A Blueprint for a Safer Planet

By Nicholas Stern

The Bodley Head
; €18; ISBN 9781847920379

Former academic, chief economist of the World Bank and author of the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, Nicholas (Lord) Stern has, in the past three years, taken climate change right into the parlour rooms of a political class eager to talk green and equally determined (so far) not to act on the dire warnings of climate science. 


Refusing steadfastly to get angry, Stern recognises that the planet’s fate rests to a scary degree on political will, and in particular on the outcome of the critical UN meeting in Copenhagen this December. There, before the gaze of the world’s media, we will find out whether the world’s leaders can agree a decisive global agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol and lead to meaningful emissions reductions over the next several decades. 


A Blueprint for a Safer Planet has been written precisely with Copenhagen in mind, and reads like a briefing document for the negotiators who will fight it out. The key elements of a desirable global deal are laid revolve around Stern’s headline call for a cut of at least 50% of world emissions by 2050 relative to 1990 levels. 


The rest of the volume addresses how we should achieve those cuts, although not before recounting the science of climate change — which has firmed up a lot over the past three years — and giving a remaining handful of climate change deniers very short shrift. 


Some of the arguments encountered require familiarity witheconomics, but most of the book is accessible. Stern reveals that he is a fan of carbon-trading schemes, particularly because they transfer large sums of money from the rich world to the poor world, thereby addressing inequality and poverty as well. Similarly, he wants climate change to be at the heart of all international aid spending, and argues that alleviating poverty and addressing climate change are part of the same agenda since failing with one will certainly mean failing with the other. 


There is an excellent section on rainforest protection in Chapter 8, now a subject of great urgency. Elsewhere we learn that switching from an American, red meat diet to a vegan 
diet saves more in CO2 emissions per year than downsizing from a large Toyota Camry to a hybrid Toyota Prius. 


But this book is not about entertainment. 
It’s about the big picture and that means 
policy. Dull but true.

The Cost of Capitalism
By Robert J. Barbera
McGraw Hill; €13.77; ISBN 9780071628440

The author marches us through the past three decades, noting a relentless list of booms and busts before the current one and urging us to accept the inherent fragility of capitalism. However, economists have a habit of ‘rediscovering’ the past amid crisis, he says, urging a re-reading of Keynes and Hyman Minsky, the American economist who studied asset bubbles. Economic theory must be rebased, central bankers re-educated to prick bubbles not just defeat inflation, yet “history tells us that policy coordination is achievable, but only during crises”.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

By Alain De Botton
Hamish Hamilton; €21.35; ISBN 9780241143537

Immeasurably better for the brilliantly documentary photos by Richard Baker, this meandering, philosophical essay on why we work is perfectly attuned to our introspective, post-boom era. De Botton succeeds in making even the dullest factory into a poetic reflection, although the tedium of many occupations seeps through as well. Describing entrepreneurs as a “judicious fusion of the utopian and the practical,” he confesses 
the deepest pang of “envy and inadequacy” at their successes, suggesting that we all have an entrepreneur inside us.

How I Caused the Credit Crunch

By Tetsuya Ishikawa
Icon Books; €12; ISBN 9781848310674

No doubt the first sluice of an incoming torrent of blow-the-roof-off narratives by unemployed ex-investment bankers, this one swerves between torrid accounts of brothels and too-complex sallies about triple A-rated derivative products. As a fictional account, it forfeits the firepower of a clinical memoir, yet maybe for that reason bankers look more loathsome by the end. Self-indictment intervenes at one point: “Even today, any banker will claim entrepreneurialism as a key strength, though it’s nothing more than a self-inflated, egotistical assessment of 
their own skills 
and value.”

The Storm

By Vince Cable

Atlantic Books
; €18; ISBN 9781848870574

An excellent account of the current economic malaise by one of the UK’s most popular politicians and the Liberal Democrat’s chief economic spokesman. Although rushed in places, the book’s strength is its lack of jargon. The two highlights are Cable’s account of the banking failure from the perspective of moral hazard and his assault on the new vogue for protectionism, explaining how, paradoxically, poor countries, 
such as China, have been supplying vast sums of capital to richer countries, exacerbating the noughties credit bubble.