Power to the People
How the Coming Energy Revolution Will Transform an Industry, Change Our Lives, and Maybe Even Save the Planet
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A guided tour of a revolution in the making that promises to change our lives
Global warming, rolling black outs, massive tanker spills, oil dependence: our profligate ways have doomed us to suffer such tragedies, right? Perhaps, but Vijay Vaitheeswaran, the energy and environment correspondent for The Economist, sees great opportunity in the energy realm today, and Power to the People is his fiercely independent and irresistibly entertaining look at the economic, political, and technological forces that are reshaping the world's management of energy resources. In it, he documents an energy revolution already underway--a revolution as radical as the communications revolution of the past decades.
From the corporate boardroom of a Texas oil titan who denies the reality of global warming to a think tank nestled in the Rocky Mountains where a visionary named Amory Lovins is developing the kind of hydrogen fuel-cell technology that could make the internal combustion engine obsolete, Vaitheeswaran gamely pursues the people who hold the keys to our future.
Man's quest for energy is insatiable. It is also essential. By avoiding the traditional binaries that pit free markets against the wisdom of conservation and the need for clean energy, Power to the People is a book that debunks myths without debunking hope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the wake of this summer's failure of the aging power grid, Vaitheeswaran, the author of this timely book, highlights the trends he believes will transform the energy game: liberalization of the energy markets, the increasing influence of the environmental movement and recent innovations in hydrogen fuel-cell technology. In short essays, he covers many of today's energy problems, such as reliance on oil, global warming, air pollution and the dangers inherent in nuclear power. Micropower from fuel cells big batteries that produce electricity by combining hydrogen fuel and available oxygen will be our salvation, he asserts, because this technology makes possible small, clean power plants that can be located close to homes and factories, enabling power to flow not from on high but from the grassroots. Vaitheeswaran, an Economist correspondent, profiles some of the energy visionaries he reveres, such as Amory Lovins, a pioneer in the field of micropower, and Firoz Rasul of Ballard Power Systems, a Canadian fuel-cell firm. He also attempts to debunk some of the "truisms" currently spouted on both the left and the right, arguing, for example, that deregulation is not the problem, and that the Kyoto treaty is flawed and would not have solved global warming problems even if the U.S. had signed it. His lucid and entertaining book is informative and insightful, but his prediction that hydrogen fuel-cell technology will take off in a decade or so will strike some as overly optimistic. Author tour.
