Settling Accounts

As drivers of climate action enter the fourth decade of what has become a multi-stage race, Net Zero has emerged as the dominant organizing principle. Hundreds of corporations and investors worldwide, together responsible for assets in the tens of trillions of dollars, are lining-up for the UN Race to Zero. This latest stage in the race to save civilization from heat, drought, fires, and floods, is defined by steering toward zeroing out greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Settling Climate Accounts probes the practice of Net Zero finance. It elucidates both the state of play and a set of directions that help form judgements about whether Net Zero is going to carry climate action far enough. The book delves into technical analyses and activates the reader’s imagination with narrative accounts of climate action past, present, and future. Settling Climate Accounts is edited and authored by Stanford University faculty and researchers. The first part of the book investigates the rough edges of Net Zero in practice, exploring questions of hedging risk, Scope 3 emissions, greenwashing, and the business of asset management. The second half looks at states, markets, and transitions through the lenses of blended finance, offsets, debt, and securitization. The editors tease out possible solutions and raise further questions about the adequacy and reach of the Net Zero agenda. To effectively navigate the road ahead, the editors call out the need for accountability and ask: who is in charge of making Net Zero add up? Settling Climate Accounts offers context and foundation to ground the rapidly evolving practice of Net Zero finance. Targeted at seasoned practitioners, newly activated leaders, educators, and students of climate action the world over, this book embraces the complexity of climate action and, in so doing, proposes to animate and drive hope.

In recent years as countries around the globe have begun to move from dictatorial to more democratic systems of governance, no more traumatic (or dramatic) ethical problem has arisen than what to do with the previous regime’s torturers. In most cases, the security and military apparatuses, responsible for the overwhelming majority of human-rights abuses, still retain tremendous power—and will not abide any settling of accounts. Now, New Yorker staff reporter Lawrence Weschler tells the extraordinary story of how, against tremendous odds, torture victims and human-rights activists in two Latin American countries—Brazil and Uruguay—tried to bring their torturers to justice and to rehabilitate their whole societies from harrowing periods of silence and repression. In this first of his two accounts, he tells how a tiny group of torture victims, clerics, and human-rights activists in Brazil launched an extremely risky, nonviolent plot to get even with the former torturers by publishing an indisputable account of their savage system of repression—indisputable because it is drawn from the regime’s own files. In the second, set in Uruguay, he tells how a more broadly-based movement attempted to bring to light the dark history of a military regime engaged in more political incarceration per capita than any other on earth at that time. In this illuminating and beautifully written book (portions of which appeared in five issues of The New Yorker), Weschler examines what a small number of individuals can do to retrieve history and truth from the hands of torturers.

Franklin Roosevelt is the assistant secretary of defense. Thomas Dewey is running for president with a blunt-speaking Missourian named Harry Truman at his side. Britain holds onto its desperate alliance with the USA’s worst enemy, while a holocaust unfolds in Texas. In Harry Turtledove’s compelling, disturbing, and extraordinarily vivid reshaping of American history, a war of secession has triggered a generation of madness. The tipping point has come at last. The third war in sixty years, this one yet unnamed: a grinding, horrifying series of hostilities and atrocities between two nations sharing the same continent and both calling themselves Americans. At the dawn of 1944, the United States has beaten back a daredevil blitzkrieg from the Confederate States–and a terrible new genie is out of history’s bottle: a bomb that may destroy on a scale never imagined before. In Europe, the new weapon has shattered a stalemate between Germany, England, and Russia. When the trigger is pulled in America, nothing will be the same again. With visionary brilliance, Harry Turtledove brings to a climactic conclusion his monumental, acclaimed drama of a nation’s tragedy and the men and women who play their roles–with valor, fear, and folly–on history’s greatest stage.

As new states in the former East bloc begin to reckon with their criminal pasts in the years following a revolutionary change of regimes, a basic pattern emerges: In those states where some form of retributive justice has been publicly enacted, there has generally been much less of a recourse to collective retributive violence. In Settling Accounts, John Borneman explores the attempts by these aspiring democratic states to invoke the principles of the "rule of law" as a means of achieving retributive justice, that is, convicting wrongdoers and restoring dignity to victims of moral injuries. Democratic regimes, Borneman maintains, require a strict form of accountability that holds leaders responsible for acts of criminality. This accountability is embodied in the principles of the rule of law, and retribution is at the moral center of these principles. Drawing from his ethnographic work in the former East Germany and with select comparisons to other East-Central European states, Borneman critically examines the construction of categories of criminality. He argues against the claims that economic growth, liberal democracy, or acts of reconciliation are adequate means to legitimate the transformed East bloc states. The cycles of violence in states lacking a system of retributive justice help to support this claim. Invocation of the principles of the rule of law must be seen as a chance for a more democratic, more accountable, and less violent world.

