Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

notes to pages 18-28 S 223
7. Walker and King, pp. 49–50.
8. See Broecker and Kunzig (2008), p. 138.
9. Battisti and Naylor’s research (2009) indicates that present trends will similarly
impact agriculture in tropical and subtropical regions worldwide. Average
temperatures by the year 2100, they say, will exceed the most extreme
temperatures recorded from 1900 to 2006.
10. Paul Epstein (2000); see also Center for Health and the Global Environment
(2006).
11. The evidence is sizable; see for example Colin Campbell (2005), Darley
(2004), David Goodstein (2004), Heinberg (2003), Klare (2004), Leggett
(2005), Roberts (2004), and Simmons (2005). For a contrary view, see Smil
(2008).
12. James Benson, Charles Chichetti, Herman Daly, Bruce Hannon, Denis
Hayes, Amory Lovins, Eugene Odum, and Cecil Phillips.
13. Energy return on investment is a controversial subject, but the long-term
trends for fossil fuels are less so. See Shah (2004), p. 161.
14. See Johnson (2000).
15. The Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation,
and Terrorism concludes that it is “more likely than not that a
weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in
the world by 2013” (2008, p. xv).
16. For analysis prior to the fi nancial implosion of 2008, see Kuttner (2007) and
Phillips (2008).
17. The best analyses are those by Makhijani (2007), Lovins et al. (2005), and
Inslee and Hendricks (2007).
18. Reliable numbers here are hard to come by, partly because the subject is
complex and partly because they would reveal inconvenient truths about
the sanity of the energy system. A full accounting of the costs of the current
energy system would include, for example, the effects of climate destabilization,
the ecological effects of acid rain and mercury contamination, whatever
price one might put on the tens of thousands who die early because
they live downwind from coal plants, the costs of maintaining a military
presence in the Middle East and periodically fi ghting oil wars that further
raise the prospects of terrorist attacks in the United States, and subsidies for
oil, gas, and nuclear power insinuated throughout federal and state budgets,
as well as research and development expenditures heavily weighted to the
status quo . . . and so forth.
19. There are cogent arguments and considerable evidence that renewables and
radically improved effi ciency are inadequate without, in Ted Trainer’s words,
a “radical change to a very different kind of society,” one not organized
around consumption (Trainer, 2007).