climatechange

Climate-change Policy
$65.00
This is a comprehensive look at climate change economics and policies, largely from a series of academic perspectives. Very substantive and detailed, its a good counter-point to the recent Stern Review.

Myopic Man: On the Nature and Universality of Human Self-Deception and Its Long Term Effects on Our Environment
$22.95
'Myopic Man' exposes a fatal flaw in the working logic of the modern environmental/conservation movement. It asks what is it about human nature that leads people to ignore or deny their environmental footprint. Others have addressed the denial of human nature in general, but none reveal the link to historical and current events, or what we can expect in the future. This book focuses on how self-deception is the unconscious predisposition that insulates excessive consumption, competition, and aggression in all people. During our 7 million year history these behaviors were never a problem until the last two centuries. The book is not another pessimistic accounting of how human nature has impacted the global ecosystem. In 12 chapters, it explores the biological basis of why history repeats itself. From 9/11 to Iraq, from worldwide immigration crises to global warming, the fact that population growth, consumption, waste and pollution indexes have all gone in the wrong direction is explained by the human predisposition to avoid, deny, and ignore the evidence of ones individual contributions to these global problems. Three chapters explore how organized religions create natural infrastructures that support self-deception in consumers under the guise of prosperity. Another two chapters explore how media and advertising are used to institutionalize our denial about consumption, waste and pollution through politics and commerce. One chapter zeros in on the denial rampant within the environmental movement itself. It reveals how 50 years of reliance on the Lockean blank slate constructivist model of human nature, now discredited and replaced by a modern Darwinian approach, explains the overall long term failure of the conservation movement. It makes the point that from the E.O.Wilsons, Al Gores and other high profile environmental leaders on down to many activists in the field, their fundamental misunderstanding and denial about the Nature and evolution of the human mind is what keeps the movement from connecting with the average consumer. This misguided assumption about how easy it is to change the core of human behavior prevents environmentalists from developing programs that lead to real changes in those pesky global indexes. We can plan on 50 more years of failure and environmental decay unless we begin to deal with our institutionalized denial about human nature. Another chapter explores the ethics of technology and our religious-like faith in its ability to solve human caused global and local problems; the chapter asks whether more technology is necessarily a good thing when the history of our use and abuse of technology is what has led to everything from 9/11, Iraq and the problems that come with globalization. In the end, it might just turn out that Man the innovator, may be too much of a good thing.