Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis

By Al Gore

Rodale, 2009

Reviewed by Bill McKibben

There’s been a certain amount of debate about whether Barack Obama deserved his Nobel Prize. About Al Gore there is no argument. He singlehandedly managed to wrest the topic of global warming on to center stage around the world. And frankly, he deserved his Oscar just as much, for figuring out a way to dramatize the sometimes complicated science of global warming. He did for climate what Mandela did for apartheid or Gandhi for colonialism—made it an inescapable part of our global political debate.

But if there was a single knock on An Inconvenient Truth, it was that it didn’t offer enough in the way of solutions—that the section on What To Do ran hard into the closing credits, and that most of the ideas—lightbulb stuff—didn’t rise to the challenge that had just been set out so vividly. That criticism always strikes me as a little dumb—diagnosis and prescription are different skills. But Gore, who is nothing if not dogged, took the criticism seriously, and convened a series of “Solutions Summits” in his Nashville home and elsewhere around the world. To judge from the acknowledgements in his new book, Our Choice, everyone who has ever had an idle thought about the question of how we’ll solve the planet’s greatest problem came to one of these sessions (me included). Simply the thought of sitting through them makes my rear end ache. But this book shows the effort was worth it. It’s the grand compendium of all that we know about how to undertake this most difficult of transitions, from an economy that burns fossil fuels to an economy that lives mostly on the incoming power of the sun in its many forms.

There are extensive, deeply documented chapters on everything you need to know to make sense of our situation: on forests and soils and how they might be made to sequester more carbon. On wind turbines and solar power and geothermal energy (which intrigues Gore) and biomass. He’s less sanguine about carbon capture from coal and about nuclear power, as much on the grounds of cost as anything else—but he’s careful not to shut the door on any option, which is appropriate considering the scale of crisis we face. Read More

Review of The Green Collar Economy by Van Jones

By Bill McKibben

Van Jones is, beyond any doubt, one of the rising stars of the American environmental movement and the American civil rights movement. He’s fused the two of them in a new way, and in so doing constructed a powerful political argument for how we might move forward with the twin challenges of preparing the country to fight global warming and pulling our economy out of its dangerous current weakness. 
  
The longtime head of the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, and now of the Green For All campaign, Jones took advantage of the odd politics of the Bay Area to reach a vital epiphany. He saw the very real environmental passion, and very real wealth, of folks in San Francisco, the Berkeley Hills, and the coastlines of Marin County, and he saw as well the abysmal poverty of the flatlands along the East Bay. How did they need each other? Well, in a practical way, and in a political one.

Practically speaking, the task of actually making all those affluent homes “green” would require lots of workers. Workers that could, and should, come from the communities passed over by prosperity in years past—“green-collar workers” who would need to go past high school but perhaps not to a four-year college to learn the real skills required to make American energy-efficient. “Let’s be clear,” he writes. “The main piece of technology in the green economy is a caulk gun. . . . Another bit of high-tech green technology is the clipboard . . . used by energy auditors as they point out energy-saving opportunities to homeowners and renters. . . . Other green-collar workers can then follow up with other tasks for building owners: wrapping hot-water heaters with blankets, blowing insulation, plugging holes, repairing cracks.” The point, he insists, is that when we think “green future” the image that should spring to mind is not George Jetson with a jet pack but “Joe Sixpack with a hard hat.” Read More

Review of  The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity, By Nicholas Stern

Nicholas Stern is a very interesting man. A member of the British House of Lords (Baron Stern of Brentford!), he was chief economist of the World Bank and head of the British government’s economic service. In 2005, the UK leadership asked him to undertake an evaluation of the costs and benefits of dealing with global warming, and the report he produced a year or so later became one of the landmark documents in the twenty-year debate over climate change. 

What Stern’s team concluded, to be very brief about it, is that the cost of doing nothing about global warming would be very high (larger than the costs of the both world wars and the Depression combined), while the cost of transforming our energy system would be relatively low. In this very lucid and well-written book, he manages to go into detail on those points, mixing in some of the latest science. And as a bonus, he provides a fascinating look at the complicated international politics of climate as we approach this December’s momentous Copenhagen global warming negotiations.

