Two and a half stars, rounding up to three. Oh, I wanted to like this better than I did, and there were some good things about it, but there's one thing, above all else, that's dropping it down from a solid three star rating. This book's full of statistics, of numbers and data, and none of them are sourced. There's no references, no bibliography. There's not even a damn index! I'm sorry, but that's no longer good enough even in non-academic non-fiction. It just isn't. If I want to double check any of their claims, there's no easy way to locate the source. Look, the point of referencing is that if someone's trying to slip something dodgy in, or to massage the data to make it seem supportive of a particular viewpoint, the source can at least be checked. Bloomberg and Pope are very likely being honest, and I have no reason to think that they're not being so, but that's beside the point. People who believe everything they read swallowed down the fact the oil companies buried climate data for years, precisely because they lacked any critical or lateral reading skills, so you'll excuse me if I don't just go along.

That being said, there is some good stuff here. I do think cities are some of the real battlegrounds of climate, and I really appreciate the focus here on what cities can do, and have done, when national governments prove too hidebound to react appropriately to science. The use of concrete examples, such as those described in New York, seem both achievable and hopeful. However, I do think that the focus on the potential of cities to act as bulwarks against climate change has been seriously muddled, here, with the apparent wonder of the market.

Bloomberg, especially, is guilty of panegyric. He admits to being a devoted capitalist, but at least half of his examples and suggestions undermine this supposed approach. Most of them seem to rely on government intervention and I'm all for that, but don't tell me you need government to subsidise and legislate and that the resulting successes are all down to the free market, because they're not. There seems to be a lamentable tendency to ascribe success or failure to the market based on results valued in advance. The base idea here is good, and simple enough: that people will act in their own interests when it comes to the market. Jobs over polar bears, and so forth. But it seems to come down, over and over, to this: if companies are doing dodgy things with regard to climate, then it is government interventions (such as giant subsidies given to oil companies) that is stifling the market (poor market!) and preventing it from working as intended. To fix this, government intervention should make the desired results more competitive (by, for instance, increasing subsidies to renewable energy companies) thereby causing the market to work as intended, and properly.

It all seems a bit arse-ended, if you ask me, though nobody has, and takes away from the very useful focus on what cities can do. I am quite prepared to believe that cities can utilise market forces in order to help mitigate the effects of climate change (several examples of them doing so are well described in this book, so it's foolish to prevaricate on that point) but the desired private-public collaboration so promoted by the authors has more than a whiff of socialise-the-costs-and-privatise-the-profits. Indeed, one of Bloomberg's three major suggestions, in his conclusion, is that the publicly owned Tennessee Valley Authority should "put miners back to work rehabilitating the land that the coal companies have left so scarred" (259). I'd suggest making the coal companies pay for it, given some of the no doubt massive profits they made in their market-driven pursuit of best possible outcome for all, except, wait.

Capitalism can certainly help provide some of the solutions for climate change, but let's not pretend that it hasn't caused the whole problem in the first place, frequently and gleefully unrestrained by things like, oh, clean air and human dignity and regulatory oversight.

Anyway, that's enough ranting from me. In a nutshell: great basic idea, some fantastic examples, muddled by a devoted death grip on capitalism as a solution to all ills, and absolutely no fucking referencing, oh my God.