This is one of the best books i have read in a long time. These days most environmentally focused literature tends to focus on the pending doom of our seeming disregard for the environment a judged through our actions. Its obviously easy to forget about the big picture consequences of the sum of our societal actions and easy to dismiss our personal impacts due to our relative smallness, so literature that hits on the major unintended consequences is always a somewhat welcomed wake up call to the most of us who tend to forget about our personal carbon imprints. This book however takes the much needed step further.



After the sensationalism fades and the reality of our predicament settles in more thoroughly we find the next (and more important) step a lot less clear. How do we enact policy that will either directly or indirectly affect our actions to alleviate the mounting problems. This book does not take the naive approach of hoping that people will invariably join together and consciously act in more costly fashions for the sake of the planet- it is too easy to act locally for individuals and that is taken more as an axiom. It describes environmental problems as arising as a mixture of fixable economic phenonenon. In particular the concept of trying to measure the price of negative externalities is discussed in detail to try to force a repricing of polluting industries to take this into account such that goods and services are priced on a fully inclusive basis rather than excluding externalities. He also addresses tragedy of the commons type situation. He concludes many of the environmental issues as being market failures based on local incentives being the guiding ones versus national and global, and this lack of accountability for externalities fundamentally needs to be adressed. This can also be a coordination problem with corporations jumping jurisdiction so that the solution might require global over national policy solutions. Obviously solutions are not simple but the origin of the incentive problems are quite well explained and subsquently can be fairly easily understood, then the framework for potential solutions is outlined.



The other aspect that is discussed is overconsumption. I agree in spirit with a lot of this, and clearly overconsumption has taken the US to a very difficult place, but this aspect of the book is more of a call for re-alignemnt of values. This is approachable through policy (consumption tax etc) but harder than trying to fix market failures as its more subjective and harder to convince those without that anticonsumption is in their global interest. Furthermore approaching anticonsumption on a graduated framework would be exceptionally difficult to monitor.



All in all this is the sort of book that should be read by all (in particular policy makers) and I hope that more literature approaches the issues the way this book does. Namely looking at it from first- articulating all the risks, then the reasons for the evolution of the problem, finally, means to fix the problems on a sustainable basis via realignent of incentives. This is one of the books that for me has made me rethink a lot of very foundational issues both personal and political (after reading much environmentalist literature which did not have nearly the same effect), and I would expect this to have the same effect on most. For all of that, I highly recommend.