Publisher's Synopsis
This book describes the different types of energy we use today and their costs with regard to our future in a threatened and dynamic environment. We have been living through a fossil fuel energy regime that extracts over 96 million barrels of oil a day and adds significant quantities of coal and gas. As early 1856, US scientist Eunice Foote studied CO2 and its warming characteristics and published a paper on the subject. For the entire time we have burned fossil fuels we have also been aware that tiny quantities of CO2, among other greenhouse gases like methane, are able to absorb infra-red energy from sunshine and retain it within the atmosphere. She and many others saw that it effectively acted as a blanket and gradually warmed our planet. The consequences are now becoming severe. Never before has our carbon footprint been as high as it is today, but the scientists, specifically the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have told us that if we do not do something dramatic to reverse our emissions of this powerful gas by about 2030, in a little more than a decade, we will be unable to undo the impacts of warming and the world will endure the effect of tipping points. Normally white ice at the Poles reflects a lot of the Sun's incoming radiation. Tipping points are irreversible moments when for example, melted ice leaves the ocean surface a dark blue color and it absorbs all the solar energy that reaches it. With global warming currently under way, Arctic ice is thinning out and today frequently the North Pole is actually just ocean surface and by 2030 it may be that way all year around. Another tipping point example is that warming in northern latitudes has resulted in melting of the permafrost. Eons of surface soils that generated methane gas has effectively frozen it into the ground. Today, the warmth is thawing this frozen ground and the methane is now bubbling to the surface and being released into the atmosphere. Methane has 21 times more heat retaining greenhouse gas impact than CO2. Together this warming brings us a litany of consequences; drought, wildfire, melting glaciers, sea level rise, impaired harvests, human and animal migration, disease vector migration, heat waves, unlivable locations, threats to coastline infrastructure worth trillions (think Miami oceanfront property), a threat to global peace and the 6th great extinction. The cause of all this change, humanity is going to be accentuated by a growing population expected to reach almost 10 billion by 2100 before tailing off again. We can stop all the bad stuff from happening. We must make it our top priority to reach 2100 without any excuses for hostility, war or human caused destruction. Geopolitics and global belief systems are such that we are poised delicately on a web of vulnerable and sensitive pressure points that could tumble into global destruction very quickly. Despite its dark premise, this book actually disports a very positive outlook. Humanity already has the solution technologies in hand to cope with everything. Instead of looking at climate change as an expensive problem that we might fail to arrest, we ought instead to educate ourselves to the alternative picture, that it's one of the biggest, capitalist, infrastructure improvement opportunities that has ever existed and represents an opportunity for humanity as a whole to clean up its fossil act, depend as it should on its cumulative experience, knowledge and science and act with alacrity to overcome this challenge. The amazing bi-products of such a global effort might be humanity bonded more tightly together and a global economy that runs on a tiny, perhaps non-existent footprint, that can feed itself sustainably and where the pursuit of happiness, one of the finest entries in the US Constitution, is made even more palpably strong. This is not an alarmist book so much as a pragmatic book with a foreword by none other than Dr. Richard Leakey.
