It’s been five weeks since I reviewed five books examining animal welfare and factory farming. To ensure that no one starts feeling too optimistic about the future, here are another five disquieting books, each with a different angle on the environment.
Many ecologists advocate for the minimalist approach. Asceticism, they argue, is the ethical lifestyle choice and the key to our planet’s future. It’s an admirable perspective but, let’s be realistic here, it’s never going to happen on any large scale. Americans like their flat-panel TVs and personal cars.
But here’s the thing about Daniel Botkin: he’s a scientist, and he’s an ecologist, and he’s against nuclear power and coal and pollution, but he doesn’t want to give up driving his car and he doesn’t think you should, either. He wants a future where we can all enjoy a high standard of living without laying waste to the environment. Powering the Future shows how it could happen.
The first part of the book focuses on five conventional energy sources (oil, natural gas, coal, water power, and nuclear power) while the second part focuses on new sources (wind power, solar power, ocean power, and biofuels). Botkin explains the pros and cons of each source, with particular regard to estimated remaining global supplies, financial cost, and environmental impact—though with no particular regard to carbon cost. This is a deliberate omission, as Botkin felt that the question of global warming warranted a separate book entirely.
The chapter for each energy source includes a bulleted list for “Key Facts” and another for “The Bottom Line,” but though this sounds suspiciously text-booky, don’t worry. Alongside the graphs and charts and photos, there are anecdotes and illustrative examples to make sense of it all. In the section on nuclear power, for instance, Botkin describes an experiment in which scientists exposed a forest to radiation for fifteen years; the results were not pretty. In the section on wind power, he considers the Beluga SkySails, a ship powered by diesel and a really big kite, a combination that reduces fuel costs by $1000 per day.
Combinations, in fact, are key to Botkin’s vision for energy in the future. As he explains in the final section of the book, we will probably never stop using conventional energy sources, at least not until they run out. (Are you fond of petroleum? At current rates, it will probably be gone by 2050.) But we can learn to use limited resources sparingly and to draw more from renewable energies, particularly wind power and solar power. Botkin offers several detailed scenarios as to how this might happen, and—this is the true strength of the book—he shows how it needs to happen on a large scale. Individuals need to do their part, but businesses need to encourage innovation and governments need to at least partially subsidize clean, renewable energies. (Bear in mind that the United States government already heavily subsidizes oil and gas.)
This book is quite readable, and the science is easily digestible for the average person. I hope that average folks pick it up and learn something—but I really hope that politicians, lobbyists, and activists read it, so that we may begin to move away from polluting energy sources and toward energy independence.
Check the WRL catalog for Powering the Future
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