Green Gold: Japan, Germany, the United States, and the Race for Environmental Technology

Twelve years of political and business leadership hostile to environmental protection has dissipated the U.S.'s once dominant position in a wide range of crucial technologies, according to this important study. Examining the technologies and policies of other nations, Moore, a lawyer and journalist, and Miller, director of the Center for Global Change at the University of Maryland, cite remarkable environmental and economic successes in Germany and Japan. While the U.S. has been unable to move technology from basic research to the marketplace, those two countries bridged that gap using technologies developed by U.S. taxpayer money. Moore and Miller delineate ways in which the U.S.'s declining share of global markets in cars, power-generating equipment and solar-cell production is related to our inferior environmental standards. They look at California's innovative policies and the failure of national policies, and tender their own recommendations. (Aug.)