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Book Reviews

How Much Would You Pay for aTon of Carbon? It Depends

Getting to Zero: Defining Corporate CarbonNeutrality, edited by B. Burtis and I. Watt.Portsmouth, NH: Clean Air-Cool Planet andForum for the Future, 2008. Available at www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/documents/zero.pdf.

A Consumer’s Guide to Retail Carbon OffsetProviders, edited by Bill Burtis and prepared byTrexler Climate + Energy Services, Inc., forClean Air-Cool Planet, 2006. Available at www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/ConsumersGuidetoCarbonOffsets.pdf.

Voluntary Carbon Markets: An International Busi-ness Guide to What They Are and How They Work,by Ricardo Bayon, Amanda Hawn, and Kather-ine Hamilton. London. Earthscan, 2007, 184 pp,ISBN 9781844074174, £24.95.

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol: A Corporate Ac-counting and Reporting Standard (revised edi-tion), by the World Resources Institute andthe World Business Council for SustainableDevelopment, 2004, 112 pp., ISBN 1-56973-568-9, free download. Available at www.ghgprotocol.org/files/ghg-protocol-revised.pdf.

Reducing U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions: HowMuch at What Cost? by Jon Creyts, AntonDerkach, Scott Nyquist, Ken Ostrowski, and JackStephenson for McKinsey & Co., 2007. Avail-able at www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/ccsi/pdf/US_ghg_final_report.pdf.

Alongside the $60 billion (and growing)global compliance markets for reducing green-house gas emissions has emerged a new, volun-tary market for carbon offsets. In this review, I

c© 2009 by Yale UniversityDOI: 10.1111/j.1530-9290.2008.00080.x

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examine some of the seminal reports and publi-cations of recent years to better understand therationale behind these markets and the chal-lenges they present to achieving verifiable green-house gas emission reductions. The review beginswith Getting to Zero: Defining Carbon Neutralityand A Consumer’s Guide to Retail Carbon OffsetProviders, which are intended to provide a betterunderstanding of terms such as carbon neutrality,carbon footprint, and carbon offsets. From therethe scope broadens, with an examination of Vol-untary Carbon Markets: An International BusinessGuide to What They Are and How They Work, bythe Ecosystems Marketplace.

These reports reveal that there is a growingneed for better accounting and standards withinthese markets; therefore, I review The GreenhouseGas Protocol: A Corporate Accounting and Report-ing Standard, by the World Resources Institute(WRI) and the World Business Council for Sus-tainable Development (WBCSD). This reviewessay on voluntary carbon markets ends with adiscussion of the climate change research inno-vation of the year: McKinsey & Company’s Re-ducing U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions: How Muchat What Cost? Collectively, this reading list pro-vides a comprehensive overview of what a priceon carbon can do to inspire innovation and cre-ate a $100 million market that confronts globalwarming yet is one of the fastest growing marketsin the world.

As greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise,so do the countless societal responses to curb-ing those emissions. The emergence of carbonneutrality—the Oxford American Dictionary’s“Word of the Year” for 2006—has led to a bur-geoning market in the development and supportfor carbon offset projects by corporations and cit-izens alike. Clean Air-Cool Planet, a U.S.-basednongovernmental organization (NGO), attemptsto provide clarity to these markets through itsinformative guides Getting to Zero: Defining Car-bon Neutrality and A Consumer’s Guide to RetailCarbon Offset Providers.

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Getting to Zero is a layman’s guide for com-panies in pursuit of an elusive carbon neutralityobjective. This guide warns companies againstmaking absolute claims of carbon neutrality andespouses a strategic carbon management ap-proach of determining one’s carbon footprintand then pursuing avoidance, reduction, replace-ment, and offset strategies for reducing green-house gas emissions. Whether a company’s goalis to reduce its absolute emissions or to lower thecarbon intensity of its products or services, Get-ting to Zero offers a user-friendly outline to un-derstanding some basic questions, such as “Whatis a company’s carbon footprint?” and “Whatare the basic approaches to achieving ‘carbonneutrality’?”

