To the Mat on Global Warming
The New York Times – July 16, 2010
SHORTLY after losing the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore embarked on an arguably even more ambitious campaign: to save the planet from destruction by global warming. His efforts, which included his documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth,” won him a Nobel Prize. But Mr. Gore has not yet achieved his goal of convincing America to limit the industrial pollution that causes climate change.
“America is still debating whether and how to reduce carbon emissions, and a loud minority continues to insist that global warming isn’t real or caused by man,” writes Eric Pooley in “The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth” (Hyperion, $27.99), an illuminating if often ponderous book.
“The Climate War” focuses mainly on the economic and political aspects of the global-warming issue. That is in keeping with Mr. Pooley’s areas of journalistic expertise. He is the deputy editor of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, a former managing editor of Fortune and a former national editor, chief political correspondent and White House correspondent for Time.