The best books about greenhouse gases

I wrote this book for the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series to give a concise guide to carbon capture for the non-specialist.  Carbon capture refers to a suite of technologies that reduce CO2 emissions by “capturing” CO2 before it is released into the atmosphere and then transporting it to where it will be stored or used. These technologies can also remove CO2 directly from the atmosphere. For many years, carbon capture was a promising but often overlooked climate change mitigation pathway. However, the recent increase in urgency to deal with climate change has elevated the interest in carbon capture. 

My book explains the fundamentals of carbon capture, as well as the larger context of climate technology and policy.  

The future will be better than you think. Thriving shows how innovation can regenerate nature, society, and the economy by taking us from degradation to restoration of ecosystems, from depletion to renewal of resources, from disparity to responsibility in communities, from disease to revitalization of health, from disconnection to rewiring through technology, and from disruption to resilience of infrastructure and institutions.

Thriving is not an exercise in blind optimism about technology or other miracle-cure solutions; rather, it is an accessible approach to systems thinking and an offer of pragmatic hope based on purpose-driven creativity and innovation. Whether you’re a progressive leader, a professional in the sustainability field, or someone who simply wants to be better informed about ways to take positive action, this thorough guide is for you.

From an editor at PoeticEarthMonth.com, comes Earth Song, a poetry anthology arranged to mirror the experience of an orchestral piece. With repeating refrains of Teasdale and Hopkins, it unfolds its lyric moments through a wide range of voices. Historic. Modern. Cross-cultural. Global—with many poems in beautiful translation. The collection includes emerging poets and greats like Neruda, Berry, Hirshfield, Darwish, Dickinson, McKay, and Merwin.

Leaving off anger, which is the single emotion many people associate with environmental concern, this collection puts forth a vision more nuanced, more poignant, and not easily brushed aside. It draws readers to embrace their care for the world—starting so simply: celebrating life moment by small moment.

This book explains what we know and don’t know about climate change, and implications for climate policy. How will growing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) affect temperatures and sea levels, and what will be the resulting damage?  What should be done to avert climate change?  Impose a carbon tax, and if so, how large? 

We might agree on what should be done to avert climate change, but we must also ask what will be done.  I show that it is unrealistic to expect worldwide GHG emissions to fall rapidly enough to prevent severe climate change. Then what should we do?  The answer is to invest now in adaptation to reduce the possible impacts of climate change, and the book shows how that can be done. 

Australia is the only English-speaking democracy to make voting compulsory. Australians do not see this as a contradiction of democracy but its embodiment, that the government is selected not just by the majority of people who turn out but the majority eligible to vote, and turnouts are regularly above 90%. Compulsory voting is accompanied by compulsory voter registration, preferential voting, the non-partisan administration of elections and voting on Saturdays, with barbeques and cake stalls at polling stations, and election night parties that spill over into Sunday morning. The benefits are immense. Compulsory voting brings to the polls the poor and marginalised, young people and new citizens, and busy people with no axes to grind who dilute the impact of polarising zealots and moral crusaders.

From being the most powerful state in western Eurasia in 600, by 700 the eastern Roman empire was on the point of collapse. Yet it did not die.

This holistic analysis elucidates the factors that allowed it to survive against all odds, integrating the history of the landscape and cities, the environment and changes in climate, the history of beliefs and ideas, the institutions of the state and the church, secular politics, and the international scene. State, elite, and church together embodied a sacralized empire that held the emperor, not the patriarch, as Christendom’s symbolic head. The empire suffered no serious political rupture and what remained became the heartland of the medieval Roman state that we call the Byzantine empire.