The guide does an excellent job of helpingcompanies conceptually understand the carbonfootprint of their products, services, and oper-ations by helping them clarify the boundariesof their value chain—from upstream (i.e., ex-traction, production, and transportation of rawmaterials) to downstream (i.e., product distribu-tion, use, and disposal) greenhouse gas emissions.For industrial ecology enthusiasts, the guide notesthat “the process for achieving neutrality shouldbegin with an inventory of the company’s entirecarbon footprint (or a life-cycle analysis of a par-ticular product)” (4). If you are interested in theanalytical practice of how companies determinetheir carbon footprint, Getting to Zero will leaveyou looking for more. If this is the case, then youmight consider adding WRI and WBCSD’s TheGreenhouse Gas Protocol: A Corporate Accountingand Reporting Standard to your bedtime readinglist to accompany Getting to Zero. Getting to Zerois a useful guide for those new to the carbon neu-trality quest and prepares readers for entry intothe adventurous world of carbon markets—theunregulated voluntary carbon offset market.

A Consumer’s Guide to Retail Carbon OffsetProviders is another valuable offering by CleanAir-Cool Planet. This guide educates consumerson what to look for in an offset provider andoffers some objective criteria for assessing retailsupplier quality. The guide establishes weightedquality criteria and uses a questionnaire and pub-licly available resources to collect informationthat ultimately ranks more than 30 retail carbonoffset providers in the marketplace. The reader is

left to assume that the “top eight” retail providersnoted in the report receive the Clean Air-CoolPlanet “stamp of approval” and the others do not.As I read through the guide, I became more andmore interested in knowing the final quantitativerankings (not alphabetical listings) and seeingmore detail on the types of carbon offset projectsbeing supported by these retail suppliers of carbonoffsets. Perhaps that information could be madeavailable in a follow-up report by Clean Air-CoolPlanet in a score table and sidebars.

The guide provides a great set of criteria toassess a retail carbon offset provider, including abaseline determination and type of projects be-ing pursued as well as the permanence, verifia-bility, and additionality aspects of supplier ap-proaches to carbon offset projects. A Consumer’sGuide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers also offerssome “cool” facts that will impress your friends,such as the fact that we emit 1 ton of greenhousegas emissions for every 2,000 miles we travelin an airplane or that, on average, a U.S. resi-dent emits 21 tons of greenhouse gas emissions ayear.

The purchase of retail carbon offsets is a funda-mental part of any comprehensive carbon-neutralstrategy. As Clean Air-Cool Planet points out,offsets not only lead to cost-effective reductionsof greenhouse gas emissions that would not haveoccurred otherwise but also provide other impor-tant societal cobenefits (e.g., educate the publicabout climate change and demonstrate to policy-makers that the issue of climate change is ripe forpublic policy). A Consumer’s Guide to Retail Car-bon Offset Providers makes clear that carbon off-sets come in different varieties—from offsets thatprotect forests to those that lead to improved fuelefficiency of diesel trucks. Consumers are beingoffered a whole menu of offset products at varyingprices, which is exciting but presents challengesin verifying that emission reductions are actuallyoccurring.

Voluntary Carbon Markets: An InternationalBusiness Guide to What They Are and How TheyWork provides a more in-depth look at the mar-kets for carbon offsets than do Getting to Zeroand A Consumer’s Guide to Retail Carbon OffsetProviders by Clean Air-Cool Planet. As the self-proclaimed Bloomberg of information on volun-tary markets for ecosystem services (i.e., water

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quality, biodiversity, and carbon mitigation), theEcosystem Marketplace, a leading consultancy inthis arena, does a thorough job and covers a lotof ground, including an overview of complianceversus voluntary markets, a comparison of car-bon offsets versus renewable energy certificates(RECs), and an explanation of the supply and de-mand characteristics for the life cycles of carbonoffsets—from project origination by developersto offset product consumption by institutions.

This guide picks up where the other guidesleft off by diving into some major issues of impor-tance, including the types of projects the marketis currently developing—from your typical “low-hanging fruit” commodity offset projects (i.e.methane capture from landfills, livestock, andcoal mines) to your “gourmet” or charismatic car-bon offset projects that advance the goals of sus-tainable development (i.e., reforestation, avoideddeforestation, and renewable energy). This guidealso delves more into the nascent market for in-dependent verification and certification servicesby covering the major standards (i.e., Green-e, Voluntary Carbon Standard, Gold Standard,and CCX) intended to bring more credibility tothe voluntary carbon markets. I believe that theguide is incomplete, however, in that it shouldhave gone into further detail about the roleand function of registries and exchanges to com-plete the reader’s tutorial on these markets. De-spite this shortcoming, Voluntary Carbon Mar-kets offers a lot of insight and is well worth theinvestment.

