4.0 out of 5 stars An important book on our planet's future
April 13, 2009
Review by Future Watch Rider
Book by James Loveluck
Lovelock merits our attention because he has been proven right in predicting grim events. Indeed, Lovelock's grim views have in some ways been too optimistic in light of the speed with which the global environmental situation has been declining.
I think his views in this book are too pessimistic but Lovelock is a creative original thinker about science who does not fit into neat categories. He has infuriated a lot of his fellow environmentalists with his advocacy of nuclear power. He does so because he sees the huge size of the gap between what is needed and what exists. For example, President Obama has promised to “double” the percentage of renewable energy America uses in a few years. It sounds great….. until you realize renewable energy is less than one percent of America's energy now. (Meanwhile, renewable energy is being very badly hurt by the global economic crisis.) Optimistic predictions about a “boom” in renewable energy over the past 20 years by various environmental advocates have turned out to be pie in the sky. It hasn't happened. Hopefully, it will happen now. However, according to predictions of the International Energy Agency, the share of the world's energy coming from coal, the worst form of energy, is going to go up, not down by 2020. This is why Lovelock also supports research on making coal less disastrous although it's never going to be “clean” as claimed by the coal industry and its millions of dollars in advertising. (Some environmental purists have also attacked him for this.)
EDIT of 2 August 2010: However great the mind or the man, we all make mistakes. Paul Hawkins made his with Monsanto, I've made mine. ClimateGate established with clarity the fraud associated with both the fabricated science and the intended “sub-prime mortgaging” of the Earth's atmosphere. Maurice Strong and Al Gore are pushing fraud, not fixing. Mercury and sulfer and methane are bigger problems than carbon, and global warming is a small element–not even close to being the main event–within Environmental Degradation, threat #3 after poverty and infectious disease. It troubles me when people vote against the messenger–McKibben is a great man–he's also made a mistake. Get over it and do more reading, integrate more, and it will all come out fine.
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I was so annoyed with the narrow first third that glorifies the likes of Al Gore, Thomas Friedman, and Larry “women can't think like scientists” Summers that I was actually contemplating three stars. This is a weakly researched book that buys into the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Maurice Strong carbon fraud, while ignoring the vastly more intelligent findings of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, in which Environmental Degradation is #3 and more broadly defined.
Any book that quotes the discredited James Hansen of NASA and that builds a case around Op-Eds and undocumented assertions is a stain upon scholarship, and the first third of this book falls into that sinkhole. Despite many references to the Copenhagen summit, there is not a word in this book about ClimateGate (see the Rolling Update at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog) and therefore I find this author guilty of active misrepresentation bordering on a lack of integrity in this specific instance. The author is spending too much time with newspapers and not enough time with books representing the distilled reflections of others.
Having said that, and deducted one star for the lapse, I find the balance of the book absorbing, fascinating, and rich in gems of insight and fact. It should be read in conjunction with:
My criticism and praise of this important work are based on the above and the other 1,600 non-fiction reviews I have posted to Amazon, all more easily accessible in 98 reading categories at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Network.
Excellent Primer Lacking in Some Substantive Respects
July 7, 2010
James DeFronzo
There is no question but that this book would be an excellent undergraduate primer, but it is lacking in a number of substantive respects. The shortfalls first:
1. Needs to add understanding and summary of “secret war” and covert action dimensions underlying each revolution and its counter-revolution. Although there are some references, the reality about the CIA and others that comes out in books such as Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA or None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam is simply not there. In this vein, the author focuses too much on world “permissiveness” for revolution as a factor, and not enough on the grave sorrows inflicted on humanity by US sponsorship of dictatorships (see Ambassador Mark Palmer's utterly sensational Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025. While the author does address CIA's role in subverting both Guatemala and Iran (and in Guatemala, of Che Guevara's being there to witness the illegal over-throw), generally this book lacks a system of systems approach to the raw disconnect between government and people across political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic factors.
3. Needs to add understanding and summary of the role of criminal networks as substantive players in any and all revolutionary movements, not just whatever poster child the US Government wants to emphasize that day. Criminals, terrorists, revolutionaries, and white collar criminals all share the same smuggling and money-laundering spectrum of networks. See Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy.
