馆藏高校

斯坦福大学

哥伦比亚大学

哈佛大学

普林斯顿大学

耶鲁大学

加州大学伯克利分校

牛津大学

Carbon

ISBN: 9781509501120 出版年:2018 页码:224 Kate Ervine Wiley

知识网络
内容简介

Carbon is the political challenge of our time. While critical to supporting life on Earth, too much carbon threatens to destroy life as we know it, with rising sea levels, crippling droughts, and catastrophic floods sounding the alarm on a future now upon us. How did we get here and what must be done? In this incisive book, Kate Ervine unravels carbon's distinct political economy, arguing that, to understand global warming and why it remains so difficult to address, we must go back to the origins of industrial capitalism and its swelling dependence on carbon-intensive fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas – to grease the wheels of growth and profitability. Taking the reader from carbon dioxide as chemical compound abundant in nature to carbon dioxide as greenhouse gas, from the role of carbon in the rise of global capitalism to its role in reinforcing and expanding existing patterns of global inequality, and from carbon as object of environmental governance to carbon as tradable commodity, Ervine exposes emerging struggles to decarbonize our societies for what they are: battles over the very meaning of democracy and social and ecological justice.

Amazon评论
L.W. Samuelson

In Carbon, Kate Irvine explains how the world has developed fossil fuel economies that are rapidly filling the world with greenhouse gases. She details the consequences of continuing to emit carbon into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate and the efforts that are being made to curtail those emissions. She explains what works and what doesn't. She also explains how global capitalists have a vested interest in keeping our carbon based economies and how their main focus is growing the economy to maximize profits. Levine tells us we have developed luxury ecologies which tend to benefit the 1% as opposed to democratic ecologies that support the poorest and most vulnerable among us who bear the brunt of the effects of global warming. Societies, economies, and systems of government must be restructured into sustainable systems with low greenhouse gas emissions to stem the tide of global warming. The book is informative. It's analysis is sound. It would be even better if it was "dummied down" somewhat. The use of acronyms impedes the flow of the writing and hampers the reader's ability to understand the text. With that being said, the book would be a good source of supplemental reading for a high school or college ecology class.

Unus, sed leo

This book is well-researched, well-argued, and well-written. It's a bit of a polemic, but it's better than most polemics on climate change. Kate Ervine assembles a bunch of facts to support her argument, and leaves out a lot of the hype and politics that many authors seem to think essential. She doesn't load the book up with tear-welling stories about polar bears dying or children starving. That said, her basic argument has no support. That is, that we have a carbon budget if we want to keep warming under 2 degrees Celsius, and an even lower budget to stay under 1.5 degrees. Many scientists have glommed onto this concept that there is something magic about 2 degrees or 1.5 degrees, and that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is like some sort of thermostat that we can use to control the climate. While that might be useful politically, it's not useful science. We now from history both recent and past that there is no close correlation between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and average global temperature. Not that the two are unrelated -- there is clearly a relationship between the two. But it's not a linear relationship, like some scientists say. It's much more complex than that. Maybe to win the climate wars you need to oversimplify science and be a social justice warrior who glosses over inconvenient facts and uses sloppy science. But I think doing that is wrong. Kate Ervine does more than most at using solid science, but she could, and should, have done better.

mirasreviews

"Carbon" is part of Polity's "Resources" series, which examine the economies -and political economies- of natural resources. This volume was written by Kate Ervine, Associate Professor in the International Development Studies Program at Saint Mary's University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Carbon is an awkward subject for the "Resources" series, as it has only been made a commodity recently by the creation of various carbon trading schemes intended to reduce atmospheric carbon. Of course, there are many carbon-rich resources, oil, natural gas, and diamonds among them. But this book is about carbon, itself. Of it should be. I found there was too little information about who is using these resources and how they are used and too much political polemic of the radical left. The author addresses her topic in five chapters, beginning with an introduction to the problems posed by excessive amounts of carbon in Earth's atmosphere, namely that it "is the main heat-trapping gas in our atmosphere and it is dangerously warming out planet." Fossil fuels provide over 80% of the world's energy and create over 90% of carbon dioxide emissions. Ervine explains that this book will situate carbon "within the broader political, economic, social and cultural processes that have shaped human history." After explaining the role of greenhouse gases in regulating Earth's temperature, she goes on for five pages about the "catastrophes" that will occur if human carbon emissions are not substantially reduced, and soon. The book's second chapter follows the rise of fossil fuels in the nineteenth century due to "its superior ability to facilitate capital's basic imperatives of growth and profitability." After a historical tour of the "old carbon economy", Ervine discusses the failure of the Kyoto Protocol and weakness of the Paris Climate Agreement. Chapter Three is about carbon-trading programs, a market-based means of reducing carbon emissions. Needless to say, the author opposes these schemes. Most of her criticism is due to the opacity of carbon markets, questionable ability to quantify emissions and determine a baseline, and that carbon-trading schemes "normalize and naturalize the current global political economy of fossil fuels." Unfortunately, she presents her weakest, most ideological arguments first, and winds up with a stronger critique of prices that are too low, caps too high, free allowances too plentiful, and nations manipulating their baselines. In spite of its polemical tone and declaration that "climate change mitigation is not a technical matter," this is one of the most informative chapters. Chapter Four is also informative, as Ervine goes through the list of proposed "low-carbon" solutions and outlines their faults. These include carbon capture and storage (CCS), negative emissions technologies (NETs), solar radiation management (SRM), natural gas as a "bridge fuel", and renewable energy sources. Curiously, she omits nuclear power. Ervine ends her concluding chapter on a philosophical note. And she criticizes the emphasis on individual responsibility for overconsumption, as she believes it obscures the need for broader initiatives. That may be so, but, judging by the average monthly utility bills in my neighborhood, most people waste an enormous amount of energy for no reason but laziness. My growing irritation with Polity's "Resources" series is probably showing in this review. I'm tired of reading polemics that leave me without an understanding of the basic movement and function of the commodities in question. Yes, carbon as a commodity is inherently political, but I’m afraid that I think Kate Ervine in hopelessly naive. She harps on the need to keep global air temperatures less that 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. But everyone knows that's impossible. It has been made a goal precisely because it's impossible. Broad, unattainable goals keep the money flowing and assiduously prevent the establishment of concrete, quantifiable, achievable goals. So no progress is made. I'm not sure why the emphasis on air temperatures or on the past 150 years anyway, as if there were no climate history before that. For a more practical approach to climate change, I suggest Polity's "Can Science Fix Climate Change?" by Mike Hulme (his answer is "no"). I'm all for reducing air pollution, but the fact is that all the talk of climate change over the past 30 years hasn't generated any social pressure on individuals, businesses, or governments to reduce energy consumption, which could easily be achieved. It is screamingly obvious that no one cares.

AnAmazonCustomer

I'm a HUGE fan of these resource guides and probably own a dozen of them to date. In an era where superficial coverage seems to be the name of the game, it's absolutely wonderful to encounter in-depth coverage of a single topic. These never fail to deliver. What makes these exceptionally interesting is the ease of reading combined with multiple approaches to the topic...beneficial for researchers, writers, academics and even investors. Carbon is probably one of the most important yet easily overlooked topics. GREAT addition to an already wonderful line of books.

推荐图书