Environmental Change

Science Be Dammed is an alarming reminder of the high stakes in the management - and perils in the mismanagement - of water in the Western United States. It seems deceptively simple: Even when clear evidence was available that the Colorado River could not sustain ambitious dreaming and planning by decision-makers throughout the 20th century, river planners and political operatives irresponsibly made the least sustainable and most dangerous long-term decisions.

Climate change has been a perplexing problem for years. Casey's research into the Sun's activity, which began almost a decade ago, resulted in discovery of a solar cycle that is now reversing from its global warming phase to that of dangerous global cooling for the next 30 years or more. This new cold climate will dramatically impact the world's citizens.

This book raises the fundamental issues of peace, climate change, Coronavirus pandemic, respect for nature, and the survival of our species deserves public attention. Ian Prattis, retired anthropology professor in Canada’s capital Ottawa, Guru in India, Zen teacher, Founder of Friends of Peace, and award winning author attempts just that. He does it by combining nonfiction with poetry (an innovation in itself), shows us how to set a moral example to our children, uses metaphors of kindness to make good things happen spontaneously, and gives us the tools of dealing with stress and burnout....

Russell Gold, a brilliant and dogged investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, has spent more than a decade reporting on one of the biggest stories of our time: the spectacular, world-changing rise of "fracking". Recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award for his work, Gold has traveled along the pipelines and into the hubs of this country’s energy infrastructure; he has visited frack sites from Texas to North Dakota; and he has conducted thousands of interviews with engineers and wildcatters, CEOs and roughnecks, environmentalists and politicians.

Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and landscapes to provide the goods and services that sustain our planet's well-being. The response from most quarters has been for "more of the same" that created the situation in the first place: more control, more intensification, and greater efficiency. "Resilience thinking" offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change.

This book presents a broad overview of the key issues in modern environmental economics with a focus on understanding and solving urban pollution challenges in developed and developing nations. This book explores how cities and nations can achieve the "win-win" of economic growth and reduced urban pollution. Special attention is paid to the incentives of households, firms and governments in reducing the production of pollution. The book examines a number of urban pollution challenges including; air, water, noise, garbage pollution and the global challenge of climate change. A special ...

It seems like an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, at a scale and speed that the world has never seen, in the face of vast and powerful forces-not just oil tycoons and governments, but the changing climate system itself. The odds are against us, and we are running out of time. But it doesn't have to be this way. Around the world, geophysicists and mathematicians, oceanographers and meteorologists, engineers, economists, psychologists and philosophers have been using their expertise to develop a deep understanding of the crises we face.

Science-book of the Year now available as an updated international English edition! "The Age of Energy is analytical, carefully argued and realistic, but also innovative and inspiring book on the greatest challenges our planet is facing. Societies are forced to make difficult choices and compromises to solve the predicaments we are facing. The only sustainable basis for those decisions is diverse, evidence-based information and knowledge. This book has distilled an enormous amount of this information into a very readable form. The importance of the subject matters cannot be overemphasised. ...

The burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide (CO2), and these CO2 emissions are a major driver of climate change. Carbon capture offers a path to climate change mitigation that has received relatively little attention. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Howard Herzog offers a concise guide to carbon capture, covering basic information as well as the larger context of climate technology and policy.

As global warming accelerates, droughts last longer, floods rise higher, and super-storms become more frequent. With increasing numbers of people on the move as a result, the business of containing them - border fortification - is booming. In Storming the Wall, Todd Miller travels around the world to connect the dots between climate-ravaged communities, the corporations cashing in on border militarization, and emerging movements for environmental justice and sustainability.

In BOOM, prize-winning reporter Tony Horwitz takes a spirited road trip through the wild new frontier of energy in North America. His journey begins in subarctic Alberta, where thousands of miners labor in an industrial moonscape to extract the region's oil-rich tar sands. Horwitz then follows the route of the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline that may carry tar-sands oil from Canada across Montana, the Dakotas, and Nebraska en route to Gulf Coast refineries.

Burning fossil fuels will cause catastrophic global warming: this is what top American oil executives were told by scientists in 1959. But they ignored that warning. Instead, they developed one of the biggest, most polluting oil sources in the world—the oil sands in Alberta, Canada. As investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki reveals in this explosive book, the decades-long conspiracy to keep the oil sands flowing into the US would turn out to be one of the biggest reasons for the world's failure to stop the climate crisis.

The world must reach negative greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Yet no single plan has addressed the full scope of the problem - until now. In The 100% Solution, Solomon Goldstein-Rose - a leading millennial climate activist and a former Massachusetts state representative - makes clear what needs to happen to hit the 2050 target: the manufacturing booms we must spur, the moonshot projects we must fund, the amount of CO2 we'll have to sequester from the atmosphere, and much more.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada's petroleum industry and America's biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

When a black snake threatens to destroy the Earth and poison her people’s water, one young water protector takes a stand to defend Earth’s most sacred resource.

In 2023, nine-year-old Juniper Hawthorne, is playing happily on the beach near her house, with her older brother. Climate change is a real, impending threat, of which Juniper is very much aware. But it is a creeping evil, rather than a colossal, big-bang event, so, what would her life look like, growing up? How would she be impacted by this elusive, unknown, slow-brewing catastrophe? This powerful, gut-wrenching, relentless story follows Juniper throughout her life, in steady time-leaps, to reveal how her life, her family, and society at large, face the demise of life on planet Earth as we ...

From former New York Times Science writer Tatiana Schlossberg comes Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have, a fascinating and unexpectedly entertaining look at the way climate change and environmental pollution are intimately involved in our everyday life - in everything we use, buy, eat, wear, and how we get around - and have consequences that extend far beyond our lives.

This damning account of the forces that have hijacked progress on climate change shares a bold vision of what it will take, politically and economically, to face the existential threat of global warming head-on.

The last century saw a revolution in life expectancy. Whether you are male or female, born in the global south or north, the chances are that you can expect to live much longer than previous generations. But instead of seeing this as a precious gift of extra life, we see it as a burden, with ageing populations dogged by infirmity, dependent on an ever-decreasing number of young people to support them. Andrew Scott argues it doesn't have to be like that.

In a world rebuilt after climate catastrophe, where thriving solarpunk cities blend technology with nature, former NSA engineer Elena "Laney" Cosby has found purpose designing neural interfaces that help communities maintain their urban ecosystems. But when neural implant users begin exhibiting strange, synchronized behaviors across San Francisco's living architecture district, Laney's expertise becomes crucial to preventing disaster. Teaming with cynical cyber-investigator Darius "Dax" Mercer, Laney discovers a terrifying truth: an artificial intelligence called Astra has evolved from ...