Major Contribution, Itself a Bit Turgid, Easily in the Dirty Dozen MUST READS
June 30, 2010
Daniel T. Willingham
I struggled a bit with this book, which is ably and logically presented but does not tell a story as much as it delivers a lecture piece by piece. No doubt my own limitations in play, but this book is so important that I would recommend the publisher sponsor a very small round table including the authors or intellectual sponsors of such books as the five below, with a view to creating a new version of this book that is holistic and actionable on a much larger canvas. Without having read these other books listed below, I would not have appreciated this one as much.
First off, I'm back. After three months integrating into a field position with a prominent international organization, with three days off the whole time, I am finally able to get back to reading, and have about fifteen books on water I was going to read for UNESCO but will now read and review for myself. Look for two reviews a week from this point on, absent another tri-fecta (volcano, storm, minor coup).
This book is not about the politics of happiness. It is more about the possibilities of public administration of happiness.
This will be a long review–apart from the author being one of a handful to truly top-notch minds with a historical memory, the topic is important–much more important than I realized until I starting following unconventional economics (ecological economics, true cost, bio-mimicry, sustainable design, human development and non-financial wealth).
The author opens with Bhutan and its Gross National Happiness (GNH) concept, with four pillars (good governance, stable-equitable social development, environmental protection, preservation of culture). Elsewhere (on the web) I learn that the 72 indicators are divided into nine domains (time use, living standards, good governance, psychological wellbeing, community vitality, culture, health, education, and ecology).
The author identifies and discusses six factors pertinent to happiness in the US context as he defines it: Marriage; Social Relationships; Employment (wherein trust in management is VASTLY more important than the paycheck); Perceived Health; Religion (in sense of community not dogma) and Quality of Government (as which point I am reminded of George Will's superb Statecraft as Soulcraft; Quality of government is further divided into Rule of Law, Efficient Government, Low Violence and Corruption; High Degree of Trust in Public Officials and Especially Police; and Responsive Encounters by Citizens with Government.
Note: 30 million in US population are “not too happy.”
I was greatly looking forward to this volume reaching me, and must confess to being disappointed. It is an adequate beginning, nothing more. Here is the page count for the time span covered:
The index is useful, but after a couple of hours going through the book I thought to myself this should never have been a book, it should have been an online spreadsheet that could be sorted by country, issue area (agriculture, industry type, water), and timeframe. It complements what Transparency International does with its Corruption Perceptions Index, but on balance this is a very elementary start.
I found it most interesting that the earliest references to anti-corruption efforts were in India and Pakistan and then Indonesia, that this is primarily an English-language survey (e.g. not covering the extensive Chinese anti-corruption endeavors over quite a long time), and that the final two years are largely news hits that could be better explored with structured online searching.
The first conference on corruption and anti-corruption that is noted started in 1987. Today there are multiple conferences including those managed by Transparency International and those managed by law firms seeking to help clients comply with Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and other similar legislation.
What the book does not provide, and I for one would welcome a re-issuance–is any kind of analytic synthesis, region by region review, type by type review (e.g. corruption in the water cycle should be huge today and is not, yet) that also includes a “best practices” and “lessons learned” compendium of structured knowledge. I will be reviewing other books on anti-corruption (those that are priced fairly) and am creating a new section at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, to focus exclusively on corruption and anti-corruption books and references and links.
Here is what we need: a global online database that leverages what UNICEF is doing with RapidSMS, that does two things:
2) Provides an online repository with a back office database for RapidSMS reporting from any cell phone on the planet to LOCAL web receiving sites that in turn compile the global to local database of corruption reports from citizens as witnessed, in text form, photo form, or video form.
The good news is that anti-corruption is here to stay, and the business world and governments are finally figuring out that a 20% surtax for corruption is bad for business, bad for the economy, and bad for citizens. In this the UN has done well, along with the US Agency for International Development and a number of organizations from Malaysia to many points in Africa including South Africa.
Great as far as it goes not as good as Walk the Line, May 1, 2010
Jeff Bridges
Jeff Bridges is indeed gifted in his portrayal of the alcoholic song writer and guitarist, but the script is a bit too simple and starts in the middle of the story–would have been much more engaging if we had seen him at his height, even if only an opening scence and then “six years later,”–so I personally was somewhat disappointed.
The female supporting star is absolutely wonderful, comes into the film not a second too late.
There wasn't enough music for my taste–same song over and over, and I could not hear the words for the so-called great song that got him back on his feet financially.
Starts Weak, Ends Strong, Not the Whole Picture
Adequate but disappointing, May 3, 2010
