Review by Choice Review
The book provides a comprehensive overview of the multitude of policies in Japan to reduce its carbon footprint. These include promoting public environmental awareness, green technology investments, "smart city" efforts, and funding research in radical future technologies. Holroyd (Univ. of Saskatchewan, Canada) places these policies and more in the context of Japanese policy developments. This book would be valuable for courses in environmental politics and urban geography. However, it offers fewer policy lessons outside the Japanese context. The book is essentially uncritical; no benefit is too small and no cost too large to impede any policy. It lacks assessments that the "cost per CO2 ton removed" may be much larger with one policy than with another. Holroyd provides little guidance as to why Japan makes little use of widely favored carbon taxes and widely implemented "cap-and-trade" programs. That "green growth" depends very much on potential export profits gets too little attention, and this reviewer wonders whether environmental concerns only embellish Japan's need to deal with its absence of domestic fossil fuels. However, since "what is happening" is more important than "whether it should," Green Japan deserves its place on the bookshelf. Summing Up: Optional. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Tim Brennan, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