SETTLING ACCOUNTS, the new Ross Malone thriller, follows in the exciting page turning tradition of the debut novel, SHOOTING STARR. Gardner Meadows struts around as the smug leader of the City Security Association. His Warriors of the Night, who are little more than rabid street vigilantes, have a stranglehold on the city. With his father under the surgeon's knife, Ross Malone gives a case to detective colleague Nellie Archer with horrifyingly deadly results. Guilt and his own sense of justice fuel Malone's quest for those responsible. Then another roadblock is thrown into his path when Prince Gregory, 13 year old heir to the throne of Laracone disppears in plain sight. His world leader parent begs Malone to find him, one father to another. Life rarely gives you more than you can handle, though sometimes it pushes you to the limit. Ross Malone is about to push back. Read every heart pounding twist and turn in JEFFREY MCGRAW'S latest thriller, SETTLING ACCOUNTS.

“[Harry Turtledove] handles his huge cast with admirable skill. The insights into racial politics elevate this novel to a status above mere entertainment, although it provides that aplenty.”—Publishers Weekly It’s 1941, and an alliance of peace holds in check the most powerful nations of the world—but it is an uneasy peace. Japan dominates the Pacific, the Russian tsar rules Alaska, and England, under Winston Churchill, chafes for a return to its former glory. Behind this façade of world order, America is a bomb waiting to explode. Jake Featherston, the megalomaniacal leader of the Confederate States of America, is just the man to light the fuse. Opposite him is Al Smith, a Socialist U.S. president in the Philadelphia White House. Smith is a living symbol of hope for a nation that has been through the hell of war and depression. Featherston and his Freedom Party are determined to conquer their Northern neighbor at any cost. After crushing a Negro rebellion in his own nation, Featherston sends Confederate army planes to attack Philadelphia. In the aftermath of the CSA blitzkrieg, the war machine spins a vortex of destruction, betrayal, and fury that no one—not even Jake Featherston himself—can control. “Turtledove plays heady games with actual history, scattering object lessons and bitter ironies along the way. [Return Engagement features] strong, complex characters against a sweeping alt-historical background.”—Kirkus Reviews “Another absorbing installment of [Turtledove’s] character-centered alternate-history saga.”—Booklist

“A profoundly thoughtful masterpiece of alternate history.”—Booklist It is 1943, the third summer of the new war between the Confederate States of America and the United States, a war that will turn on the deeds of ordinary soldiers, extraordinary heroes, and a colorful cast of spies, politicians, rebels, and everyday citizens. The CSA president, Jake Featherston, seems to have greatly miscalculated the North’ s resilience. But as new demonic tools of killing are unleashed, secret wars are unfolding. The U.S. government in Philadelphia has proof that the tyrannical Featherston is murdering African Americans by the tens of thousands in a Texas gulag called Determination. And the leaders of both sides know full well that the world’s next great power will not be the one with the biggest army but the nation that wins the race against nature and science—and smashes open the power of the atom. Praise for The Grapple “Turtledove never tires of exploring the paths not taken, bringing to his storytelling a prodigious knowledge of his subject and a profound understanding of human sensibilities and motivations.”—Library Journal “One of the strongest books in the extended series.”—SfSite “Compelling.”—Publishers Weekly

“Turtledove never tires of exploring the paths not taken, bringing to his storytelling a prodigious knowledge of his subject and a profound understanding of human sensibilities and motivations.”—Library Journal It’s 1942. For twenty-five years, the USA and the CSA have been entrenched in an era of simmering hatred, locked in a tangle of blood-soaked battle lines, modern weaponry, desperate strategies, and the kind of violence that only the damned could conjure up for themselves and their enemies. In Richmond, Confederate president and dictator Jake Featherston is shocked by what his own aircraft have done in Philadelphia—killing U.S. president Al Smith in a barrage of bombs. Featherston presses ahead with a secret plan carried out on the dusty plains of Texas, where a so-called detention camp hides a far more evil purpose. As the untested U.S. vice president takes over for Smith, the United States face a furious thrust by the Confederate army, pressing inexorably into Pennsylvania. But with the industrial heartland under siege, Canada in revolt, and U.S. naval ships fighting against the Japanese in the Sandwich Islands, the most dangerous place in the world may be overlooked. “First-time readers can jump in and enjoy Turtledove’s richly rearranged cultural and political landscape.”—The Kansas City Star “Engrossing . . . thoroughly satisfying.”—Publishers Weekly