Stern begins where any account of the problem must, with a quick recapitulation of the science. Though he has the annoying habit of using a particularly arcane metric (co2-equivalent concentrations, which includes a variety of other gases and is an unnecessary and obscuring filigree when carbon dioxide is the main problem), his view is based fairly strongly on the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He believes that nothing we can do will prevent us from a warming of more than three degrees Fahrenheit (so far we’ve seen about one degree) and he believes really catastrophe lies north of that number, at five or six degrees Fahrenheit. Here his science is perhaps a little out of date—the most recent data indicates that we’re already seeing enormous shifts in the planet’s climate system (the melt of Arctic sea ice and so forth). We now think that we can afford even less carbon in the atmosphere than Stern contends. Read More

Review of American Grit: What It Will Take To Survive And Win In The 21st Century by Tony Blankley

By Ezra Klein

It is possible I’ve read books worse than Tony Blankley’s American Grit: What It Will Take To Survive And Win In The 21st Century, but it is hard to recall any of them right now. This slim volume – 188 pages of actual argument, large type on every page, ample white space between every line – would make for a very nice present to a very dim conservative who you wanted to play a practical joke on. 

Blankley is a syndicated columnist who served as press secretary to Newt Gingrich and speechwriter to Ronald Reagan. He is a man who knows quite a bit more about launching political insurrections than I do. Even so, I’ve rarely heard of ideological renewal – much less a strategy for 21st century survival — emerging quite so haphazardly. Blankley’s vision for the future is the sort of thing that would hardly withstand the rigors of a shoutfest on the McLaughlin Report. Which is fitting, in a sense, because that’s where it comes from.

“It never occurred to me precisely where my political philosophy was moving until an appearance on the McLaughlin Group television show a few years ago,” writes Blankley. He goes on to relate a particularly illuminating exchange he had in which McLaughlin demanded to know the agenda of “neo-cons” like Blankley. “I’m not a neo-con,” Blankley replied. “Well, what are you?” asked McLaughlin. What comes next is a direct quote from the book: “With the red light of the television camera focused on me, I paused and thought for a second or two, and then more or less blurted out, ‘I’m a nationalist!’” Read More

This article was originally published at Progressive Book Club in June, 2008.

Misrule by Design
Conservative policy ideas have failed again and again. But Grover Norquist doesn’t seem to notice.
Review of Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives by Grover Norquist
By Greg Anrig

A 2005 New Yorker profile aptly described Grover G. Norquist as the conservative coalition’s “ringleader, visionary, and enforcer.” As head of the advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform since 1985, Norquist relentlessly pushed disparate factions on the right to cooperate in electing Republicans at all levels of government and in killing the careers of politicians who dodged or broke his signature “no-new-taxes” pledge. Because Norquist’s ascent to power coincided with the conservative movement’s domination of American politics, when he speaks, everyone across the ideological spectrum listens.

Norquist wrote his new book, Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives, to lay out his roadmap for his “Leave us Alone Coalition to continue its progress toward Jefferson’s vision of the self-reliant, independent American—toward a free society where everyone lives off the earnings of no man but himself.”  But with the conservative era apparently on the verge of collapsing in November, Norquist’s book is more illuminating as a resource for understanding why his movement’s resounding political successes ended up producing such catastrophic failures of governance. The belief system built on hostility toward government that motivated Norquist and his followers left the public officials they elected with no effective ways to respond to challenges ranging from Hurricane Katrina to stagnating wages to the downward-spiraling health care system to tainted spinach to global warming and so on. Drowning government in a bathtub, to use Norquist’s characteristically blunt language, left the residents of New Orleans on their own when Katrina drowned their city. A large majority of Americans were appalled at what that looked like. Read More

This article was originally published at Progressive Book Club in June, 2008.

A Fundamentally Dishonest Book

Review of War and Decision by Douglas Feith

By Matthew Yglesias

Few Bush administration officials have escaped their time in government service with their reputations intact, but nobody has done as much to make himself despised as former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith. Famously dubbed “the stupidest fucking guy on the face of the planet” by General Tommy Franks, Feith achieved a level of notoriety unusual for a subcabinet official. The policy shop, generally regarded as the number three post at the Pentagon, has a wide range of responsibilities for developing the Defense Department’s thoughts on big-picture strategic issues and relationships with other countries. From that vantage point, Feith became known as a kind of less-sympathetic version of his bosses, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld.

