Robin Collins is a member of Canadian Pugwash Group
Publiahed in Canadian Field-Naturalist journal July-Sept 2024
Download review here:
https://www.canadianfieldnaturalist.ca/index.php/cfn/article/view/3525
COPOUT: How Governments Have Failed the People on Climate—an Insider’s View of Climate Change Conferences, from Paris to Dubai By Nick Breeze. 2024. Gemini Books. 240 pages, 22.99 CAD, Paper.
Nuclear is Not the Solution: the Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change By M.V. Ramana. 2024. Verso Books. 272 pages, 39.95 CAD, Hardcover, 11.99 CAD, E-book.
In two recent books addressing responses to climate change, readers learn about the unwieldly international policy process as well as technological options, and in particular nuclear energy, that may or may not effectively mitigate the global crisis.
A COP, or Conference of the Parties, is an annual United Nations meeting on climate change with official and unofficial representatives from countries around the world. Author Nick Breeze attended eight COPs, beginning with the Paris Agreement event at COP 21 in 2015 where 196 governments agreed on a baseline limit of 1.5o C global temperature rise above pre-industrial levels. His book, COPOUT, reviews the progress of those conferences; from COP to COP, we detect a growing malaise, as emissions increase faster than mitigation. An early focus on planting trees and carbon capture draw-down technologies was also missing the mark.
In Nuclear is Not the Solution, M.V. Ramana makes four core arguments against nuclear power: High cost and slow build time, weapons proliferation risk, contamination risk, and the spent fuel disposal problem. Early in the book, he says: “Although climate change scares me, I am even more scared of a future with more nuclear plants.” Read: full article here