Balancing Green by
An expert on business strategy offers a pragmatic take on how businesses of all sizes balance the competing demands of profitability and employment with sustainability. The demands and stresses on companies only grow as executives face a multitude of competing business goals. Their stakeholders are interested in corporate profits, jobs, business growth, and environmental sustainability. In this book, business strategy expert Yossi Sheffi offers a pragmatic take on how businesses of all sizes--from Coca Cola and Siemens to Dr. Bronner's Magical Soaps and Patagonia--navigate these competing goals. Drawing on extensive interviews with more than 250 executives, Sheffi examines the challenges, solutions, and implications of balancing traditional business goals with sustainability. Sheffi, author of the widely read The Resilient Enterprise, argues that business executives' personal opinions on environmental sustainability are irrelevant. The business merits of environmental sustainability are based on the fact that even the most ardent climate change skeptics in the C-suite face natural resource costs, public relations problems, regulatory burdens, and a green consumer segment. Sheffi presents three basic business rationales for corporate sustainability efforts: cutting costs, reducing risk, and achieving growth. For companies, sustainability is not a simple case of "profits versus planet" but is instead a more subtle issue of (some) people versus (other) people--those looking for jobs and inexpensive goods versus others who seek a pristine environment. This book aims to help companies satisfy these conflicting motivations for both economic growth and environmental sustainability.
Constructing Green
Experts consider green construction and the social, institutional, and cultural changes associated with it, through a sociological and organizational lens. Buildings are the nation's greatest energy consumers. Forty percent of all our energy is used for heating, cooling, lighting, and powering machines and devices in buildings. And despite decades of investment in green construction technologies, residential and commercial buildings remain stubbornly energy inefficient. This book looks beyond the technological and material aspects of green construction to examine the cultural, social, and organizational shifts that sustainable building requires, examining the fundamental challenge to centuries-long traditions in design and construction that green building represents. The contributors consider the changes associated with green building through a sociological and organizational lens. They discuss shifts in professional expertise created by new social concerns about green building, including evolving boundaries of professional jurisdictions; changing industry strategies and structures, including the roles of ownership, supply firms, and market niches; new operational, organizational, and cultural arrangements, including the mainstreaming of environmental concerns; narratives and frames that influence the perception of green building; and future directions for the theory and practice of sustainable construction. The essays offer uniquely multidisciplinary insights into the transformative potential of green building and the obstacles that must be overcome to make it the norm. Contributors Lauren Barhydt, Clayton Bartczak, Lyn Bartram, Olivier Berthod, Nicole Woolsey Biggart, Lenora Bohren, Bertien Broekhans, William Browning, Zinta S. Byrne, Michael Conger, Jennifer E. Cross, David Deal, Beth M. Duckles, Brian Dunbar, Robert Eccles, Amy Edmondson, Bill Franzen, Ronald Fry, Rebecca L. Henn, Jock Herron, Stephen Hockley, Andrew J. Hoffman, Kathryn B. Janda, Nitin Joglekar, Gavin Killip, Alison G. Kwok, Larissa Larsen, Michelle A. Meyer, Christine Mondor, Monica Ponce de Leon, Nicholas B. Rajkovich, Stuart Reeve, Johnny Rodgers, Garima Sharma, Geoffrey Thün, Ellen van Bueren, Kathy Velikov, Rohit Verma, Robert Woodbury, Jeffrey G. York, Jie Zhang
The Economics of Infrastructure Provisioning: The Changing Role of the State by
The complexities of financing, installing, implementing, and regulating public infrastructures, including empirical research, analytical models, and theoretical insights.
Green Giants? by
The United States in recent years has been abandoning its historical role as a leader in environmental regulation. At the same time, the European Union, spurred by political integration, has enacted many new environmental laws and assumed a leadership role in promoting global environmental sustainability. Green Giants?, one of the most detailed comparisons of the environmental policies of America and Europe yet undertaken, looks at current policy trends in the United States and the European Union--the two largest economic actors in the world--and the implications they have for future transatlantic and global cooperation. The contributors--leading European and American scholars and practitioners--examine similarities and differences in specific policy areas in order to assess whether United States and European Union policies are diverging, pursuing similar goals and methods, or undergoing a "hybridization" through joint learning and exchanges. They find that although European and American policies may parallel each other somewhat in domestic regulation, they are clearly diverging in the "third generation" of environmental concerns, which include such global problems as climate change, international trade, and sustainable development. In the final chapter the editors conclude that transatlantic dialogue and cooperation at the highest level are necessary if these two economic and political giants are to lead the international community toward a stable and secure ecological future.
Small, Gritty, and Green by
How small-to-midsize Rust Belt cities can play a crucial role in a low-carbon, sustainable, and relocalized future. America's once-vibrant small-to-midsize cities--Syracuse, Worcester, Akron, Flint, Rockford, and others--increasingly resemble urban wastelands. Gutted by deindustrialization, outsourcing, and middle-class flight, disproportionately devastated by metro freeway systems that laid waste to the urban fabric and displaced the working poor, small industrial cities seem to be part of America's past, not its future. And yet, Catherine Tumber argues in this provocative book, America's gritty Rust Belt cities could play a central role in a greener, low-carbon, relocalized future. As we wean ourselves from fossil fuels and realize the environmental costs of suburban sprawl, we will see that small cities offer many assets for sustainable living not shared by their big city or small town counterparts, including population density and nearby, fertile farmland available for new environmentally friendly uses. Tumber traveled to twenty-five cities in the Northeast and Midwest--from Buffalo to Peoria to Detroit to Rochester--interviewing planners, city officials, and activists, and weaving their stories into this exploration of small-scale urbanism. Smaller cities can be a critical part of a sustainable future and a productive green economy. Small, Gritty, and Green will help us develop the moral and political imagination we need to realize this.
Climate Policy and Nonrenewable Resources by
A detailed and rigorous analysis of the effect of climate policies on climate change that questions the empirical and theoretical support for the "green paradox." Recent developments suggest that well-intended climate policies--including carbon taxes and subsidies for renewable energy--might not accomplish what policy makers intend. Hans-Werner Sinn has described a "green paradox," arguing that these policies could hasten global warming by encouraging owners of fossil fuel reserves to increase their extraction rates for fear that their reserves will become worthless. In this volume, economists investigate the empirical and theoretical support for the green paradox. Offering detailed and rigorous analyses of the forces and assumptions driving Sinn's argument, the contributors consider whether rising carbon tax rates inevitably speed up climate change; the effects of the design of resource markets, the availability of clean substitutes, and the development of new technologies; and the empirical evidence (or lack thereof) for the green paradox result. They consider extraction costs; sustainability and innovation; timing, announcement effects, and time consistency in relation to policy measures; and empirical results for the green paradox phenomena under several alternative policy measures. Contributors Julien Daubanes, Corrado Di Maria, Carolyn Fischer, Florian Habermacher, Michael Hoel, Darko Jus, Gebhard Kirchgassner, Ian Lange, Pierre Lasserre, Volker Meier, Karen Pittel, Stephen Salant, Frank Stähler, Gerard van der Meijden, Frederick van der Ploeg, Edwin van der Werf, Ngo Van Long, Ralph A. Winter, Cees Withagen
Repairing Infrastructures: The Maintenance of Materiality and Power by
An investigation of the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life.
Environmental Ethics: A Very Short Introduction
Environmental Law: A Very Short Introduction
Environmental Law Principles
Examining Ecology by 
Lessons from the Clean Air Act
U.S. Environmental Policy in Action
Wildlife Law: A Primer