One of the strengths of this guide is the com-parison of the voluntary markets for carbon off-sets to the burgeoning market for RECs in theUnited States. With more of a consumer historyin the U.S. markets, retailers of RECs are beingconfronted with the challenges of communicat-ing greenhouse gas emission mitigation benefitsin light of the emerging carbon offset markets.The guide does an excellent job of summarizingthe similarities and differences of these marketsand confronts them head-on by providing an op-portunity for two experts to take opposite sidesof the debate. The issue of carbon offsets andRECs will be an ongoing, contentious debate inthe United States for years to come, as marketmakers attempt to reconcile their differences. Ifyou are interested in exploring this area further,

I recommend that you read Redefining REC, byGillenwater (2007a, 2007b).

One of the other unique aspects of this guide isthe inclusion of several notable experts express-ing their views on the role of voluntary carbonmarkets and their potential to advance green-house gas emission reduction strategies. I foundRoss and Corzo’s piece on carbon sequestrationprojects in Mexico to provide a compelling posi-tion against the stringent rules of the clean de-velopment mechanism (CDM) and for the needfor flexibility that the voluntary carbon marketsprovide. The reader may find the opinion of In-terface’s Erin Meezan particularly of interest, asshe discusses their efforts to design and manu-facture a “carbon neutral” product called CoolCarpetTM that offsets the carbon emissions overthe entire life cycle of the product. Again, thesetypes of cases lack quantitative discussion onthe life cycle assessment (LCA), but the readergains a perspective on how a manufacturer viewsthe carbon impact of its products. Given thatthe Center for Business and the Environment atYale University (where I work) took up the issueof carbon finance in 2008, I particularly foundthe opinion by Lorna Slade of the bank HSBCto provide some invaluable insights into the fi-nance sector’s views of the risks and opportuni-ties presented by the voluntary carbon markets. Ifthe carbon markets can unleash the investmentcapital of the finance community, then perhapsthe development of higher order carbon offsetprojects and clean technologies can be advancedand accelerated to meet the climate changechallenge.

The Ecosystem Marketplace’s Voluntary Car-bon Markets is another must-read guide if onewants to understand the fundamental supply anddemand drivers within the unregulated marketsof voluntary carbon offsets. Together with Get-ting to Zero and A Consumer’s Guide to RetailCarbon Offset Providers, in 1 week you can get athorough understanding of the underlying com-plexities, challenges, and motivations of the en-trepreneurs and businesses operating in thesemarkets. In order to go further, it is necessary tograpple with standards for carbon emissions andcredits.

The business of climate change all starts withhaving an accounting and reporting standard

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for greenhouse gas emissions, and the Green-house Gas Protocol has become the preemi-nent standard. An effort led by the WRI, aWashington-based environmental think tank,and the WBCSD, a Geneva-based global associ-ation of businesses, this standard was developedby a large team of experts, which gives it the nec-essary credibility and industry applicability thatit requires. One of the key aspects analysts andinterested stakeholders assess in terms of corpo-rate carbon disclosure is what greenhouse gas ac-counting standard a company uses; more oftenthan not, that standard is the Greenhouse GasProtocol.

One quick glance at the table of contentsand the reader can get a sense of the thorough-ness of this important standard. From providingguidance on goals, inventory design, manage-ment of inventory quality, and determination ofgreenhouse gas targets to setting a standard fororganization and operational boundary setting,emissions tracking, and greenhouse gas emissionsreporting, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol is a must-read if you want to enter the world of carbondisclosure. If you have heard about the CarbonDisclosure Project, the United Nations GlobalCompact’s Caring for Climate Initiative, Princi-ples for Responsible Investing, or ESG (Environ-ment, Social and Corporate Governance) issues,then you are most likely benefiting from the ac-counting and reporting standard of the Green-house Gas Protocol.

