Edward Elgar Publishing

Europe and global climate change; politics, foreign policy and regional cooperation.

This collection of 16 articles by international and multidisciplinary contributors take a single environmental issue, climate change, and explore responses at the European Union (EU) level, providing extensive commentary on projects, studies and policies. Contributors examine national political approaches to global climate change issues from a variety of angles, describing domestic sources of German foreign policy on the issue, the awkward role of the United Kingdom, the reliance on middle power leadership in foreign policy negotiations in the Netherlands, Polish and Swedish policies in the EU context, Spain's new enthusiasm and Norway's traditional NGO approach. Topics on the EU acting as its own entity include creating consensus, creating common policy, developing policy diffusion, meeting the Kyoto commitments, tracking policy shifts as the EU expands, sharing ideas and burdens, and explaining how domestic aims and international policy work together. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Government and public health in America.

For all the praise and blame of the private health care industry in the US, says Hamowy (emeritus history, U. of Alberta and economics, George Mason U., US) over 45% of all medical costs are paid by some political entity, mostly the US government. He provides detailed studies of five agencies involved in health care, including the history and politics of how they got to where they are today. They are the Public Health Service, Food and Drug Administration, Veterans Administration, National Institutes of Health, and Medicare. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The impact of climate change on regional systems; a comprehensive analysis of California.

In one of the first comprehensive and integrated studies of the impact of climate change on a specific region, economists, engineers, planners, and other professionals develop a methodology for measuring regional climate impact, and apply it to California. They consider such aspects as socio-economic changes, urbanization, biodiversity, timber, runoff, crop yields and irrigation demand, agriculture, energy, and the coast. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Industrial ecology and spaces of innovation.

This series of studies addresses the issue of how innovation systems and industrial ecology can actually inform each other, although they seem to have incompatible agendas. They introduce both disciplines, then describe techniques and cases in industrial ecology including a study in the UK and applications to developing countries, followed by perspectives on transformation an variety raised by industrial ecology in such areas as food consumption and production systems, the interplay of sustainability and networks of regulations and firms, and the experience of China in developing waste incineration for energy. Articles describe consumption from the view of theories of practice and the ecology of intermediation, while others describe enabling designs for deep industrial ecology and personal values transformation from a social ecology perspective and the social and political ecology of industrial ecology. The concluding article reviews emerging themes. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)