The Energy Book: Supercharge your life by healing your energy

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Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America’s Power by Meghan L. O’Sullivan The final chapter contains a stunningly accurate picture of where energy conversion should be headed, and it deserves to be read by all thinking people who care about both the environment and humanity - which are one and the same. This book goes into the sources of your energy. It explains the original power that you have ‘received’. What we know about life in the period prior to video cameras is tainted and tinted by sanitized depictions in modern movies and shows. The book presents an entirely different picture. It was a dark, smelly, smoggy, dirty, and spartan existence, bared through numerous data points and factoids. Consider this: the US population at various times in the nineteenth century was less than today's Singapore, or an average American had a life expectancy (at 46) at the beginning of the twentieth century less than the last-placed country in the world today. The book has plenty to offer for history buffs who care more about information than narratives. In discussing the modern preoccupation with clean and renewable energy sources, particularly in response to environmental impacts in the developed nations, Rhodes is pessimistic about the ability of these sources to augment and supplant existing dependency on coal, oil, and natural gas. Perhaps due to his past research and writing on atomic weaponry and its civilian application, he believes political and environmentalist objections to nuclear power are either honestly misguided or intentionally dishonest.

Yes. Oliver says that we have a big problem. We know that we want to continue to be able to use large amounts of energy, we know that it’s going to be difficult to switch to entirely non-fossil fuel sources and give people cheap reliable energy, therefore, as sensible human beings, we need to think about what happens if we cannot pull down our fossil fuel use fast enough. And what the book is really about is a plea for people to start thinking about this, rather than saying— as they tend to do at the moment—that we shouldn’t talk about geoengineering because it makes us think we have an excuse for not doing anything about carbon emissions because we can always get rid of the problem by throwing up a few thousand tonnes of sulphates into the upper atmosphere.However, he also points out that the the invention of the Haber-Bosch process in the first decades of the twentieth century enabled the world to convert fossil fuels into nitrogen-based agricultural fertiliser and he calls this geoengineering as well. The application of artificial fertiliser to fields expanded the total amount of energy from food that’s available to the planet’s inhabitants. In turn, that loosened the Malthusian constraints on the world’s population. Smil has shown that before the use of fossil fuels for such things as fertiliser energy availability per person was only a few kilowatt hours a day.

Sustainable Energy Transformations, Power And Politics: Morocco And The Mediterranean (Routledge Studies In Energy Transitions) 1st EditionAs sensible human beings, we need to think about what happens if we cannot pull down our fossil fuel use fast enough. ” It is full of interesting anecdotes and asides that add enormous flavour to the stories. It is written in a manner that would be entertaining to a layperson as well as an engineer or scientist. I am familiar with the principles through my professional life, but still I learned so much. I had to keep “rewinding” it to hear the numerous gems again. Antinuclear activists, whose agendas originated in a misinformed neo-Malthusian foreboding of overpopulation (and a willingness at the margin to condemn millions of their fellow human beings to death from disease and starvation), may fairly be accused of disingenuousness in their successive against the safest, least polluting, least warming, and most reliable energy source humanity has yet devised. (p. 336)

In The Switch, you present the astonishingly rapid fall in the cost of solar but you also say that it’s not the only part of the equation. To some extent other renewable energy technologies must play a role. And, crucially, even in the brightest scenario — to coin a foolish phrase — the sun only shines some of the time. So, you’ve got to have storage technologies, particularly in northern and extreme southern latitudes I suppose. Even in India, the sun doesn’t shine at night. The sun doesn’t shine at night. There are monsoons. There are places in China—for example—which are remarkably cloudy. So this by itself does not solve the problem, however cheap solar photovoltaics become. However it does definitely solve part of our problem. For example, in India about twenty percent of current electricity demand is to pull water up from wells and use it for irrigation. And you didn’t have to have that activity going on all the time so, for that type of application and solar is absolutely suitable. Indeed, for a large fraction of the world, the point of highest daily energy demand is in late afternoon when the air conditioning is working at its hardest. For those places, solar is useful; the sun is still above the horizon.Notwithstanding the occasional discussions on current issues and what the future may hold - mostly connected to pollution and the climate - this is a history book. The author will not discuss the most obvious topics - like why innovations exploded in a particular part of the world or the factors that led to their accumulative pace. To a degree, the absence of opinions and value judgments makes for a relatively drab and detail-heavy account.