Monday, December 10, 2012

The Carbon Crunch by Dieter Helm


Hardcover: 273 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press (October 22, 2012)

In The Carbon Crunch, author Dieter Helm has tackled what we are getting wrong with climate change and offers proposals on how to fix it.

How is it that Helm is the person to tackle these issues?  For starters, Helm's credentials are rather impressive.  He is a professor of energy policy at Oxford and a member of the Economics Advisory Group to the UK Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change.

Make no mistake.  Climate change means warmer winters and summers approaching the brink of disaster.

Helm uses this book to serve as a critique of the global climate and energy policy spanning the last 40 years.

Since 1990, Helm argues, absolutely nothing has been achieved in the worldwide fight against climate change.  Helm advocates for a transition from coal burning to clean energy by way of natural gas.  This proposal won't sit well in areas of Kentucky, where coal mining is seen as a way of life.

Helm proposes that we spend money not on the the current technologies but towards research and development and future technology that will be able to solve the problem of climate change--while encouraging the quick transition from coal to gas.

There's no doubt that this book will serve as a blueprint for the future debate into climate change.

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