Nonetheless, there is still a lot of learningoccurring with greenhouse gas accounting andreporting standards, as evidenced by the discus-sion of scope 3 emissions within this protocol andscope 4 emissions suggested by others (Matthewset al. 2008). The entrance of more independentthird-party verification firms, such as Pricewater-houseCoopers, into the greenhouse gas account-ing field provides more confidence to the invest-ment community in the production and use ofcorporate reporting on greenhouse gas emissions.The issue of accounting standards and reporting isincreasingly becoming more important as we ap-proach the post-2012 Kyoto period and COP15(the United Nations Climate Change Confer-ence, in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2009). Thequestion is, will companies eventually be man-dated to account and report greenhouse gas emis-

sions, as opposed to dealing with them on a vol-untary basis? Having a consistent accounting andreporting standard, such as the Greenhouse GasProtocol, will become important as the marketsseek to value the winners and losers in the low-carbon economy of the future.

The last publication reviewed here is McKin-sey and Company’s report Reducing U.S. Green-house Gas Emissions: How Much at What Cost,arguably one of the climate change research in-novations of the year for 2007. The central con-clusion of this report is that “the United Statescould reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 2030by 3.0 to 4.5 gigatons of CO2e . . . at marginalcosts less than $50 per ton” (ix). Recognizing theinherent market uncertainties and key assump-tions that underlie reports of this nature (i.e.,using $59 a barrel of oil as the long-term energyprice), I suggest that McKinsey’s innovation hereis not its conclusions but instead the use of amethodology for determining the marginal costsand benefits of various abatement strategies incombination with goal setting.

McKinsey uses a “techno-engineering” costaccounting approach that incorporates capital,operating, and maintenance costs as well as en-ergy savings that result from the reduction of 1ton of CO2e. In its analyses, McKinsey assumes a7% discount rate and excludes transaction costs,information costs, taxes, tariffs, subsidies, andeven a price for carbon; without these exclusions,the bottom-line economics of various greenhousegas reduction measures get better. In using thismethodology, readers with more understandingof local and regional public policies and tech-nology applications can begin to assemble theirown portfolio strategies for investing in profitablesolutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

For years, efforts have been underway acrossthe United States to implement a variety ofgreenhouse gas emission reduction strategies inthe power, transportation, industry, buildings,agriculture, and forestry sectors (see Governorson the March, by Northrop et al. [2008]). Giventhat in the years ahead, the United States willlikely face heightened pressure—at home andabroad—to reduce its overall carbon footprint,this report by McKinsey and Company is one ofthe seminal works of the year; it not only shedslight on some practical and affordable climate

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solutions but, more important, enables more cre-ative thinking for entrepreneurs to assemble port-folio strategies for investing in climate changesolutions.

Bryan GarciaCenter for Business and the Environment

at Yale UniversityNew Haven, Connecticut

References

Gillenwater, M. 2007a. Redefining RECs (Part 1): Un-tangling attributes and offsets (Version 2). Prince-ton, NJ: Science, Technology and Environmen-tal Policy Program, Woodrow Wilson Schoolof Public and International Affairs, PrincetonUniversity.

Gillenwater, M. 2007b. Redefining RECs (Part 2): Un-tangling certificates and emission markets. Princeton,NJ: Science, Technology and Environmental Pol-icy Program, Woodrow Wilson School of Publicand International Affairs, Princeton University.

Matthews, H. S., C. T. Hendrickson, and C.L. Weber. 2008. The importance of car-bon footprint estimation boundaries. Environ-mental Science & Technology 42(16): 5839–5842.

Northrop, M., D. Sassoon, and K. Colburn. 2008. Gov-ernors on the march. Environmental Finance June:30–31.

