Hot, hot, hot

Crisis, global, environment: the words are familiar enough to dull the sense of urgency they should instil. Red Sky at Morning (Yale University Press, £9.99) by James Speth, dean of Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, is the perfect antidote to apathy. He turns up the heat on the US body politic in a book about its greatest failure in modern times: its refusal to sign the Kyoto agreement. Speth offers a rational way out, and writes well.