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What’s ahead? (book reviews)
Peter Hadekel, The Gazette
Carbon Shift:
How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future
Edited by Thomas Homer-Dixon
The Next 100 Years:
A Forecast for the 21st Century
By George Friedman
A Brief History of the Future:
A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century
By Jacques Attali
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These unsettled times have led to a boom in predictions. The economy is in upheaval, energy prices are unstable, the climate is under stress and political forces are being realigned. Amid the change and uncertainty, people are looking for a clear way forward.
Publishers have recognized the opportunity: There are several new books this spring that peer into the future, offering both policy prescriptions and bold predictions.
Political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon is the editor of Carbon Shift, a collection of essays by Canadian academics and journalists, including The Gazette’s William Marsden, that address two closely related questions: How do we assure future energy security and how do we act on climate change?
(1 May 2009)
Capitalism in Wonderland
Richard York, Brett Clark, and John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review
… Economists versus Natural Scientists
Needless to say, establishment economists, virtually by definition, tend to be environmental skeptics. Yet they have an outsized influence on climate policy as representatives of the dominant end of capitalist society, before which all other ends are subordinated. (Social scientists other than economists either side with the latter in accepting accumulation as the appropriate goal of society or are largely excluded from the debate.) In sharp contrast, natural and physical scientists are increasingly concerned about the degradation of the planetary environment, but have less direct influence on social policy responses.
Mainstream economists are trained in the promotion of private profits as the singular “bottom line” of society, even at the expense of larger issues of human welfare and the environment. The market rules over all, even nature. For Milton Freedom the environment was not a problem since the answer was simple and straightforward. As he put it: “ecological values can find their natural space in the market, like any other consumer demand.”7
Natural scientists, as distinct from economists, however, typically root their investigations in a materialist conception of nature and are engaged in the study at some level of the natural world, the conditions of which they are much more disposed to take seriously. They are thus much less inclined to underrate environmental problems.
The conflict between economists and natural scientists on global warming came out in the open as a result of an article by Nordhaus that appeared in the leading natural science journal, Science, in 1993.
Richard York is coeditor of Organization & Environment and associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.
Brett Clark is assistant professor of sociology at North Carolina State University. They are coauthors with John Bellamy Foster of Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present(Monthly Review Press, 2008).
John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet (Monthly Review Press, 2009) among numerous other works.
(May 2009 issue)
Latest in a series of articles in which Monthly Review has been synthesizing ecological and socialist thought.
For the 60th anniversary of the Monthly Review, the magazine is republishing an article that appeared in the first edition: “Why Socialism?” by Albert Einstein. -BA
Somebody’s Gotta Do It
Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute
Hi. My job is trying to save the world, and I’d like to tell you a little about my line of work.
First, it’s a job I enjoy. I get to feel good about what I do, and I meet a lot of smart, interesting people. I get to travel to exciting places to attend conferences, and at least some people respect my efforts (though many others think I’m crazy or misguided).
It’s not all a bed of roses. The biggest problems with trying to save the world are: first, that it doesn’t always seem to want to be saved; and second, that those of us trying to save it can’t agree on why it needs saving or how to go about doing so. Let me explain.
(4 May 2009)