Tasty or Sustainable Food:A Dilemma All Trussed up

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History ofFour Meals, by Michael Pollan. New York: Pen-guin, 2006, 464 pp., ISBN 9781594200823,$26.95

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, byMichael Pollan. New York: Penguin, 2008, 256pp., ISBN 9781594201455, $21.95.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma was named one of theten best books of 2006 by The New York Times andThe Washington Post. But will it be palatable to anindustrial ecologist? To find out, I embarked on a

quest spanning well over 400 pages and found ita rewarding literary experience. Pollan employsan extremely elegant style, and the book con-tains all kinds of educational trivia. Nonetheless,I wondered about the originally intended tar-get audience. In the introduction—appropriatelytitled “Our National Eating Disorder”—Pollanstates that the book’s central theme is the ques-tion “What should we have for dinner?” InEurope, though, in spite of globalization, the cul-tural food patterns carved out 2,000 years ago arestill demonstrated today (De Boer et al. 2006).Pollan explains his approach to “the dinner ques-tion as a naturalist might, using the long lenses ofecology and anthropology, as well as the shorter,more intimate lens of personal experience” (6).He makes just one—fleeting—remark on the tar-get audience:

Many people today seem perfectly contenteating at the end of an industrial food chain,without a thought in the world; this book isprobably not for them. There are things in itthat will ruin their appetites. But in the endthis is a book about the pleasures of eating,the kinds of pleasure that are only deepenedby knowing. (11)

In line with the overall approach, the book isstructured into three parts, each of which followsa particular type of food chain (industrialized, or-ganic, and hunter−gatherer) from field to fork—the author’s fork, that is, which enhances thehands-on sensation. This works fine and greatlycontributes to the book’s success. Each part endsin a meal.

The first part—Industrial (Corn)—revolvesaround a fast-food meal consumed in a car at65 mph. The author “enjoys” a cheeseburger, hiswife a salad, and his son a portion of chickennuggets. In the six chapters leading up to themeal, Pollan takes his time to trace the mostimportant ingredients back to the field, describ-ing the underlying impacts of nitrogen fertilizersand multinationals such as Monsanto, Cargill,and McDonalds in the process. We meet farmerGeorge Naylor, with whom Pollan rides a clatter-ing 1975 International Harvester tractor to plantthe last 160 acres of corn, shortly before “he’dstart in on the soybeans . . . the classic Corn Beltrotation since the 1970s” (35) and with whom

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he has discussions on U.S. farm policy. We followthe corn via the grain elevator to the feedlot. Theeconomic “necessity” of the concentrated animalfeeding operation (CAFO) is explained in detail,as is the gastrointestinal contradiction of feed-ing corn to ruminants. The associated bloatingand acidosis are underlined, as well as the inher-ent feed-loss inefficiency and need for antibioticsand other pharmaceuticals.

In the aftermath of the meal on wheels, Pol-lan makes some calculations, which is not hisstrongest selling point. For example, in spite ofthe huge difference in conversion efficiency be-tween the two species, Pollan claims that 90%of the energy in corn is wasted when it is fedfirst to a steer or a chicken (p. 118), which maybe true for the latter only (Smil 2000). Overall,he estimates that his family’s three-person lunchcomprised 4,510 calories and that growing andprocessing those food calories took at least tentimes as many calories of fossil fuel. The eyeopener, however, is a mass spectrometer estimate(based on the carbon 12/13 ratio) of the extentto which the meal constituents derive from corn:The soda is 100% from corn, the milk shakeis 78%, the salad dressing is 65%, the chickennuggets are 56%, the cheeseburger is 52%, andeven the french fries come out at 23%. From cor-nucopia to corn-utopia in 10 seconds flat. There-fore, Pollan concludes that fast food is just corndrenched in fossil fuel. Moreover, he doesn’t likethe meal’s taste.

The second part—Pastoral (Grass)—featurestwo alternative meals, both “organic.” It starts outon Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm. On this mixedfarm, Pollan helps make hay—indeed, while thesun is shining—but he makes it abundantly clearthat the pastoral idyll is a fairytale. He explainsthe rotation of beef cattle grazing the pasture,followed by the “sanitation crew” of several hun-dred laying hens, which eliminate fly larvae andparasites as well as spread the manure. By the endof the season, the grasses will have been trans-formed into thousands of eggs, rabbits, turkeys,and broilers plus thousands of pounds of beefand pork. Joel Salatin’s farm compares very fa-vorably to George Naylor’s with respect to sus-tainability, but, technically speaking, it is notan organic farm. Elaborating on this idea, Pol-lan then investigates a Big Organic food chain,

which he labels “supermarket pastoral,” explain-ing the political power struggle underlying itsevolution from Little Organic. At Greenways Or-ganic, supplier to Small Planet Foods, insects arecontrolled by organic (i.e., mostly plant-derived)toxic compounds, such as rotenone, pyrethrum,and nicotine sulfate. As Pollan observes, this is“a much greener machine, but a machine never-theless” (159). Weed control is by heavy tillage,which leads to increased nitrogen fertilizer re-quirements, such as Chilean nitrate: forbiddenunder international organic rules but permittedunder federal rules. Pollan is not very sympathetictoward the fossil fuel expenditure on prewashedorganic lettuce, either.

