| View Larger Image | Global Climate Change and U.S. Law | Paperbackby Michael B. Gerrard (Editor)
| List Price: | $59.95 | | Price: | $37.77 | | You Save: | $22.18 (37%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | American Bar Association | | Page Count: | 784 Pages | | Publication Date: | September 25, 2007 | | Sales Rank: | 371,761st |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
This comprehensive, current examination of U.S. law as it relates to global climate change begins with a summary of the factual and scientific background of climate change based on governmental statistics and other official sources. Subsequent chapters address the international and national frameworks of climate change law, including the Kyoto Protocol, state programs affected in the absence of a mandatory federal program, issues of disclosure and corporate governance, and the insurance industry. Also covered are the legal aspects of other efforts, including voluntary programs, emissions trading programs, and carbon sequestration. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 1.0 based on 1 review)
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Global warming hype meets environmental ambulance chasers by Connecticut Commentator (North Stonington, CT)  1 Stars
April 20, 2009
The premises of this volume rest upon the intellectual and scientific quicksand which underlies the entire phenomenon of "global warming" hysteria. Like the vast majority of those who have jumped onto the "global warming" bandwagon, the editor and contributors to this volume bring no scientific expertise to the project, being content to blindly accept the extreme hypotheses of some scientists on the federal grant gravy train and run with them. But this will make little difference to those lawyers who are looking for new avenues in which to peddle their "services," just as they sign up for the latest specialized conferences on Vioxx litigation and the like. Cap and trade, however, will provide a virtual goldmine to litigation-happy lawyers for years to come as it drives a stake into the heart of the American economy. It will, in its dire effects, constitute the most far-reaching, and totally unecessary, case of economic masochism in American history.
Nevertheless, it's astounding what a negligible increase of 0.8 degrees Celsius in the world's temperature over the past 150 years, coming at the end of the Little Ice Age, will do to fuel the collective, and collectivist, mindset among the nations and citizens of the world. These temperatures have variously risen and fallen for eons. Indeed, some of the most highly qualified climate scientists have painstakingly documented the existence of a 1,500-year climate cycle over the entire globe. In a monumental 1983 study of mile deep Greenland ice core samples by Denmark's Willi Dansgaard and Switzerland's Hans Oeschger (results confirmed a few years later on Antarctica, and by scores of proxy studies) revealed a 250,000-year world climate history which reflected the moderate climate cycles of the sun. What characterizes the present era, however, is a lot of bad science anxious to tap unlimited sources of government funding for climate research, a gullible media, quasi-religious environmental organizations, and the nefarious influence of politics upon the scientific enterprise. The fruits of that "research" include Michael Mann's now thoroughly debunked "hockey stick" representation of the most recent 1,000 years of climate history, which, nevertheless, became a prominent feature of Al Gore's global warming sideshow, and which finds naïve acceptance by the editor of this volume (see Figure 1-1). The "presentist" mindset, which interprets the current climate experience as a unique and threatening phenomenon, reveals a sorry lack of historical perspective. Most significantly, the carefully documented climate record reveals that temperatures were 2-4 degrees higher in the medieval warm period (900-1300 A.D.) than they are today, when CO2 levels are higher, and that CO2 levels are actually an 800-year lagging indicator of global warming, not a causal factor. Many of the scientists who contributed to the 1996 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) documented these findings, concluding that no such "human fingerprint" had been found in the recent global warming, but their statements were shockingly removed from Chapter 8 of the IPCC's 1996 report by U.N. bureaucrats and U.S. politicians in the Clinton administration anxious to manufacture "consensus" regarding anthropogenic global warming. This is the context in which books like the Global Climate Change and U.S. Law are produced. Regardless of the flawed presentation of the science presented in this volume, however, lawyers stand to make a good living off the complex legal and regulatory schemes detailed in this book, including the implementation of an elaborate system of emission cap and trade programs, as well as the more benign efforts to conserve energy, and develop renewable energy sources.
Building upon this flawed scientific analysis, Part I of this volume describes the national and international framework of climate change regulation, the impact of the Kyoto Protocol on U.S. business, clean air regulation, civil remedies, climate change in facility permitting, and international trade and development. Part II describes the emerging regional, state and local actions, together with a 50-state survey of state responses to climate change. Part III examines a variety of corporate actions, including disclosure issues, fiduciary duties, insurance and climate change, and subsidies, tax policy and technological innovations. Part IV examines the legal aspects of efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, such as voluntary efforts, emissions trading, and carbon sequestration. It also includes a list of important resources, a glossary of climate-related terms, a list of acronyms; endnotes, and index. Twenty-four authors contributed to this volume under the editorship of Michael Garrard, a partner in the New York office of Arnold & Porter LLP, where he heads its environmental practice group. The views of the individual authors stand alone, irrespective of the views of the other contributors.
For more authoritative and balanced views of the science of global climate, see Fred Singer and Dennis Avery's Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Lawrence Solomon's "The Deniers" (Richard Vigilante Books, 2008);" Iain Murray's "The Really Inconvenient Truths" (Regnery, 2008); Roy Spencer's "Climate Confusion" (Encounter Books, 2008); and Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder's The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change (Icon Books, 2007), which argues that the interplay of clouds, the sun, and cosmic rays has a far more profound effect of climate than carbon dioxide. Readers are also directed to Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas' metanalysis of studies related to the existence of the climate cycle, the Medieval Warming Period, and Little Ice Age (see "Reconstructing Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 Years: A Reappraisal," Energy and Environment 14, no. 2/3 (March 2003), 233-296. They discovered 112 studies about the Medieval Warming Period, 92% of which showed evidence of warming, 124 studies from around the world addressing the existence of the Little Ice Age, 98% of these confirming the era's cooling. Finally, they examined 102 studies containing information on the question of whether the 20th century was the warmest on record, 78% of which found earlier periods lasting at least 50 years that were warmer than any period in the 20th century.
Ironically, despite all the hoopla about "global warming" or, as it is increasingly called as temperatures have fallen, "climate change," global mean temperatures are now at roughly their 3,000-year average.
The EPA, led by its extremist "global warming" czarina Carol Browner, has now declared carbon dioxide to be a "pollutant." This is surely the most scientifically unfounded decision and the most damaging to our economy and freedom in the history of that agency. And, if implemented, it will rank with the banning of DDT as the most deadly action every perpertated by the U.S. government on the world's poor. But that won't stand in the way of thousands of lawyers trying to make a buck off their, and our, misery.
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