The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America

Thomas L. Friedman · 516 pages

Friedman's bestseller "The World Is Flat" has helped millions of readers to see globalization in a new way. Now the author brings a fresh outlook to the crises of destabilizing climate change and rising competition for energy.

The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World

Paul Roberts · 400 pages

Petroleum is now so deeply entrenched in our economy, our politics, and our personal expectations that even modest efforts to phase it out are fought tooth and nail by the most powerful forces in the world: companies and governments that depend on oil revenues; the developing nations that see oil as the only means to industrial success; and a Western middle class that refuses to modify its energy-

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

Naomi Klein · 576 pages

The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems. In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon our physical world. The

The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World

Bjorn Lomborg · 540 pages

The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age

John Michael Greer · 259 pages

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 279 pages

The New York Times bestselling Freakonomics was a worldwide sensation, selling more than four million copies in thirty-five languages and changing the way we look at the world.Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with Superfreakonomics, and fans and newcomers alike will find that the freakquel is even bolder, funnier, and more surprising than the first.SuperFreakonomics challenges the way

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion

Elizabeth L. Cline · 258 pages

Evaluates the costs of low-priced clothing while tracing the author's own transformation to a conscientious shopper, a journey during which she visited a garment factory, learned to resole shoes, and shopped for local, sustainable clothing.

The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World

Russell Gold · 375 pages

Fracking has vociferous critics and fervent defenders, but the debate between these camps has obscured the actual story: Fracking has become a fixture of the American landscape and the global economy. It has upended the business models of energy companies around the globe, and it has started to change geopolitics and global energy markets in profound ways. Here the author tells the story of this o

Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Modern Japan

Alex Kerr · 432 pages

"In an ancient tale, a Chinese emperor asks his court painter about the easiest and most difficult subjects to paint. The painter replies, "Dogs are difficult, demons are easy." To Alex Kerr, a longtime resident expert and observer, Japan's "dogs" are the vital activities that sustain an ecologically and culturally responsible economy, while the expedient "demons" are the million-dollar boondoggle

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Jared Diamond · 592 pages

"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?" "As in Guns, G

$20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better

Christopher Steiner · 281 pages

Imagine an everyday world in which the price of gasoline (and oil) continues to go up, and up, and up. Think about the immediate impact that would have on our lives.Of course, everybody already knows how about gasoline has affected our driving habits. People can't wait to junk their gas-guzzling SUVs for a new Prius. But there are more, not-so-obvious changes on the horizon that Chris Steiner trac

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization

Jeff Rubin · 304 pages

An internationally renowned energy expert has written a book essential for every American--a galvanizing account of how the rising price and diminishing availability of oil are going to radically change our lives. Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller is a powerful and provocative book that explores what the new global economy will look like and what it will mean for all of us.In a co

Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

Adam Minter · 284 pages

"When you drop your Diet Coke can or yesterday's newspaper in the recycling bin, where does it go? Probably halfway around the world, to people and places that clean up what you don't want and turn it into something you can't wait to buy. In Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter-- veteran journalist and son of an American junkyard owner-- travels deeply into a vast, often hidden, multibillion-dollar indust

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World

Paul Gilding · 292 pages

According to the author, the Great Disruption started in 2008, with spiking food and oil prices and dramatic ecological changes, such as the melting ice caps. It is not simply about fossil fuels and carbon footprints. The author claims we have come to the end of Economic Growth, Version 1.0, a world economy based on consumption and waste, where we lived beyond the means of our planet's ecosystems

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

Richard Heinberg · 321 pages

"Economists insist that recovery is at hand, yet unemployment remains high, real estate values continue to sink, and governments stagger under record deficits. The End of Growth proposes a startling diagnosis: humanity has reached a fundamental turning point in its economic history. The expansionary trajectory of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable natural limits. Richard Hein

The Ecology of Commerce Revised Edition: A Declaration of Sustainability

Paul Hawken · 288 pages

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet

Jeffrey D. Sachs · 400 pages

From one of the world's greatest economic minds, author of The New York Times bestseller The End of Poverty, a clear and vivid map of the road to sustainable and equitable global prosperity and an augury of the global economic collapse that lies ahead if we don't follow itThe global economic system now faces a sustainability crisis, Jeffrey Sachs argues, that will overturn many of our basic assump

The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems

Van Jones · 237 pages

The award-winning human rights activist and advisor to policy makers and presidential candidates delivers a 21st-century economic plan to rescue working-class Americans. Van Jones illustrates how we can invent and invest our way out of the pollution-based grey economy and into the healthy new green economy. Built by a broad coalition deeply rooted in the lives and struggles of ordinary people, thi

When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century

Fred Pearce · 346 pages

Green Illusions

Ozzie Zehner · 437 pages

"We don't have an energy crisis. We have a consumption crisis. And this book, which takes aim at cherished assumptions regarding energy, offers refreshingly straight talk about what's wrong with the way we think and talk about the problem. Though we generally believe we can solve environmental problems with more energy--more solar cells, wind turbines, and biofuels--alternative technologies come w

Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet

Tim Jackson, Bill McKibben, Herman E. Daly, Mary Robinson · 276 pages

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

Daniel Yergin · 816 pages

In this gripping account of the quest for the energy that our world needs, Daniel Yergin continues the riveting story begun in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Prize. A master storyteller as well as a leading energy expert, Yergin shows us how energy is an engine of global political and economic change. It is a story that spans the energies on which our civilization has been built and the new

The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse

David Owen · 261 pages

"This is a mind-changing manifesto about the environment, efficiency, and the real path to sustainability. Hybrid cars, fast trains, compact florescent lightbulbs, solar panels, carbon offsets: everything you've been told about being green is wrong. The quest for a breakthrough battery or a 100 mpg car are dangerous fantasies. We are consumers, and we like to consume greenly and efficiently. But D

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers · 207 pages

*Limits to Growth*, a study of the patterns and dynamics of human presence on earth, pointed toward environmental and economic collapse within a century if "business as usual" continued. In 1972, the book's findings sparked a worldwide controversy about the earth's capacity to withstand constant human and economic expansion. More than 40 years later, with more than 10 million copies sold in 28 lan