Tracking down an organic roasting chickenbought at Whole Foods leads him to PetalumaPoultry. There, he discovers that the federal rulemandating that an organic chicken should have“access to the outdoors” does not necessarily de-mand that these doors should be unlocked. Thistrip completes Pollan’s quest and ends in his or-ganic industrial meal. His verdict on the bettertaste and healthiness of this meal is a definitemaybe, but his verdict on its sustainability islethal. He hands down the final sentence: “Andso, today, the organic food industry finds itselfin a most unexpected, uncomfortable, and, yes,unsustainable position: floating on a sinking seaof petroleum” (184). The author then returns toPolyface Farm, singing the blessings of the mixedfarming system in lively detail. His week on thefarm is described day by day, including hands-onslaughter of some chickens and sales in a farmer’smarket. In stark contrast to the organic industrialmeal, however, the concluding grass-fed meal isconsidered a “sublime bite” (273).

In the third and final part—Personal (theForest)—the author wants to prepare a meal en-tirely from ingredients he has hunted, gathered,or grown himself to “recover the fundamental bi-ological realities that the complexities of modernindustrialized eating keep from our view” (281).We meet Angelo, who has “a passion vergingon obsession about the getting and preparing offood” (282). The evolutionary trade-off betweenbig guts (koalas) and big brains (rats and hu-mans, to name a few omnivores) is proposed andillustrated in terms of risk-avoiding strategies. Achapter on gathering mushrooms describes both

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the risks associated with toxic mushrooms andthe competition with fellow mushroom hunters.A whole chapter on the ethics of eating ani-mals precedes the chapter on hunting pigs. Pollandoes not address the unsustainability of wastingvaluable resources (land, water, biodiversity, etc.)by converting about 6 kg of plant proteins into1 kg of animal protein plus eutrophying emis-sions. Even though the 90% conversion lossesin terms of energy are mentioned briefly onpage 118 and the nitrogen limitation of the hu-man population is discussed on pages 42–43, meatis not convicted (Steinfeld et al. 2006; Patel2008).

Finally, Pollan eats the “perfect meal,” whichis also the name of the book’s final chapter. Thisfive-course dinner served to his contributing com-pany of carefree Californians is described in tran-scendent terms.

The meal was more ritual than realistic be-cause it dwelled on such things, reminding ushow very much nature offers to the omnivore,the forests as much as the fields, the oceansas much as the meadows. If I had to givethis dinner a name, it would have to be theOmnivore’s Thanksgiving. (410)

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an interestingbook. Evidently, it caters more to citizens—ifnot to yuppies—than to scholars, but everyone’sa food consumer out of necessity, and everyonewill recognize the basic question of what to havefor dinner. Tracing four meals back to their ori-gins serves as a good vehicle by which to feedthe reader some tasty morsels on the historical,cultural, political, technological, biological, andchemical processes underlying current food sys-tems in the developed world in general and theUnited States in particular. In fact, it stands toreason that both the industrialization of the foodsupply and its repercussions on sustainability arefeatured throughout the book. Pollan touches onmany interesting topics and issues; however, hisdigging is not very deep, and it is not balancedvery well. Although the story is told in a capti-vating and literate way, it lacks precious detail.The trouble is that sustainability (and industrialecology) is inherently quantitative. It is about in-terfering in geochemical cycles and shifting dy-namic equilibriums. It is about scale and rate of

acceleration. Compared to the carbon cycle, theimportance of our interference in the nitrogenand water cycles as a result of food production(Smil 2000; Liu et al. 2008) is underexposed inthe book, and meat is let off the hook. The evolu-tion of agriculture and industry (and the technol-ogy involved) has both shaped and been shapedby world population growth (Evans 1998). Hav-ing both gastronomy for the whole world and asustainable environment is not an option. Youcannot have your cake and eat it—that is thereal dilemma. Pollan pays lip service to internal-izing the true environmental cost of food, but TheOmnivore’s Dilemma—culminating in the perfectmeal—puts gastronomy before any other aspect offood. A paraphrase of Lynne Truss probably pro-vides the most precise summary of the author’sattitude toward food and sustainability: Pollanshoots, eats, and leaves.

