Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming by Fred Krupp

Krupp, longtime president of the Environmental Defense Fund, and Horn present a stirring and hopeful call to arms as they feature the bold innovators and investors who are reinventing energy and the ways we use it.

From The Editors:

Environmental Defense Fund president Krupp and journalist Horn proffer a business-centric prescription for alleviating climate change, coupling the market force of capitalism with technological innovation and entrepreneurial inventiveness. The authors argue in favor of strict federal carbon caps, which would induce innovators to explore new ways to control carbon dioxide emissions. The book notes the global and historical successes of cap and trade mechanisms, such as the Clean Air Act of 1990.

Designed specifically to control sulfur dioxide (which causes acid rain), the Clean Air Act cut emissions 30% more than the law required by providing coal plant operators with a financial incentive to modernize. New technologies that would benefit from such a logical, elegant, market-based approach include one as basic as an Arizona natural gas power plant that vents its smokestack waste into a vast greenhouse, where it nourishes algae used for manufacturing biodiesel, and one as a radical as harnessing the kinetic energy of molecules as a power source. This optimistic book brims with similar ideas, balancing jargon-heavy science with engaging profiles of individuals who are blending business and science in an attempt to save the planet. 

A Review :

An excellent Survey of the next Industrial Revolution,

By	Arup Biswas (Campbell, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Are you getting depressed about the gloom and doom news of climate catastrophe? Then read this book and you will awaken to the endless possibilities of the future that is being worked out silently by a huge number of entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers who are the pioneers of the next industrial revolution - the cleantech revolution.

This book surveys the main sources of alternative energies- solar, biofuel, wind, geothermal and oceanic. Then goes into considerable depth into describing various works going on into each area. For example, in solar energy alone, the book details over half a dozen approaches to make solar energy an efficient, cheap and viable solution. The authors describe the technology in simple terms, but with sufficient depth. At the same time, they mention the business viability and political issues. A very well rounded approach indeed!

One recurring theme throughout the book is the necessity of a carbon cap and trade program. Without a price on carbon emission, the playing field between the fossil fuels and renewable energy sources will remain uneven and the renewables will not have a chance to flourish. Free market is an wonderful instrument, but is completely dumb. Information has to be injected into the market system regarding the cost of everything.

Currently, the polluters dump the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without a price tag. The result is sea level rise, destruction of natural habitats, melting glaciers, agricultural yield reduction, increase of diseases, environmental refugees and on and on. Doesn't these all have a price tag? Once this price tag is attached with pollution, the underlying strength of innovation and free market will unleash and get a chance to save this civilization that faces the greatest challenge in many centuries - the global warming.

This book will be enjoyable by the environmentally conscious readers, the entrepreneurs, the science lovers and just about anyone who is interested in keeping abreast of this next frontier of technology. Do not miss it, we are at the door-step of a new era of the civilization, this does not happen with every generation, read the book and make other people read it!