Unsustainable World: Are We Losing the Battle to Save Our Planet? - Paperback

by Peter N. Nemetz (Author)

Using a cross-disciplinary, science- and economics-based approach, this book provides a sobering and comprehensive assessment of the multifaceted barriers to achieving sustainability at a global level.

Organized into three parts, the book defines sustainability in part I and sets the context of the historical and current difficulties facing the world today. In parts II and III, it outlines the sustainability challenges faced in transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture, and then in turn addresses the solutions, conditional solutions, and nonsolutions to these challenges. These include electric and autonomous automobiles, nuclear power, renewable energy, geoengineering, and carbon capture and storage. The author attempts to differentiate among those proposed solutions and discusses which are most promising and which are infeasible, counterproductive, and potentially a waste of time and money. In each of the book's chapters, the scientific evidence is presented in detail, in keeping with the advice of the young Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, to let the science speak for itself. The author outlines why sustainability is unlikely to be achieved in several key areas of human endeavor and readers are challenged to weigh the scientific evidence for themselves.

Using an economic business-based approach, this book introduces students and general readers to the challenges of sustainability and the environmental difficulties facing humanity today.

Author Biography

Peter N. Nemetz received a PhD in Economics from Harvard University and is Professor Emeritus of Strategy and Business Economics in the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia, Canada. For twenty-nine years he held a visiting research position in the Department of Health Sciences Research at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He has published more than one hundred books, academic articles, and consulting reports in the areas of natural disaster economics, natural resource and environmental economics and policy, international business, sustainability, and epidemiology.