Engineering Economics

Peak Everything addresses many of the cultural, psychological and practical changes we will have to make as nature rapidly dictates our new limits. This latest book from Richard Heinberg, author of three of the most important books on Peak Oil, touches on the most important aspects of the human condition at this unique moment in time.

A combination of wry commentary and sober forecasting on subjects as diverse as farming and industrial design, this book tells how we might make the transition from The Age of Excess to the Era of Modesty with grace and satisfaction....

The work of engineers surrounds us: from the phones in our pockets to the layout of our cities. These days, engineers even transport some of us to the moon. But the skills that brought the world clean water and telecommunications also produced polluting technologies that could threaten its future. Engineering explores the scientific, social, and philosophical implications inherent in the challenges faced by engineers throughout history. Here, McCarthy presents a future in which engineering is crucial.

As climate change becomes an international crisis, more and more industries are looking for a sound model for creating successful environmentally friendly companies, and a new generation of young leaders are eager for inspiration and guidance on creating sustainable businesses. Mid-Course Correction Revisited advocates why we need to create prototypical green companies and a new economy - not based on non-renewable resources, but on renewable energy, aggressive recycling, innovative technology, and sustainable business practices.

Despite exponential growth in the fishing industry, the global wild fish catch reached a plateau and stagnated. As numerous scientific reports showed, many fish stocks around the world collapsed, creating a genuine global overfishing crisis. Analyzing the ramifications of overfishing for the United States by investigating how fishers, seafood processors, retailers, government officials, and others have worked together to respond to the crisis, historian Mansel G. Blackford examines how these players took steps to make fishing in some American waters sustainable.

Demokratie und Wohlstand, ein längeres Leben, mehr Gleichberechtigung und Bildung: Der Kapitalismus hat viel Positives bewirkt. Zugleich ruiniert er jedoch Klima und Umwelt, sodass die Menschheit nun existenziell gefährdet ist. "Grünes Wachstum" soll die Rettung sein, aber Wirtschaftsexpertin und Bestsellerautorin Ulrike Herrmann hält dagegen: Verständlich und messerscharf erklärt sie in ihrem neuen Hörbuch, warum wir stattdessen "grünes Schrumpfen" brauchen. Die Klimakrise verschärft sich täglich, aber konkret ändert sich fast nichts.

Rejecting the old Left/Right ideologies, Rand develops a more pragmatic view capable of delivering practical solutions to this critical problem. A renewed capitalism harnessed to the task is the only way we might replace fossil fuels fast enough to mitigate severe climate risk. If we leave our dogma at the door, Rand argues, we might just build an economy that survives the century.

In 2006, John Doerr was challenged by his 15-year-old daughter to solve the climate crisis. And for 15 years, that has been his goal. Despite many solutions already being in hand - batteries, electric vehicles, solar and wind power - global warming has continued to worsen as we lack the policy, investment, and global consensus to fully deploy them. We need a clear course of action. Using Objectives and Key Results, the tool that has helped Google and many other start-ups achieve awe-inspiring goals, Doerr presents an action plan to safeguard the planet for generations to come.

The conservation of natural resources, like that of any other asset, involves trade-offs. Yet, in a world faced with the harsh realities of climate change, crafting the right environmental policies is an increasingly urgent task. In Conservation, Charles Perrings and Ann Kinzig bring together new research in economics and biodiversity to investigate conservation decisions and the theory behind them.

Proper stewardship of natural assets and liabilities is a matter of planetary urgency: natural resources have the potential either to transform the poorest countries or to tear them apart, while the carbon emissions and agricultural follies of the rich world could further impoverish them. The Plundered Planet charts a course between unchecked profiteering on the one hand and environmental romanticism on the other to offer realistic and sustainable solutions to dauntingly complex issues.

From the Pulitzer Prize winner and number one international best-selling author of The World Is Flat, an essential and entertaining field guide to thriving in the 21st century. We all sense it - something big is going on. You feel it in your workplace. You feel it when you talk to your children. You can't miss it when you read the newspapers or watch the news. Our lives are speeding up - and it is dizzying.

John Roebling was one of the 19th century's most brilliant engineers, ingenious inventors, successful manufacturers, and fascinating personalities. Raised in a German backwater amid the war-torn chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, he immigrated to the US in 1831, where he became wealthy and acclaimed, eventually receiving a carte-blanche contract to build one of the 19th century's most stupendous and daring works of engineering: a gigantic suspension bridge to span the East River between New York and Brooklyn.

Within every company, there lies a sleeping giant. Companies have long been viewed as either the primary cause of environmental destruction, or as a deep-pocketed funding source for people trying to confront it. But with their access to innovation, new technology, and intellectual firepower, most companies are built to tackle the challenges our planet faces in a way smaller organizations and foundations can’t. What would happen if executives stopped looking at sustainability as a side project for the PR team and saw it instead as a way to benefit the planet and their profits?

As fossil fuel prices rise, oil insecurity deepens, and concerns about climate change cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new energy economy is emerging. Wind, solar, and geothermal energy are replacing oil, coal, and natural gas, at a pace and on a scale we could not have imagined even a year ago. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, we have begun investing in energy sources that can last forever. Plan B 4.0 explores both the nature of this transition to a new energy economy and how it will affect our daily lives.

Economic growth is wrecking the planet. It's the engine driving climate change, pollution, and the shrinking of natural spaces. To save the environment, will we have to shrink the economy? Might this lead to a better society, helping us break free from an obsession with material wealth that only benefits the few? Alessio Terzi takes these questions as a starting point for a journey into the socioeconomic, evolutionary, and cultural origins of our need for growth.

This book will explore whether we can successfully align our politics with climate science and the conditions under which it may be possible to act boldly. Canada’s WWII experience, Klein contends, provides a reminder that we have mobilized in common cause and retooled our economy in a few short years.

Sometimes solving climate change seems impossibly complex. This book offers hope. Drawing on the latest research, Mark Jaccard shows us how to recognize the absolutely essential actions (decarbonizing electricity and transport) and policies (regulations that phase out coal plants and gasoline vehicles, carbon tariffs). Rather than feeling paralyzed and pursuing ineffective efforts, we can all make a few key changes in our lifestyles to reduce emissions, to contribute to the urgently needed affordable energy transition in developed and developing countries.

The machines are here. After decades of sci-fi doomsaying and marketing hype, advanced A.I. and automation technologies have leapt out of research labs and Silicon Valley engineering departments and into the centre of our lives. The world's biggest corporations are racing to automate jobs and some experts predict that A.I could put millions of people out of work. But all is not lost. With a little effort, we can become futureproof.

The climate is the fundamental issue of our time, yet it seems we can barely agree on what is really going on, let alone what needs to be done. We urgently need facts. The Carbon Almanac is a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration between hundreds of writers, researchers, thinkers and leaders that focuses on what we know, what has come before and what might happen next. With thousands of data points, articles and charts explaining carbon's impact on everything in our society, it is the definitive source for facts and the basis for a global movement to fight climate change.

Economists insist that recovery is at hand, yet unemployment remains high, real estate values continue to sink, and governments stagger under record deficits. The End of Growth proposes a startling diagnosis: humanity has reached a fundamental turning point in its economic history. The expansionary trajectory of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable natural limits.

Climate Change and the Road to Net-Zero is a story of how humanity has broken free from the shackles of poverty, suffering, and war and for the first time in human history, grown both population and prosperity. It’s also a story of how a single species has reconfigured the natural world, repurposed the Earth’s resources, and begun to reengineer the climate. The book uses these conflicting narratives to explore the science, economics, technology, and politics of climate change.