This is the last installment of book suggestions on the subjects of global warming and peak oil. In a summer of deaths from extreme heat in the Southwest, drought-caused crop loss in the Midwest, and general muggy heat exhaustion in the Mid-Atlantic, it's not really likely that anyone will choose these titles for their vacation reading. Here and there may be readers who are interested enough in their own and their children's futures to take note of titles and look them up once Real Life returns in September. My other suggestions are here and here in previous posts.
The first on my list is by a guy a lot of people call a maverick, a lunatic, a kook. I think he's just so far ahead of the rest of us that most folks can't see what he sees. These are often the ones we call crazy, the Cassandras whose vision outstrips our own. His website and blog are on our sidebar under his name - the real name of the site not being fit for a G rated blog. Are we a G rated blog, in fact? Who knows. So far neither church nor state has decided to put ratings on blogs. As far as I know. Anyway, James Howard Kunstler's look at the future:
The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century, by James Howard Kunstler
The last two hundred years have seen the greatest explosion of progress and wealth in the history of mankind. But the oil age is at an end. The depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels is about to radically change life as we know it, and much sooner than we think. As a result of artificially cheap fossil-fuel energy we have developed global models of industry, commerce, food production, and finance that will collapse. The Long Emergency tells us just what to expect after we pass the tipping point of global peak oil production and the honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale.
I appreciate how Kunstler calls them "converging" catastrophes. It's so exactly right on. The next book also speaks of coming catastrophe, and how Exxon and others are - pardon the pun, it's actually Gelbspan's - fueling it.
Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis-And What We Can Do to Avoid It, by Ross Gelbspan
In Boiling Point, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ross Gelbspan argues that, unchecked, climate change will swamp every other issue facing us today. Indeed, what began as an initial response of many institutions - denial and delay - has now grown into a crime against humanity. Gelbspan's previous book, The Heat Is On, exposed the financing of climate-change skeptics by the oil and coal companies.In Boiling Point, he reveals exactly how the fossil fuel industry is directing the Bush administration's energy and climate policies - payback for helping Bush get elected. Even more surprisingly, Gelbspan points a finger at both the media and environmental activists for unwittingly worsening the crisis. Finally, he offers a concrete plan for averting a full-blown climate catastrophe.
I'm throwing in one last book here, not specifically about climate change or peak oil, but about the way the Bush administration and it corporate cronies have enormously damaged the environment, and the health of all Americans, in a relatively short time. An expose of profit and power as the values that now rule this land. No matter the propaganda about other values.
Crimes Against Nature : How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In this powerful and far-reaching indictment of George W. Bush's White House, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the country's most prominent environmental attorney, charges that this administration has taken corporate cronyism to such unprecedented heights that it now threatens our health, our national security, and democracy as we know it. In a headlong pursuit of private profit and personal power, Kennedy writes, George Bush and his administration have eviscerated the laws that have protected our nation's air, water, public lands, and wildlife for the past thirty years, enriching the president's political contributors while lowering the quality of life for the rest of us.
Buy these titles at Powell's City of Books online or in your local (not big-box, if you can help it) bookstore. Independently-owned bookstores need our business to stay alive.