His book will do little to dispel the sense that his role in the presentation of pre-war intelligence claims was deliberately dishonest, since he’s produced a fundamentally dishonest book. The problems start in the third sentence of the introduction, where he claims he has “aimed not to write a polemic, but rather to make a contribution to history, extensively documented and as accurate as one person’s account can be.” The book is, in fact, very much a polemic — a lengthy exposition of a point of view that’s had little play in the press or the political system, namely that the serious problems in Iraq have stemmed not from the president listening too much to the extremist views of the civilian defense department officials of the first term, but from listening to them too little. Read More

A Crime Against Truth, Decency and Democracy

Review of Obama Nation by Jerome Corsi

By Eric Alterman

How do you solve a problem like Jerome Corsi? Put yourself in the position, momentarily, of Mary Matalin, who heads up Threshold Editions, the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster. (The publisher has no “liberal” imprint.) He has a manuscript he wants you to read about Barack Obama. The first thing you’d do, if you take your own reputation—as well as that of the publishing house you represent—seriously, would be to do a little research on the fellow.

In the case of Jerome Corsi, that’s not exactly heavy lifting; the man is all over the place. Max Blumenthal, writing in The Nation, pounded a little (entirely proverbial) pavement and discovered that Corsi has a history of running a shadowy investment venture in Poland that, in 1995, lost his investors $1.2 million and invited an FBI investigation. Corsi also has written quite a few books. His most famous effort, “Unfit for Command,” a dishonest account of John Kerry’s military service is well known. Others included one with “prophecy expert” Michael Evans, called “Showdown with Nuclear Iran,” which demanded an US attack on that nation, while another of his tomes, called, Black Gold Stranglehold, purported to debunk the “enslave[ing]” Americans: “the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and a finite resource.” Yet another was called “The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada.” You can guess what that one is about.

Corsi also has an extensive publishing history. Blumenthal unearthed a column he authored for the WorldNetDaily*, in which he revealed John McCain to be a dangerous rube who “has enjoyed strong support from a lobbying group that backs…a Muslim terrorist group with ties to criminal drug networks and Al Qaeda.” Meanwhile, his buddy George W. Bush, he has explained has allowed “communist China” to “run its gunboats up the Mississippi.”

Should any of these published works and comments have provoked your interest, you might have decided to do a little digging. Here, for instance is an Internet positing your aspiring author put up under the screen name “jrlc.” “Anybody ask why HELLary couldn’t keep BJ Bill satisfied? Not lesbo or anything, is she?” This one too: “Isn’t the Democratic Party the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA–oh, I forgot, it was just an accident that Clintoon’s [sic] first act in office was to promote ‘gays in the military.’ RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters–it all goes together.”

Ok, you get the point. Corsi is not exactly the kind of fellow who’d be welcome at a Matalin/Carville dinner party, much less one attended by the higher-ups at Simon & Schuster, home of many of America’s most respected and admired authors and editors. He is, at the very least, the kind of author for whom—-again, if you cared even slightly about your reputation-—you would demand airtight sources for every accusation he made. Read More

Ideology Over Ideas

Review of The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk

by Alan Wolfe

With the campaign run by John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008, the world saw what conservatism had become—and the sight was not pretty. McCain’s decision to reject the positions on immigration that once gave him the reputation of a maverick, Palin’s memorization and delivery of talking points supplied to her by the McCain camp, the absurd adoption of Joe the Plumber as a wise man, all showed the extent to which conservatism had become little more than catechism. Name any issue—guns are good, tax cuts are essential, our enemies are evil—and the candidates mouthed all the expected platitudes. Nothing was original, nothing daring, nothing unexpected. Conservatism, the message was clear, knows what it believes and has stopped thinking.

Was conservatism always like this? Surely there must have been a golden age in the past when right-wing ideas attracted great minds curious to explore the paradoxes of human existence. The brilliant Edmund Burke, after all, was a conservative. So were leading American politicians such as John Adams and John C. Calhoun. Major twentieth-century poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound held right-wing views, and we still admire them for their art, although not their anti-Semitism. If we go far enough back into the past, conservatives, or so one hopes, can offer up ideas more nuanced than the platitudes of Palin.

One person conservatives frequently cite as they consider the major thinkers produced by their tradition is Russell Kirk (1918–94), a Michigan–born-and-bred thinker whose rejection of modern life’s seductions—cars, television, cities, and, toward the end of his life, computers were things he avoided—contributed to his reputation as an against-the-grain critic filled with homespun sincerity. A writer of gothic fiction, an expositor of Burke, and, most importantly, the author of the classic 1953 book The Conservative Mind, Kirk has been undergoing something of a rediscovery in recent years as his writings are reprinted and as conservative foundations promote his work and conservative colleges teach them. Ronald Reagan called him one of his favorite philosophers. Kirk may not be as famous as William F. Buckley Jr., but when young conservatives gathered at a retreat in Santa Barbara in the summer of 2006, Kirk was on the lips of all. Read More