Slow Burn
The Hidden Costs of a Warming World
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- 25,99 €
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- 25,99 €
Descrição da editora
How the subtle but significant consequences of a hotter planet have already begun—from lower test scores to higher crime rates—and how we might tackle them today
It’s hard not to feel anxious about the problem of climate change, especially if we think of it as an impending planetary catastrophe. In Slow Burn, R. Jisung Park encourages us to view climate change through a different lens: one that focuses less on the possibility of mass climate extinction in a theoretical future, and more on the everyday implications of climate change here and now.
Drawing on a wealth of new data and cutting-edge economics, Park shows how climate change headlines often miss some of the most important costs. When wildfires blaze, what happens to people downwind of the smoke? When natural disasters destroy buildings and bridges, what happens to educational outcomes? Park explains how climate change operates as the silent accumulation of a thousand tiny conflagrations: imperceptibly elevated health risks spread across billions of people; pennies off the dollar of productivity; fewer opportunities for upward mobility.
By investigating how the physical phenomenon of climate change interacts with social and economic institutions, Park illustrates how climate change already affects everyone, and may act as an amplifier of inequality. Wealthier households and corporations may adapt quickly, but, without targeted interventions, less advantaged communities may not.
Viewing climate change as a slow and unequal burn comes with an important silver lining. It puts dollars and cents behind the case for aggressive emissions cuts and helps identify concrete steps that can be taken to better manage its adverse effects. We can begin to overcome our climate anxiety, Park shows us, when we begin to tackle these problems locally.
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This unconventional debut study from Park, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, examines the less intuitive consequences of the climate crisis. Surveying research on the indirect effects of wildfire smoke, Park points to studies showing that on days with poor air quality, Israeli students performed 15% worse on tests and California farms were 6% less productive. Hotter weather has been correlated with numerous negative outcomes, Park reports, citing evidence that social media users curse more and judges give harsher sentences when the temperature increases. These burdens will not be distributed equally, Park warns, noting that in the U.S., poorer neighborhoods with more residents of color tend to be hotter than "wealthier, whiter areas within the same city" owing to a comparative lack of greenery. Park suggests ameliorative policies might include energy subsidies to help people without air-conditioning install cooling systems and making it easier to access credit for climate change–related investments, which could help lower-income individuals update their homes to deal with climate threats, or move to less affected regions. Discussions sometimes get bogged down in scholarly minutiae, as when Park offers a detailed investigation of the pros and cons of various methods for calculating heat deaths, but the unsettling research makes clear that climate change's effects will reverberate even further than commonly understood. It's enough to make readers break out in a sweat.