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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Melting World

Author: Christopher White
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0312546289
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
The author of Skipjack documents concerning evidence of adverse climate change in the Rocky Mountains, where climate scientist and ecologist Dan Fagre reveals how a rapid decline of alpine glaciers is threatening the mountain ecosystem.

Casino Capitalism

Author: Susan Strange
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719052354
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
Reprint. Originally published: Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.

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.

Pandora's Toolbox

Author: Wake Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009006525
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Book Description
Reaching net zero emissions will not be the end of the climate struggle, but only the end of the beginning. For centuries thereafter, temperatures will remain elevated; climate damages will continue to accrue and sea levels will continue to rise. Even the urgent and utterly essential task of reaching net zero cannot be achieved rapidly by emissions reductions alone. To hasten net zero and minimize climate damages thereafter, we will also need massive carbon removal and storage. We may even need to reduce incoming solar radiation in order to lower unacceptably high temperatures. Such unproven and potentially risky climate interventions raise mind-blowing questions of governance and ethics. Pandora's Toolbox offers readers an accessible and authoritative introduction to both the hopes and hazards of some of humanity's most controversial technologies, which may nevertheless provide the key to saving our world.