As he states in its introduction, Pollan wroteIn Defense of Food in response to readers of TheOmnivore’s Dilemma who asked for even moreconcrete advice: “Okay, but what should I eat?”Pollan continues, “My aim in this book is to helpus reclaim our health and happiness as eaters”(7). The first section, The Age of Nutritionism,sets the scene. In the second section, The West-ern Diet and the Diseases of Civilization, Pollanpoints out the underlying health impacts and themain culprit. In the third and final section, Get-ting Over Nutritionism, he provides recommen-dations to redress the current decline of healthand happiness in the shape of “a couple dozen. . .eating algorithms, mental devices for thinkingthrough our food choices” (12). These are sum-marized, in fact, in the book’s opening line: “Eatfood. Not too much. Mostly plants” (1).

This “health and happiness” book is not forscientists. Although he repeatedly denounces re-ductionism and nutritionism (on which he sayson page 28 that “the widely shared but unexam-ined assumption is that the key to understand-ing food is indeed the nutrient”), Pollan fallsinto exactly the same reductionist trap. For ex-ample, health depends not just on diet but alsoon genetic make-up and lifestyle (sedentary vs.active). Pollan rarely touches on the boundaryconditions imposed by sustainability. Just once,he briefly mentions that there are “certainly notenough wild fish” (p. 171). For health reasons,

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he recommends cultured fish, such as salmon,as an abundantly available alternative. Unfortu-nately, he forgets that, weight for weight, thesecarnivorous fish require more wild fish (as feed)than they will ever yield themselves (as food)and that the poor cannot afford them. Finally,this book lacks the compelling literary qualitiesof its predecessor, partly due to the ideologicalstyle, which includes lots of repetition. It is a truemanifesto.

Harry AikingVrije Universiteit (IVM-VU)Amsterdam, the Netherlands

References

De Boer, J., M. Helms, and H. Aiking. 2006. Proteinconsumption and sustainability: Diet diversity inEU-15. Ecological Economics 59(3): 267–274.

Evans, L. T. 1998. Feeding the ten billion: Plants and pop-ulation growth. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Liu, J., H. Yang, and H. H. G. Savenije. 2008. China’smove to higher-meat diet hits water security. Na-ture 454(7203): 397.

Patel, R. 2008. Is meat off the menu? Observer22 June. www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/jun/22/foodanddrink.food/. Accessed 25 July2008.

Smil, V. 2000. Feeding the world: A challenge for thetwenty-first century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Steinfeld, H., P. Gerber, T. Wassenaar, V. Castel, M.Rosales, and C. De Haan. 2006. Livestock’s longshadow: Environmental issues and options. Rome,Italy: FAO.

The Pieces of the Periodic Table

Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Ele-ments, by John Emsley. Oxford, UK: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2001, 560 pp., ISBN 978-198-503-408, $19.95 (paperback)

World of the Elements, Elements of the World, byHans-Jurgen Quadbeck-Seeger (translated by J.

Oliveira). Weinheim, Germany: Wiley, 2007,116 pp., ISBN 978-3-527-32065-3, €15.90

Material flow analysis (MFA), one of the cen-tral tools of industrial ecology, has generally fo-cused on large flows and thus on abundant ma-terials, such as crushed stone (Hashimoto et al.2007), wood (Muller 2006), or iron (Wang et al.2007). With the realization that modern technol-ogy is increasingly finding uses for every materialnature has to offer, we are now beginning to seeMFA studies of far less abundant materials, suchas indium (Nakajima et al. 2007) and tungsten(Harper and Graedel 2008). As a consequence,the MFA specialist has a much broader range ofmaterials to contemplate than used to be the case,a situation that over and over again leads one, insearch of information and perspective, to that oldfriend and classic, the periodic table.

