The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth
In The Climate War, Eric Pooley—deputy editor of Bloomberg BusinessWeek—does for global warming what Bob Woodward did for presidents and Lawrence Wright did for terrorists. In this epic tale of an American civil war, Pooley takes us behind the scenes and into the hearts and minds of the most important players in the struggle to cap global warming pollution—a fight in which trillions of dollars and the fate of the planet are at stake.\ Why has it been so hard for America to come to grips with...
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In The Climate War, Eric Pooley— deputy editor of Bloomberg BusinessWeek— does for global warming what Bob Woodward did for presidents and Lawrence Wright did for terrorists. In this epic tale of an American civil war, Pooley takes us behind the scenes and into the hearts and minds of the most important players in the struggle to cap global warming pollution— a fight in which trillions of dollars and the fate of the planet are at stake. Why has it been so hard for America to come to grips with climate change? Why do so many people believe it isn't really happening? As President Obama’ s science advisor John Holdren has said, “ We’ re driving in a car with bad brakes in a fog and heading for a cliff. We know for sure that cliff is out there. We just don’ t know exactly where it is. Prudence would suggest that we should start putting on the brakes.” But powerful interests are threatened by the carbon cap that would speed the transition to a clean energy economy, and their agents have worked successfully to deny the problem and delay the solutions. To write this book, Pooley, the former managing editor of Fortune and chief political correspondent for Time, spent three years embedded with an extraordinary cast of characters: from the flamboyant head of one of the nation's largest coal-burning energy companies to the driven environmental leader who made common cause with him, from leading scientists warning of impending catastrophe to professional skeptics disputing almost every aspect of climate science, from radical activists chaining themselves to bulldozers to powerful lobbyists, media gurus, and advisors in Obama's West Wing— and, to top it off, unprecedented access to former Vice President Al Gore and his team of climate activists. Pooley captures the quiet determination and even heroism of climate campaigners who have dedicated their lives to an uphill battle that’ s still raging today. He asks whether we have what it takes to preserve our planet’ s habitability, and shows how America’ s climate war sends shock waves from Bali to Copenhagen. No other reporter enjoys such access to this cast of characters. No other book covers this terrain. From the trenches of a North Carolina power plant to the battlefields of Capitol Hill, Madison Avenue, and Wall Street, The Climate War is the essential read for anyone who wants to understand the players and politics behind the most important issue we face today. The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani Mr. Pooley gives us a detailed…account of the political battle to get Congress to take legislative action on global warming. It is a depressing account of gridlock in Washington, of efforts by conservative lobbyists to deny the phenomenon altogether (and when that hasn't worked, to delay any sort of action), and of infighting within the environmental left over whether to compromise and try to get the support of centrists and corporate interests, or whether to take a hard-line, ideological stand. It is a story about how the economic meltdown of 2008 and the ensuing recession—and concerns about job losses and other short-term costs of establishing a clean-energy economy—affected the debate over global warming and the political arithmetic that members of Congress and the Obama administration have been doing over the viability of climate change legislation.
\ Kirkus ReviewsA solid work of environmental reportage from the front lines of cap-and-trade, the Kyoto Protocol, carbon sequestration and other weighty matters. Bloomberg BusinessWeek deputy editor Pooley sympathizes with the initial doubts about climate change. "You didn't have to be a conservative to be an armchair skeptic," he writes. "[A]nyone would prefer it not to be real." Against the reality of this change, chronicled by the most august scientific organizations, is a body of naysayers whom the author collectively dubs the "Denialosphere." This loosely organized cabal of deniers, whose founding members "saw themselves as flinty truth tellers trying to stop the world from adopting solutions they hated in response to a problem they didn't think existed," an attitude that prevails to this day, rarely included a trained scientist. Most were insurance agents and public-relations executives, with an occasional civil engineer for leavening. Somehow this noisy crew inserted itself into the legislative process, happily aided and abetted during the disastrous years of the science-hating Bush administration. Against them stood-and stands-not just those scientists, but a rather motley crew of activists, such as a young dreadlocked leftie named Anthony Jones who became a standard-bearer of the green-jobs movement. Pooley's account is light on hard science, but his focus is politics-and that politics is often impossibly bizarre, featuring remote policy wonks and deep corporate pockets, among them sleazy executives who once "fought the ban on workplace smoking" and are now trying to save the planet from the planet-savers. A well-written Primary Colors for the environmentalist set. Tie-in to author's lecture schedule\ \ \ \ \ Michiko KakutaniMr. Pooley gives us a detailed…account of the political battle to get Congress to take legislative action on global warming. It is a depressing account of gridlock in Washington, of efforts by conservative lobbyists to deny the phenomenon altogether (and when that hasn't worked, to delay any sort of action), and of infighting within the environmental left over whether to compromise and try to get the support of centrists and corporate interests, or whether to take a hard-line, ideological stand. It is a story about how the economic meltdown of 2008 and the ensuing recession—and concerns about job losses and other short-term costs of establishing a clean-energy economy—affected the debate over global warming and the political arithmetic that members of Congress and the Obama administration have been doing over the viability of climate change legislation.\ —The New York Times\ \
