num_pages: 272
description: In Green Gone Wrong environmental writer Heather Rogers blasts through the marketing buzz of big corporations and asks a simple question: Do today's much-touted green products carbon offsets organic food biofuels and eco-friendly cars and homes really work? Implicit in efforts to go green is the promise that global warming can be stopped by swapping out dirty goods for clean ones. But can earth-friendly products really save the planet? This narrative explores how the most readily available solutions to environmental crisis may be disastrously off the mark. Rogers travels the world tracking how the conversion from a petro to a green society affects the most fundamental aspects of life food shelter and transportation. Reporting from some of the most remote places on earth Rogers uncovers shocking results that include massive clear-cutting destruction of native ecosystems and grinding poverty. Relying simply on market forces people with good intentions wanting to just do something to help the planet are left feeling confused and powerless.Green Gone Wrong reveals a fuller story taking the reader into forests fields factories and boardrooms around the world to draw out the unintended consequences inherent obstacles and successes of eco-friendly consumption. What do the labels USDA Certified Organic and Fair Trade really mean on a vast South American export-driven organic farm? A superlow-energy eco-village in Germany's Black Forest demonstrates that green homes dramatically shrink energy use so why aren't we using this technology in America? The decisions made in Detroit's executive suites have kept Americans driving gas-guzzling automobiles for decades even as U.S. automakers have European models that clock twice the mpg. Why won't they sell these cars domestically? And what does carbon offsetting really mean when projects can so easily fail? In one case thousands of trees planted in drought-plagued Southern India withered and died releasing any CO2 they were meant to neutralize. Green Gone Wrong speaks to anyone interested in climate change and the future of the natural world as well as those who want to act but are caught not knowing who or what to believe to protect the planet.
language: English
title: Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution
publisher: Scribner