The two books that are the subject of thisreview offer semipopular takes on the periodictable and its elements. Both deal with all 92 ele-ments of nature and a dozen more made only inaccelerators, but their approach and level of de-tail are quite different. Quadbeck-Seeger’s bookis 110 pages, concise and colorful. Emsley’s themuch more detailed and expansive; it runs over500 pages. Each is well done, and each is useful,but in different ways.

Quadbeck-Seeger’s book is the one to grab fora quick bit of information: Where is tellurium lo-cated on the periodic table? What is it used for?What is the atomic weight? Almost all elementsget half a page dedicated to this sort of informa-tion. (A few of the really important—e.g., carbonand iron—get a whole page.) Brief chapters dis-cuss the history of the periodic table and presentsome of the physical properties of the elements.The text is highly readable, even a bit breezy, andthe whole book is visually very attractive.

Emsley’s book is for those who need moredepth. Each element here gets between two andseven pages, within which are treated the ele-ment’s characteristics in the human body (zincis essential, highly concentrated in the eye andthe liver, and most easily acquired from beef),in medicine (gold alleviates the symptoms ofrheumatoid arthritis), in history (copper beadsexcavated in northern Iraq are some 10,000 yearsold), and in technology (most molybdenum is

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used to strengthen iron and steel), and there areeven some surprises (crystals of strontium car-bonate outsparkle diamond). As with Quadbeck-Seeger’s book but in more detail, there is an in-troduction to the naming and ordering of theelements, as well as a history of the developmentof the original periodic table and the invention ofalternatives to try to circumvent problems, suchas the proper location of the lanthanides or thebest way to deal with the uniqueness of hydrogen.

Much of the information in the books is avail-able in a variety of sources; the work of the au-thors has been largely to collect that informationand then present it in a useful way. Nonethe-less, some of the material does become dated.The authors have trouble keeping up with tech-nology (hafnium is now crucial to high-speedintegrated circuits, but neither book mentionsthis) and with the evolution of the locationswhere ore is extracted (Emsley ignores Chileas a source of copper, although the countrydominates world production). Probably the mostegregious mistake is Quadbeck-Seeger’s offhandcomment that a few bottlenecks in the supply ofresources can be “circumvented by recycling andby fixing the price (105)”. This comment wouldbe regarded as extremely naive by national andinternational groups wrestling with how to deter-mine and quantify potential constraints to mate-rials supplies (Committee on Critical MaterialImpacts 2007; Christmann et al. 2007).

Despite these quibbles, many of us need ahandy reference to the periodic table and theelements that compose it, and these books do agood job at that. I find that I reach for Quadbeck-Seeger’s book first, going on to Emsley’s if I needinformation in more depth. As industry and in-

dustrial ecologists take advantage of the full rangeof nature’s gifts, either one of the books is a handyassistant for them to have around.

T. E. GraedelYale Center for Industrial EcologyNew Haven, Connecticut

References

Christmann, P., N. Arvanitidis, L. Martins, G. Re-coche, and S. Solar. 2007. Towards the sustain-able use of mineral resources: A European geo-logical surveys perspective. Minerals & Energy 22(3-4): 88–104.

Committee on Critical Material Impacts. 2007. Min-erals, critical minerals, and the U.S. economy.Washington, DC: National AcademyPress.

Harper, E. M. and T. E. Graedel. 2008. Illuminat-ing tungsten’s life cycle in the United States:1975–2000. Environmental Science & Technology42: 3835–3842.

Hashimoto, S., H. Tanikawa, and Y. Moriguchi. 2007.Where will large amounts of materials accumu-lated within the economy go?—A material flowanalysis of construction minerals for Japan. WasteManagement 27: 1725–1738.

Muller, D. B. 2006. Stock dynamics for forecast-ing material flows—Case study for housing inthe Netherlands. Ecological Economics 59: 142–156.

Nakajima, K., K. Yokoyama, K. Nakano, and T.Nagasaka. 2007. Substance flow analysis of in-dium of flat panel displays in Japan. MaterialsTransactions 48: 2365–2369.

Wang, T., D. B. Muller, and T. E. Graedel. 2007.Forging the anthropogenic iron cycle. En-vironmental Science & Technology 41: 5120–5129.

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