Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

Not an economist’s treatise but a reporter’s travels, tracing the costs of warming as they show up in farmers’ fields, airline fuel, forests, insurance rates, cities’ costs, petroleum prices and our taxes - and eventually in financial hits to consumers.As Schapiro puts it, “You could inject a black dye representing carbon into the circulatory system of the twenty-first-century economy and see it appear behind every major calculation from here on out, rising with intensity and focus. . . Currently the risks from the dark spread are largely shielded from public view.”Invisibility is compounded by complexity: “Figuring out just what those costs are and who will pay what portion of them is fraught with the realities of biology, the unpredictability of water, the vagaries of the insurance industry, the uneven hand of politics, and, ultimately, the amount that you or I can afford to spend on, say, a tomato, an almond, or a cherry.”And complexity is abetted by government policies and business practices to produce a “fake price in the economic hall of mirrors – in which the price reflects not actual costs but the reflected glare of the margins necessary for oil companies to sustain hefty profits.”This is the best start anyone has made in connecting the dots between the effects of burning carbon and the impacts on our personal finances. Anyone who wants an early glimpse of “How Carbon Is Changing the Cost of Everything” (the subtitle) should read this book.

After reading this book, I can only come to one conclusion. We will never find a solution to the greenhouse solution. And please don't think I am an pessimist by any chance. Read this book. Where do I start, When the EU wanted to impose tariff for green house emissions from aircrafts, our pro-climate change president Mr Obama lobbied together with China and India to shut it down. The Department of Agriculture cannot do much to stop companies like Monsanto who are also responsible for the problem. How companies are buying carbon offsets in underdeveloped countries to compensate for their emissions. Also the failure of UN to validate that some of these offsets are actually even reducing the emissions. Another ironical example of how the carbon allowances market is abused by companies. There is no end to it. This is such a complex problem that expecting we can solve it at a global level is impossible. Every person, every city, every county, every state and every country should do the right thing to curb this independent of what others are doing and we can take baby steps to contain this issue of green house gases emission.Bottomline, ITS ALL ABOUT MONEY AND POWER.If I were to give up being hopeful and see what we have done so far at a global level to combat climate change and how companies have found ways to avoid it or profit from it, I don't think we can solve this problem. Sad but true!

This note in the annotated bibliography of my own writings about the current status of climate change reports says it all: "Mark Schapiro's Carbon SHOCK is the best single volume I have yet encountered in describing what is being done, what must be done more and better, and what should have been done years ago to begin to come to terms with the vast looming impacts of the climate crisis."Bernard Z. Friedlander, PhD, Madison, WI

A crisply written summing up of the struggle to find a price for carbon. Schapiro is a top-notch journalist who is able to connect the dots on the story from Kyoto to Paris. It is a very good set-up for the Paris summits, where we hope we will finally get real commitments to stop subsidizing destruction and start internalizing the costs of climate change.

While the conclusions may be accurate, the science of climates change as presented in the book is so misstated that I had to put it down and delete my Kindle edition after reading a short time. There is NO excuse for this degree of misunderstanding. The basic sciencecis simple and clear and accessible out there, in many places. Thus book misleads on those points.

Wow what a book! Well written and documented. It's a very personal story of his own "in your face" encounters with how we are trashing Earth.

Average - not a big fan of the style

A brilliant and important account of the economics and politics of global warming around the world and what is and what isn't being done to address it.