The Global Warming Combat Manual - by Bruce Johansen (Hardcover)

About the Book

The Global Warming Combat Manual describes the practical measures that readers can take in their daily lives to reduce their carbon footprints, while showing how to link one's personal choices with the big-picture science and the big-scale campaigns to combat global warming on the political, legal, economic, and technological fronts. The emphasis throughout is on practical tips for ways in which people can help combat global warming in their everyday roles as citizens, consumers, homeowners, employees, commuters, tourists, sportsmen, business owners, or farmers. Johansen--assisted by climatologist James Hansen's foreword and appendix--gives general readers the tools they need to calculate and put into action the most rational and ethical green choices.

Dovetailing the personal with the technological and public-policy dimensions, this book lays out the whole battery of existing, emerging, and speculative solutions for global warming. These range from the humdrum and easy (keeping your tires properly inflated), through the necessary and hard (retooling the ways you transport, house, and feed yourself for maximum energy efficiency and minimum carbon footprint). They also encompass the possible (switching over a large fraction of our carbon-based energy sector to alternative sectors based on biofuel, wind, solar, and geothermal power), the visionary (creating a bacterium that will consume CO2), and the improbable (deploying giant reflecting mirrors in space), as well as the weird and dangerous (pumping sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere).

Book Synopsis

The Global Warming Combat Manual describes the practical measures that readers can take in their daily lives to reduce their carbon footprints, while showing how to link one's personal choices with the big-picture science and the big-scale campaigns to combat global warming on the political, legal, economic, and technological fronts. The emphasis throughout is on practical tips for ways in which people can help combat global warming in their everyday roles as citizens, consumers, homeowners, employees, commuters, tourists, sportsmen, business owners, or farmers. Johansen--assisted by climatologist James Hansen's foreword and appendix--gives general readers the tools they need to calculate and put into action the most rational and ethical green choices.

Dovetailing the personal with the technological and public-policy dimensions, this book lays out the whole battery of existing, emerging, and speculative solutions for global warming. These range from the humdrum and easy (keeping your tires properly inflated), through the necessary and hard (retooling the ways you transport, house, and feed yourself for maximum energy efficiency and minimum carbon footprint). They also encompass the possible (switching over a large fraction of our carbon-based energy sector to alternative sectors based on biofuel, wind, solar, and geothermal power), the visionary (creating a bacterium that will consume CO2), and the improbable (deploying giant reflecting mirrors in space), as well as the weird and dangerous (pumping sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere).

Review Quotes

"Books on natural cataclysm, often climate-induced, are in vogue. Bruce Johansens The Global Warming Combat Manual seeks to make readers more environmentally aware. The Global Warming Combat Manual discusses climate-driven changes in US environmental policy and practice. By describing recent switchesthe increasing use of wind power in Texas, for exampleand emerging technologies and trends, Johansen lays out a range of solutions for minimizing climate change." --Nature

"Packed with recent examples of ways that individuals and corporations are working to reduce their carbon footprints, this book provides a helpful overview of current strategies for addressing global warming...this book may be a good starting point for students investigating practical solutions...good coverage of strategies used in other countries...Recommended. General readers and lower-division undergraduates." --Choice

About the Author

Bruce E. Johansen is Frederick W. Kayser Research Professor of Communication and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is the author of dozens of books, including Global Warming in the 21st Century (Praeger, 2006), The Global Warming Desk Reference (Greenwood Press, 2001), The Dirty Dozen: Toxic Chemicals and the Earth's Future (Praeger, 2003), Indigenous Peoples and Environmental Issues (Greenwood Press, 2003), and Silenced! Academic Freedom, Scientific Inquiry, and the First Amendment under Siege in America (Praeger, 2007). Johansen regularly contributes articles on environmental issues to such national periodicals as The Nation, The Progressive, the Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic Monthly.