Reviews for Greening the Budget: Budgetary Policies for Environmental Improvement

The average rating for Greening the Budget: Budgetary Policies for Environmental Improvement based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-21 00:00:00 Roger MARTIN This book takes the position that conservation must begin with with individuals (conservation, recycling, renewable resources, population control) like yourself: as consequence it is more of a polemical screed that technical textbook. I should give Professor Chiras a break. None of us would like to be held to every prediction we made in 1991. Having said that, some of the predictions (ethanol!) here are just embarrassing. He has an unfortunate tendency to report benefits, of technologies he dislikes, on a per day (a smaller number) basis while reporting costs on a per year (a larger number) basis. Is it just me, or is this a little sleazy? He seems oblivious to the Jevons Paradox: you can't talk intelligently about energy/resource policy without understanding this. (Pages 369/370 - Improved energy efficiency . . . could go a long way toward cutting emissions. - is just flat out wrong. Professor Chiras does get some things right. Solar energy is going to make the difference. (Please be gentle in 2031 when you remind me I said this.) Solar (PV thin-film as being implemented at the new Boeing facility in South Carolina) is going to change everything. He also discusses the (pernicious) effect of (most important - the control of) population growth: somehow this issues seems to be something we no longer discuss. It's time to start again. p. 390. He says that About 3.2 million metric tons of oil enters the world's seas every year. About half of the oil that contaminates the ocean comes from natural seepage from offshore deposits. One-fifth comes from well blowouts, breaks in pipelines, and tanker spills. The rest, quite surprisingly, comes from oil disposed of inland and carried to he ocean in rivers.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-06-03 00:00:00 James Favieri I received a copy of this book because I read the glowing blurbs of it on amazon, and added it to my wish list. A mistake on my part, I think, as the book turned out to be an unfortunate example of how bizarre writing on certain topics can become when transferred into academic jargon and citation. I can't really see this book being very useful to either environmental justice activists or to sociologists interested in really understanding the environmental justice movement. The concepts are so basic to anyone already working in environmental justice, but they're dressed up here to look more authoritative - to convince whom, I'm not sure. The author's whole argument has been made many times before, and usually more quickly and elegantly at that.