This book explores the relationship between quality of life, policy, and political behavior. Using carefully collected, granular data, the authors create a measurement of quality of life for each county in the United States. After applying the index to each county and calculating scores, the results are applied to key political and social questions, such as, variation in voter turnout, electoral choices, and the allocation of federal aid. By tying quality of life directly to social and pol...

What if what we think we know about ecology and environmental policy is just wrong? What if environmental laws often make things worse? What if the very idea of nature has been hijacked by politics? What if wilderness is something we create in our minds, as opposed to being an actual description of nature?In 1934, former U.S. Forest Service offcial Aldo Leopold, a godfather to the modern environmental movement, wrote that “restrictive laws” had “largely failed” in ...

This book dispels common myths about electricity and electricity policy and reveals how government policies manipulate energy markets, create hidden costs, and may inflict a net harm on the American people and the environment.Climate change, energy generation and use, and environmental degradation are among the most salient—and controversial—political issues today. Our country's energy future will be determined by the policymakers who enact laws that favor certain ...

Renewable and carbon-neutral energy have been promoted as the future of energy production in the United States. Non-traditional energy sources show promise as alternatives to fossil fuels and may provide a sustainable source of energy in increasingly uncertain energy markets. However, these new sources of energy face their own set of political, administrative, and legal challenges. Green vs. Green explores how mixed land ownership and existing law and regulation present serious ch...

This book examines the voting restrictions that have been implemented across the United States in the post-2008 recession era. Navigating the literature and conventional wisdom, this book navigates the fiscal, partisan and racial influences on voting rights laws in a post-recession era. Reilly explores the role each of these three influences have had on policy and culminate in a trifecta of effects. This is the first contribution to the literature that explores fiscal impacts with the inte...

One of the most urgent challenges in African economic development is to devise a strategy for improving statistical capacity. Reliable statistics, including estimates of economic growth rates and per-capita income, are basic to the operation of governments in developing countries and vital to nongovernmental organizations and other entities that provide financial aid to them. Rich countries and international financial institutions such as the World Bank allocate their deve...

Tar Sands critically examines the frenzied development in the Canadian tar sands and the far-reaching implications for all of North America. Bitumen, the sticky stuff that ancients used to glue the Tower of Babel together, is the world’s most expensive hydrocarbon. This difficult-to-find resource has made Canada the number-one supplier of oil to the United States, and every major oil company now owns a lease in the Alberta tar sands. The region has become a global...

'A valuable corrective to the fraying narrative of [African] failure.'Foreign AffairsNot so long ago, Africa was being described as the hopeless continent. Recently, though, talk has turned to Africa rising, with enthusiastic voices exclaiming the potential for economic growth across many of its countries.What, then, is the truth behind Africa's growth, or lack of it? In this provocative book, Morten Jerven fundamentally reframes the debate, challenging main...

Passionate and cogent, this could be the most important book of the year for CanadiansWe are complacent. We bask in the idea that Canada holds 20% of the world’s fresh water — water crises face other countries, but not ours. We could not be more wrong. In Boiling Point, bestselling author and activist Maude Barlow lays bare the issues facing Canada’s water reserves, including long-outdated water laws, unmapped and unprotected groundwater reserves, agricult...

When regulations (or lack thereof) seem to detract from the common good, critics often point to regulatory capture as a culprit. In some academic and policy circles it seems to have assumed the status of an immutable law. Yet for all the ink spilled describing and decrying capture, the concept remains difficult to nail down in practice. Is capture truly as powerful and unpreventable as the informed consensus seems to suggest? This edited volume brings together seventeen scholars from acros...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERFrom Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former head of the Sierra Club Carl Pope comes a manifesto on how the benefits of taking action on climate change are concrete, immediate, and immense. They explore climate change solutions that will make the world healthier and more prosperous, aiming to begin a new type of conversation on the issue that will spur bolder action by cities, businesses, and citizens—and even, someday, by Washington.

The Burning Question reveals climate change to be the most fascinating scientific, political and social puzzle in history. It shows that carbon emissions are still accelerating upwards, following an exponential curve that goes back centuries. One reason is that saving energy is like squeezing a balloon: reductions in one place lead to increases elsewhere. Another reason is that clean energy sources don't in themselves slow the rate of fossil fuel extraction.Tackling global...