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61 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding. Most important book on this topic for the next 20 years., 11 Feb 2009
Where will our energy come from? Oil and coal are running out and cause global warming, nuclear plants are potential Chernobyls that nobody wants in their back yard, wind turbines kill birds and spoil the landscape... We've got a serious problem, right? Right. But it's not "Which technology should we shift to?", it's rather "Why can't people add up?".
In a nutshell, David MacKay's brilliant book is about working out a budget, as if on the back of an envelope, with the red column listing how much energy we consume and the green column listing how much we produce (or could produce using various technologies). Can this budget be balanced? And how? In one brief but insightful chapter after another, the author gives us a few simple intellectual tools to figure out the answer for ourselves: not much more than the four operations and a bit of common sense, plus a useful human-scale framework for thinking sensibly about energy. With the sharp mind of the scientist, to the tune of "numbers, not adjectives", he mercilessly cuts through the fog of empty propaganda words that has surrounded the energy debate to date.
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for life", says the Chinese proverb. MacKay gives no answers; instead, he gently and entertainingly teaches readers how to fish them out for themselves. The author, who is a professor in the Physics department at Cambridge, couples open-mindedness and intellectual rigour with an admirable talent for making quantitative ideas easy to understand and even satisfyingly fun to work out. After responding with a simple calculation to the objection that building a nuclear power plant would consume "huge" amounts of concrete and steel and therefore cause "huge" pollution, for example, he notes with characteristic wit: "Please don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear. I'm just pro-arithmetic."
This book is an amazing performance: sharp, accurate, quantitative and at the same time clear, entertaining and compelling, not to mention beautifully illustrated with great photographs and informative diagrams and maps. A scientific book as hard to put down as a good novel. It's a labour of love (three years in the making) and it shows. It's even available at no charge as a full-quality pdf download from the author's own web site. Despite that, I've bought five extra paper copies, besides my own, as presents for friends with whom I wanted to share this all-important message about our future. I have never done this before with any other book. If there were a way to give this book more than five stars, I definitely would.
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34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read, re-read, then buy it for everyone you know, 10 Feb 2009
Quite staggeringly brilliant. Real science, real numbers, and real, strong conclusions, but with such a light, accessible approach that the reader doesn't even notice how difficult the concepts are that they have just understood. This book explains exactly why we need to urgently find sources of sustainable energy, painting a complete picture of where all the energy goes, and the pros and cons of every potentially sustainable option: changes to fossil fuel use, improvements in energy efficiency, renewable energy sources, nuclear, everything.
What makes it particularly good is that the book's stated goal is primarily to work out how, for the foreseeable future, we could possibly keep on using the same amount of energy we use today. If nothing else, this book shows beautifully that questions of energy and questions of environmental catastrophe can be de-coupled. Whether people believe that the Earth is warming up or not is irrelevant: we need sustainable energy sources either way! So buy it for the eco-sceptic in your life, and then they may just stop whinging about low-energy light bulbs...
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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Probably the best book I have ever read, 24 Feb 2009
This is the book I was waiting for: someone has done the research and put credible broad-brush energy numbers down on paper, and it's surprisingly entertaining as a bonus.
If you want to know the scale of the sustainable energy/climate change problems we face, and what scale the possible solutions need to be, get this book. If you'd prefer to believe that buying a Prius will save the world, don't get this book.
It's a stunning achievement and it should be made compulsory reading for anyone involved in government.
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