Panic At The Pump

An authoritative history of the energy crises of the 1970s and the world they wrought In 1973, the Arab OPEC cartel banned the export of oil to the United States, sending prices and tempers rising across the country. Dark Christmas trees, lowered thermostats, empty gas tanks, and the new fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit all suggested that America was a nation in decline. “Don’t be fuelish” became the national motto. Though the embargo would end the following year, it introduced a new kind of insecurity into American life—an insecurity that would only intensify when the Iranian Revolution led to new shortages at the end of the decade. As Meg Jacobs shows, the oil crisis had a decisive impact on American politics. If Vietnam and Watergate taught us that our government lied, the energy crisis taught us that our government didn’t work. Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter promoted ambitious energy policies that were meant to rally the nation and end its dependence on foreign oil, but their efforts came to naught. The Democratic Party was divided, with older New Deal liberals who prized access to affordable energy squaring off against young environmentalists who pushed for conservation. Meanwhile, conservative Republicans argued that there would be no shortages at all if the government got out of the way and let the market work. The result was a political stalemate and panic across the country: miles-long gas lines, Big Oil conspiracy theories, even violent strikes by truckers. Jacobs concludes that the energy crisis of the 1970s became, for many Americans, an object lesson in the limitations of governmental power. Washington proved unable to design an effective national energy policy, and the result was a mounting skepticism about government intervention that set the stage for the rise of Reaganism. She offers lively portraits of key figures, from Nixon and Carter to the zealous energy czar William Simon and the young Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Jacobs’s absorbing chronicle ends with the 1991 Gulf War, when President George H. W. Bush sent troops to protect the free flow of oil in the Persian Gulf. It was a failure of domestic policy at home that helped precipitate military action abroad. As we face the repercussions of a changing climate, a volatile oil market, and continued turmoil in the Middle East, Panic at the Pump is a necessary and lively account of a formative period in American political history.

"A detailed historical narrative of the U.S. energy crisis in the 1970s and how policymakers responded to the turmoil"--

In a clear and concise style, the extensively revised Putting Your Patients on the Pump offers physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, clinicians, and educators experience and practical guidance on how to help patients successfully manage their diabetes using an insulin pump. Ten chapters provide an in-depth description of insulin pump therapy advantages and disadvantages, pump and infusion set options and selection, pump candidate basics, getting the patient ready, pump start-up, pump therapy management, other considerations (e.g., dining out, alcohol, exercise and physical activity, intimacy, managing sick days, stress, travel, weight change, menses and menopause, pregnancy, pediatrics, and older patients), resources, tips from pump experts, and insulin pumps of the future. Filled with checklists and step-by-step instructions, Putting Your Patients on the Pump is the ideal resource for health care professionals with expertise in diabetes care who wish to successfully start and maintain diabetes patients on insulin pump therapy.

The 1970s were a decade of historic American energy crises—major interruptions in oil supplies from the Middle East, the country’s most dangerous nuclear accident, and chronic shortages of natural gas. In Energy Crises, Jay Hakes brings his expertise in energy and presidential history to bear on the questions of why these crises occurred, how different choices might have prevented or ameliorated them, and what they have meant for the half-century since—and likely the half-century ahead. Hakes deftly intertwines the domestic and international aspects of the long-misunderstood fuel shortages that still affect our lives today. This approach, drawing on previously unavailable and inaccessible records, affords an insider’s view of decision-making by three U.S. presidents, the influence of their sometimes-combative aides, and their often tortuous relations with the rulers of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Hakes skillfully dissects inept federal attempts to regulate oil prices and allocation, but also identifies the decade’s more positive legacies—from the nation’s first massive commitment to the development of alternative energy sources other than nuclear power, to the initial movement toward a less polluting, more efficient energy economy. The 1970s brought about a tectonic shift in the world of energy. Tracing these consequences to their origins in policy and practice, Hakes makes their lessons available at a critical moment—as the nation faces the challenge of climate change resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.

This "utterly spectacular" book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises). What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots. From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.

A spine-tingling standalone novel by bestselling author TJ Klune—a supernatural road-trip thriller featuring an extraordinary young girl and her two unlikely protectors on the run from cultists and the government. There's nothing more human than a broken heart. In the spring of 1995, Nate Cartwright has lost everything: his parents are dead, his only brother wants nothing to do with him, and he's been fired from his job as a journalist in Washington, DC. With nothing left to lose, he returns to his family's summer cabin outside the small mountain town of Roseland, Oregon, to try and find some sense of direction. The cabin should be empty. It's not. Inside is a man named Alex. And with him is an extraordinary ten-year-old girl who calls herself Artemis Darth Vader. Artemis, who isn't exactly as she appears. Soon it becomes clear that Nate must make a choice: let himself drown in the memories of his past, or fight for a future he never thought possible. Because the girl is special. And forces are descending upon them who want nothing more than to control her. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Inspire performance and prove your leadership impact Prove It! is the executive guide to improving organisational performance through the practice of evidence-based leadership. More than ever before, the world is demanding transparency and accountability from organisational leaders, and there is a growing push to hold leaders responsible for the performance of their organisation. Many executives panic at the thought of what transparency might reveal and how they might be held accountable, but others relish the opportunity to showcase their organisation's performance. The difference is in the leadership methodology. The best leaders already know how their organisation is performing, and that it has improved during their tenure – and they can prove it because they practise evidence-based leadership. This book offers a clear blueprint for building on your existing skills and performance management systems to build a truly high performance organisation. Just three personal leadership habits and three organisation-wide habits can transform your organisation into the powerhouse you know it can be. With a simple methodology and a focus on practical results, this book can help you: Set a strategic direction that really does inspire organisational excellence Gain a true picture of your organisation's performance Master the habits that help you lead a high-performance culture Improve your organisation objectively, measurably and quickly If an organisation can only be as good as its leadership, it's reasonable to place the burden of performance responsibility on those who make the decisions. A leader's job is to inspire, motivate and guide, and those who do it well are already raising the bar. Prove It! gives you a practical model for measurable, real-world results, starting today.

Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild. The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.