The Climate War

April 15, 2010
A solid work of environmental reportage from the front lines of cap-and-trade, the Kyoto Protocol, carbon sequestration and other weighty matters.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek deputy editor Pooley sympathizes with the initial doubts about climate change."You didn't have to be a conservative to be an armchair skeptic," he writes."[A]nyone would prefer it not to be real." Against the reality of this change, chronicled by the most august scientific organizations, is a body of naysayers whom the author collectively dubs the"Denialosphere." This loosely organized cabal of deniers, whose founding members"saw themselves as flinty truth tellers trying to stop the world from adopting solutions they hated in response to a problem they didn't think existed," an attitude that prevails to this day, rarely included a trained scientist. Most were insurance agents and public-relations executives, with an occasional civil engineer for leavening. Somehow this noisy crew inserted itself into the legislative process, happily aided and abetted during the disastrous years of the science-hating Bush administration. Against them stood—and stands—not just those scientists, but a rather motley crew of activists, such as a young dreadlocked leftie named Anthony Jones who became a standard-bearer of the green-jobs movement. Pooley's account is light on hard science, but his focus is politics—and that politics is often impossibly bizarre, featuring remote policy wonks and deep corporate pockets, among them sleazy executives who once"fought the ban on workplace smoking" and are now trying to save the planet from the planet-savers.

A well-written Primary Colors for the environmentalist set.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from May 15, 2010
Had they been told in 1970 that 40 years later the U.S. still would not have a cohesive climate policy, the observers of the first Earth Day would have recoiled in disbelief. Yet while administration after administration has either tried and failed to enact legislation, or worse yet, hasnt seen the need for such regulation in the first place, the world has spun inexorably closer to environmental disaster. Of course, the denialosphere sees it differently, and therein lies the crux of Pooleys engrossing behind-the-scenes expos' of the multifactioned confrontation over climate. With hot air spewing from special interest groups like so much smog over Los Angeles, and a contentious political firestorm burning like the once toxic Cuyahoga River, blistering hypocrisy and blustering hyperbole pit dedicated enviros against dithering politicians to the point of mind-numbing inertia. As he parses the ecology-versus-economy debate waged in Capitol Hill back rooms and Wall Street boardrooms, Pooley peppers his meticulously researched insider account with aha! moments of revelation and populates it with a Machiavellian cast of characters. Accomplishing the impossible, Pooley makes policymaking fascinating, if frustrating.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)