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A blueprint for a better future that offers a unified theory of human behavior, culture, and society. Playing on the phrase “a theory of everything” from physics, Michael Muthukrishna’s ambitious, original, and deeply hopeful book A Theory of Everyone draws on the most recent research from across the sciences, humanities, and the emerging field of cultural evolution to paint a panoramic picture of who we are and what exactly makes human beings different from all other forms of life on the planet. Muthukrishna argues that it is our unique ability to create culture, a shared body of knowledge, skills, and experience passed on from generation to generation, that has enabled our current do...
A provocative call for delegitimizing fossil fuels rather than accommodating them, accompanied by case studies from Ecuador to Appalachia and from Germany to Norway. Not so long ago, people North and South had little reason to believe that wealth from oil, gas, and coal brought anything but great prosperity. But the presumption of net benefits from fossil fuels is eroding as widening circles of people rich and poor experience the downside. A positive transition to a post-fossil fuel era cannot wait for global agreement, a swap-in of renewables, a miracle technology, a carbon market, or lifestyle change. This book shows that it is now possible to take the first step toward the post-fossil fue...
Over half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas. Few who live in cities understand that cities, too, are ecosystems, as beholden to the laws and principles of ecology as are natural ecosystems. Understanding Urban Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Systems Approach introduces students at the college undergraduate level, or those in advanced-standing college credit high school courses, to cities as ecosystems. For graduate students it provides an overview and rich literature base. Urban planners, educators, and decision makers can use this book to help in designing a more sustainable or “green” future. The authors use a systems approach to explore the complexity and interactions...
This topical Handbook explores the emergence of climate change as an international security issue, the threats it poses, and the political and academic debates it has prompted. Framing climate change as a security issue, it explores the ways relevant actors, states and international organizations have conceptualized climate security and its associated threats.
"Changing Energy outlines how humanity came to its current energy economy through three previous energy transitions and now stands poised for a necessary fourth one. Despite the immense benefits conferred by a global energy economy based primarily on coal, oil, gas, and uranium, societies must now rebuild their energy economies to rely as much as possible on renewable energy used efficiently. This imperative to change comes from the risks of climate change plus the dangers of geopolitical tensions, health and environmental effects, and the long-term prospects for ever depleting sources of today's energy sources. Changing Energy argues that sustainability of the benefits from energy services will come from investments made in the technologies of the fourth transition. Perkins envisions a viable post-fossil fuel energy economy and outlines the barriers that must be resolved to reach it."--Provided by publisher.
In this book Ronald A. Simkins addresses the current environmental crisis and what the Bible might contribute in response to it. The environmental crisis includes loss of biodiversity, degradation of the soil, and especially climate change. If left unchecked, these trends will bring about the collapse of human civilization. These environmental problems are interrelated and share a similar cause: the exploitation of the natural world through an economy structured by capitalist relations of production and powered by the burning of fossil fuels. Through our economic relations, we have depleted natural resources, polluted natural environments, and altered natural processes. These problems are a ...
A philosopher and a scientist propose that sustainability can be understood as living well together without diminishing opportunity to live well in the future. Most people acknowledge the profound importance of sustainability, but few can define it. We are ethically bound to live sustainably for the sake of future generations, but what does that mean? In this book Randall Curren, a philosopher, and Ellen Metzger, a scientist, clarify normative aspects of sustainability. Combining their perspectives, they propose that sustainability can be understood as the art of living well together without diminishing opportunity to live well in the future. Curren and Metzger lay out the nature and value o...
The Cost of Electricity is an essential tool for any researcher or practitioner seeking to establish the economic and environmental cost of power generation, and thereby to analyse the economic feasibility of power systems. Chapters cover capital cost, fuel cost, levelised cost, subsidies and tariffs, lifetime emission analysis, net energy analysis, traditional generation costs and renewable generation costs. The work is based on published analyses of generation costs and generation cost predictions from trusted organisations such as the US Energy Information Administration and the IEA. Chapters proceed in a logical manner through cost factors before concluding with the current and future cost of electricity generation. - Analyses the factors that contribute to the cost of generating electricity together with the presentation of historical cost trends and predictions for future costs - Examines the environmental cost of power generation by lifecycle analysis, including carbon emissions impact - Reviews factors which distort the market cost of electricity
This book is about the mechanisms of wealth creation, or what we like to think of as evolutionary "progress." The massive circular flow of goods and services between producers and consumers is not a perpetual motion machine; it has been dependent for the past 150 years on energy inputs from a finite storage of fossil fuels. In this book, you will learn about the three key requirements for wealth creation, and how this process acts according to physical laws, and usually after some part of the natural wealth of the planet has been exploited in an episode of "creative destruction." Knowledge and natural capital, particularly energy, will interact to power the human wealth engine in the future ...