100 books like Paying for Pollution

This is a short introduction to the science of climate change, written by a professor of earth science at MIT, whose writings and opinions can be relied upon.  The book explains a great deal about climate change in a concise but engaging manner.  Highly recommended!

This book provides a nice introduction to the science and economics of climate change. It explains, in easy-to-understand terms, the nature of the uncertainty regarding what we might expect, and it emphasizes the possibility of an extreme climate outcome. Given that possibility, it explains the importance of “radical” forms of adaptation, an example of which is geoengineering. And the book is short enough to be read in one sitting. 

Nordhaus was one of the first economists to explain the nature of climate change and why dealing with it is of economic importance.  In this book, he uses his DICE (Dynamic Integrated Climate and Economy) model to help explain --- at a textbook level --- how unrestricted GHG emissions can cause climate change to occur and lead to serious problems in the future. He also utilizes the model to illustrate some of the uncertainties we face when thinking about the climate system and when trying to predict the changes to expect under different policies. The book thereby provides students (and others) with a good introduction to climate change policy.

The dramatic growth in human populations and the extraordinary increase in human capacities to affect the environment has led to a transformation of the setting in which issues of environmental governance arise.

The result is the onset of a new era commonly described as the Anthropocene and the rise of the idea of Earth system governance. The biophysical conditions that control the Earth’s climate system or the diversity of life on the planet play critical roles as determinants of human well-being.

But human actions also are now critical forces in determining the character of the climate system and the future of biological diversity on the planet. There is still a need for regimes dealing with specific environmental concerns, such as transboundary air pollution, persistent organic pollutants, or the spread of plastic debris.

At the same time, there is a critical need to focus on arrangements designed to sustain key planetary… show more.

Enough science to understand the problem and see that the solution is eminently doable. But it's really about politics, how the fossil fuel industry and its paid lackeys are blocking climate action, but in a new way. The old climate war was straight-up science denial. Since that won't fly anymore, the industry has retreated to its fallback position: acknowledging that climate change is real but finding ways to defer action by deflecting responsibility on consumers or dividing the movement against itself, like vegans vs meat-eaters. Once we know the con, we can avoid it and push for real climate solutions by the government that will keep fossil fuels in the ground and build clean energy capacity as quickly as possible.

As a former vice president of the United States, Gore was the best-known American political figure to make climate change a priority personal and professional issue as early as the 1980s, literally forcing it into the United States and world political discourse, meanwhile using mass politics as a springboard to publicize the importance of the issue in the present world and for many generations to come.

As with many people who study the subject, Gore made combating climate change a large part of his life’s work, as he went on a lecture circuit with a ladder and magic marker to show how quickly the concentration of carbon dioxide had risen during the past few centuries.

Drawing on a wide range of research, Shah counteracts the common assumption that contemporary human and nonhuman migrations represent an unprecedented global crisis.

She reframes migration as a biological and cultural necessity that has been a crucial part of human history and shows how it has been fueled by such factors as economic inequality, politics, nationalism, colonialism, etc. I learned so much from this meticulously researched, yet highly readable book.

I love how it asks readers to consider migration and its history from multiple perspectives and that it can help us think and prepare for an increase of migration due to climate change.

Few people have as much hands-on experience with air pollution as Dr. Gary Fuller. A scientist at Imperial College London, he set up and manages the London Air Quality Network—one of the world's biggest urban air pollution monitoring networks. In this surprisingly engaging book, I discovered the fascinating story of how the world woke to the problem of dirty air, including why it took us so long to fix the problem of acid rain, why the "Dieselgate" scandal really happened, and why supposedly "green" wood burning stoves have turned out to be such an environmental disaster. I think the great thing about Gary's work is his optimism: air pollution is a problem we really can solve, making a huge difference to the quality of life for literally billions of people.

One of the fascinating things about air pollution is why and how it varies around the globe. Tim Smedley brought a journalist's keen perspective to the subject by traveling the world to see and experience the problems for himself. This book makes a great partner to mine. Where I explore air pollution science topic by topic, Tim zooms in to explore real impacts on real people. And it's not all gloom: two short appendices describe what we can do as societies and individuals to clean up our act.

Like Tim Smedley, Beth Gardiner brings a journalist's eye to the problem of air pollution and contrasts how it affects different people in different ways in the UK, India, Poland, and the USA. For some people, science is dull, mundane, and plonkingly prosaic, but Beth's eleven stories really brought the problem alive for me in a spellbinding writing style I really admire.