THE COMING ECLIPSE deals with the most important issue of our era, and deals with it in a unique way. This book is concerned with a critical choice of futures: either the adoption of a comprehensive climate-mitigation program or the emergence of a new technological revolution. As this book succinctly explains, the adoption of one will eclipse the other. A climate mitigation program of the type proposed by the IPCC will require the establishment of an artificial system of prices, which could only be achieved by establishing a command-like economy. Such an economic system would lock us into the old polluting fossil-fuel technological paradigm and thereby delay, even derail, the newly emerging technological revolution - the Solar Revolution - which will be based on radically new methods of energy extraction. By using a realist general dynamic framework, Professor Snooks shows that, by the end of the twenty-first century, the real dynamic costs of the mitigation program proposed by the IPCC will amount to an astronomical 90% of world GDP rather than the 1-2% estimated by climate mitigationists. Owing to their inadequate methodology, orthodox economists have massively, and dangerously, underestimated the real costs of climate mitigation, which would inevitably arise from delaying the imminent technological revolution due to begin in the middle decades of this century. A revolution that will transform our world, just as the Industrial Revolution transformed the commercial world of the eighteenth century. A revolution that, ironically, if not derailed will solve the current problem of climate change. This book is designed to be read in a couple of sittings by busy powerbrokers and businesspeople, as well as the educated public.
About the Author: Graeme Donald Snooks is Executive Director of the Institute of Global Dynamic Systems (IGDS) in Canberra. From 1989 to 2010 he was the Coghlan Research Professor in Economics in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University. Dr Snooks is an accomplished author at the cutting edge of research on social and biological dynamics. He has published more than twenty books (with publishers such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and University of Michigan Press) and many scholarly articles.