Book Notes: Eric Pooley’s “The Climate War”

Over at N+1, Chad Harbach has a great take on Eric Pooley’s The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth:

Eric Pooley’s The Climate War was the most exciting book about global warming published this year. It’s a page-burning political thriller—a Washington-insider account of the long drive to get climate legislation through Congress. Politicans, coal execs, and the surprisingly influential folks at the NRDC are the principals, and as the book proceeds you can feel Pooley’s conservative sympathies sliding toward the coal-region eco-radicals he meets. Everything is building toward the effort to get the 2009 Waxman-Markey bill passed, and the tale is so gripping that at moments I forgot that I already knew the end of the story, and cheered myself with the thought that the bill, woefully inadequate as it was, might actually make it. Instead, of course, we are where we are, still careening toward disaster.

Pooley is no treehugger – he’s the deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek and the former managing editor of Fortune and chief political correspondent for Time.

Here’s what Pooley has to say about the economics of climate change:

Why is positioning the argument as “Economy vs. Environment” a false choice?

A clean energy economy will bring with it short-term costs—some workers in traditional energy industries may lose jobs over time, and consumers may pay somewhat higher energy bills as the economy transitions. So it is easy for those against climate change legislation to say that cleaning up the planet comes at the expense of the American economy. Over the long term, as the cost of alternative energy sources comes down, the clean energy economy will bring with it millions of new jobs while providing abundant energy that does not contribute to global warming.

The longer we wait, the more damaging climate change will be, and the more expensive and difficult the solutions will become. The question isn’t whether or not to act; it is how to do so in the most cost effective manner, and how to summon the political will to do what needs to be done while there’s still time. The Climate War is the story of those fighting to take the first essential step, and those fighting against them. It explains why, after all these years, we still haven’t managed to get started.

-> Next Page: Read an excerpt from The Climate War