Unsustainable World

Using a cross-disciplinary, science and economics-based approach, this book provides a sobering and comprehensive assessment of the multifaceted barriers to achieving sustainability at a global level. Organised into three parts, the book initially defines sustainability and sets the context of the historical and current difficulties facing the world today. In parts two and three, the volume outlines the sustainability challenges faced in transportation, manufacturing and agriculture, and then in turn address the solutions, conditional solutions and non-solutions to these challenges. These include: electric and autonomous automobiles, nuclear power, renewable energy, geoengineering, and carbon capture and storage. The author attempts to differentiate among those proposed solutions and discusses which are most promising and those which are infeasible, counterproductive and potentially a waste of time and money. In each of the book's chapters, the scientific evidence is presented in detail, in keeping with the advice of the young Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, to let the science speak for itself. The author outlines why sustainability is unlikely to be achieved in several key areas of human endeavour and readers are challenged to weigh the scientific evidence for themselves. Using an economic-business based approach, this book introduces students and general readers to the challenges of sustainability and the environmental difficulties facing humanity today.