Frances Beinecke

I wish I could put a copy of this book into the hands of every US voter -- more accurately, I wish I could have done so before the midterm elections, so that voters would have been able to give themselves a better assessment of the views of the candidates on offer; the results would assuredly have been very different. In a text not much longer, if at all, than the Tom Paine tract its title homages, it spells out very readably exactly the nature of the climate-change problem facing us, the corruptness of the arguments of those who try to persuade us it doesn't exist, what we can do to solve it, and how, rather than approaching the solution as if it were some kind of a burden we can instead regard it as the glorious economic opportunity it in fact is. The authors have gone out of their way to avoid making this a partisan broadside, even going to the extent of citing the famous George W. Bush address to Congress in which, years late, he finally acknowledged the existence of global warming and emptily promised to do something about it. If you're unlucky enough to have someone in your family dumb enough to have swallowed the line that gross excesses of CO2 in the atmosphere just mean there's more plant food to go around, here's the ideal stocking stuffer for them.
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