First Book Review - A US economist on my 'A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization'

I've just found the first print review of my new book, published by ArtVoice, which is apparently the number one weekly newsmagazine in western New York, Buffalo. The review is part of a wider article on government water policy in the Great Lakes region, and comes courtesy of Bruce L. Fisher, Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Studies, Buffalo State College at the State University of New York, and also a Visiting Professor of Economics and Finance there.

Fisher sums up the book as "dense, brilliant and frightening." You can read the whole thing here, but the excerpts focusing on my book are below:

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The scientific evidence and the near-universal consensus about the reality of man-made climate change—which results mainly from burning oil and coal—is being met with phenomena like the Democratic Senate candidate from West Virginia, who is running on a platform of opposition to climate-change legislation, a position quite comfortable for every Republican. But as British think-tanker Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed’s new book shows, not only is there a consensus among scientists about catastrophic climate change, there’s a growing recognition that climate change, looming global food shortages, recent and future financial crises and the ongoing plague of political violence and terrorism are all linked by the fossil fuel business.

Ahmed’s A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization is a tough read. It is dense, brilliant, and frightening. Ahmed has done the job that has needed doing: He has connected the dots for the non-specialist. His first depressing achievement is to have collated the dense scientific literature on global warming into a chapter that sums it all up simply: The governments of the major industrialized countries have all come to understand that climate change is for real, and that the catastrophe of a four degree Celsius rise in global temperatures will happen by 2050, but because we are stuck in a global system dominated by petroleum, the governments that should be taking urgent, radical steps to move us to a post-carbon economy are not doing so. Nor, Ahmed says, can they be expected to do so.

Ahmed follows his summation of what the scientists are saying with a still-salient report on the recent global financial crisis, a review of the ongoing Third World food-production crisis, and a long, unsparing look at America’s global lust for oil, a lust that has sometimes put us on both sides of the “war on terror.” The result is a difficult volume that is hard to put down. It is a truly impressive book that is terrifying, but that, sadly, because Ahmed is a Marxist, is destined to be ignored. But you can’t ignore his sources, which include US military documents that concur on the inevitability of major climate change, but that strangely do not map out energy alternatives for America.

Where is President Obama on this? One would think that Obama and his Nobel Prize-winning secretary of energy would have galvanized the nation and created a crash national program on wind and solar power, instead of hurrying up the construction of nuclear power plants—of which there could never be an adequate supply, according to Ahmed’s sources. The creator of the Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock, pooh-poohed wind and pushed nuclear, but wind power is gaining: Google executives just last week announced that they will spend $5 billion of their pocket change to create a near-shore East Coast wind-powered grid to power more than million homes. Ahmed’s book reports on the astounding strides that the government of Germany has already made in fostering alternative, renewable, carbon-neutral energy. He also gives kudos to some local British successes. But it’s hard to be hopeful in the US today, as the fossil-fuel lobby may be about to retake the House of Representatives.

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Nafeez AhmedOctober 29, 2010bruce fisher, crisis of civilization, nafeez ahmed, reviewComment