodansky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191643149
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Book Description
This textbook, by three experts in the field, provides a comprehensive overview of international climate change law. Climate change is one of the fundamental challenges facing the world today, and is the cause of significant international concern. In response, states have created an international climate regime. The treaties that comprise the regime - the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement establish a system of governance to address climate change and its impacts. This book provides a clear analytical guide to the climate regime, as well as other relevant international legal rules. The book begins by locating international climate change law within the broader context of international law and international environmental law. It considers the evolution of the international climate change regime, and the process of law-making that has led to it. It examines the key provisions of the Framework Convention, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. It analyses the principles and obligations that underpin the climate regime, as well as the elaborate institutional and governance architecture that has been created at successive international conferences to develop commitments and promote transparency and compliance. The final two chapters address the polycentric nature of international climate change law, as well as the intersections of international climate change law with other areas of international regulation. This book is an essential introduction to international climate change law for students, scholars and negotiators.

The New Map

Author: Daniel Yergin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698191056
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Book Description
A Wall Street Journal besteller and a USA Today Best Book of 2020 Named Energy Writer of the Year for The New Map by the American Energy Society “A master class on how the world works.” —NPR Pulitzer Prize-winning author and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin offers a revelatory new account of how energy revolutions, climate battles, and geopolitics are mapping our future The world is being shaken by the collision of energy, climate change, and the clashing power of nations in a time of global crisis. Out of this tumult is emerging a new map of energy and geopolitics. The “shale revolution” in oil and gas has transformed the American economy, ending the “era of shortage” but introducing a turbulent new era. Almost overnight, the United States has become the world's number one energy powerhouse. Yet concern about energy's role in climate change is challenging the global economy and way of life, accelerating a second energy revolution in the search for a low-carbon future. All of this has been made starker and more urgent by the coronavirus pandemic and the economic dark age that it has wrought. World politics is being upended, as a new cold war develops between the United States and China, and the rivalry grows more dangerous with Russia, which is pivoting east toward Beijing. Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping are converging both on energy and on challenging American leadership, as China projects its power and influence in all directions. The South China Sea, claimed by China and the world's most critical trade route, could become the arena where the United States and China directly collide. The map of the Middle East, which was laid down after World War I, is being challenged by jihadists, revolutionary Iran, ethnic and religious clashes, and restive populations. But the region has also been shocked by the two recent oil price collapses--and by the very question of oil's future in the rest of this century. A master storyteller and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin takes the reader on an utterly riveting and timely journey across the world's new map. He illuminates the great energy and geopolitical questions in an era of rising political turbulence and points to the profound challenges that lie ahead.