The Energy Book: Supercharge your life by healing your energy

Product Information

Sustainable Energy Transformations, Power And Politics: Morocco And The Mediterranean (Routledge Studies In Energy Transitions) 1st Edition

This book was also reissued recently. The new edition is by no means as extensively rewritten as Vaclav Smil’s book, but it is a wonderfully readable history of the development of the oil age: how the world came from a point where if you had energy it was either biomass—that is wood—or coal, to a point where oil was the dominant source of energy. It was probably never more than fifty percent of total energy worldwide but it has been the most traded energy commodity and it changed the nature of geopolitics over the course of a hundred years from around 1890 to late in the twentieth century. It’s only the rise of shale oil in the US that has reduced crude oil’s central role in world politics.I read this book at the same time as Smil's Energy and Civilization. It proved to be a good compliment to Smil's book but left me feeling pretty disappointed at the same time. I wanted more from this book than it had to offer. Maybe I would have favored it more if I had not read at the same time as Smil's masterpiece. There are consequences to what we do, and there is no way for us to know what those consequences are yet. In modern times, the idea of dark feminine energy has been explored in literature and popular culture. Many books and movies feature female characters who embody this energy, using their power to challenge traditional gender roles and societal norms. For example, the character of Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is a prime example of a woman who embodies dark feminine energy. Psychological Perspectives 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)

From a psychological perspective, dark feminine energy can be seen as a manifestation of the unconscious mind. This energy represents aspects of the psyche that are often repressed or ignored, such as anger, aggression, and sexuality. By tapping into this energy, individuals can gain a deeper understanding of themselves and their place in the world. Credit must be given to the narrator Jacques Guy, who has a wonderful voice and an astounding ability to relate the direct quotes with convincing accents to represent the original speaker’s voices. (He even captures the nuances between different English and Scots speakers.) We here in the UK have a different perspective, of course. When we need energy, the sun generally isn’t shining. For the bulk of the world, solar is pretty good. But, everywhere is going to need storage. It’ll either be storage in the form of things like concentrating solar power, which is where the sun heats a liquid or fluid of some form during the day and that heat — we’re talking about hundreds of degrees centigrade here — is used at night to create steam to drive a turbine. That is being taken up in various parts of the world, such as Morocco, South Africa, China, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai. That’s a way of capturing the sun’s energy during the day and using it at night. I’ve heard the distinguished climate scientist Ken Caldeira say that, sure, we should we looking at geoengineering and yes there may be some technical fixes but when you look at the costs, it’s almost always likely to be much cheaper to just reduce carbon emissions in the first place than to geoengineer. 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.

I think the world needs to look at it. I think Oliver is right to ask us not to just dismiss it. There are lots of problems with geoengineering using sulphate aerosols, including that it will probably change the world’s rainfall patterns. Areas which have a lot of rainfall at the moment might have much less in the future. Others might have too much. Getting the global community to act when one large group of people suffer and another large group of people benefit has proved to be almost impossible in the past and may well be so in the case of geoengineering. But I think Oliver Morton is right to insist that because climate change could be utterly devastating — and fairly soon — for large parts of the world we need at least to openly discuss how the global community might reach a decision to geoengineer the atmosphere. And, like the other books in this selection, it is an engaging and informative read from a fine stylist. Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author Richard Rhodes reveals the fascinating history behind energy transitions over time—wood to coal to oil to electricity and beyond. PV needs to be supplemented by other forms of energy conversion technologies such as wind turbines in less sunny parts of the world, but also with storage. In fact, the majority of the book is about the problems of dealing with the intermittency of solar, both intermittency on a minute by minute basis and more generally because the seasonal availability of sun varies hugely in high latitude locations such as the UK. We have a lot of sun in the summer and virtually none in the winter. But, remember, only ten percent of the world’s population lives north of London. For the vast bulk of the globe, solar is pretty reliable source of energy year round. I wanted to conclude by breaking the rules and talking briefly about a sixth text. This is not a book but a recent academic article. I’ve included it both because it is an absolutely superb piece of writing and also because it was written by a woman. All the rest of the works in this list are by men. That troubled me. Climate change already disproportionately affects women. In many places, for example, they have to travel further for water and for wood as a result of temperature and rainfall change. However the world of energy production and energy research, as well writing about energy, is wholly dominated by men. This has to change. 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 the case of PV, in Travis Bradford’s book he suggests that every time the accumulated volume of solar photovoltaics panels that has ever been produced has doubled the cost has fallen by about 18 percent. Today this number is thought to be nearer 20 percent but he got the number basically right over ten years ago. That means, if solar panel production is growing at 40 percent a year—which is what solar has done for the last fifty years—very roughly the cost will go down by 20 percent every two years—indefinitely—in a relatively smooth decline. And that’s happened with batteries as well. The text helps to keep our focus on risk management applications and forecasting problems that are arising or may arise in the field of renewable energy. By reading these contributions, one can easily understand all the major aspects associated with the energy production chain. These aspects include:

Report and webcast archive

This book is a masterpiece, written by experts in the field of probability, risk management, statistics, electrical engineering, and economics. Being a multidisciplinary volume, the book is a perfect source of reference on the topic “renewable energy risk management”. 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. But the oil picture has changed, hasn’t it? Now the great majority of the world’s oil is not owned by private corporations but by states, notably Saudi Arabia and Russia and a few others. Bearing in mind the concept of a major transition away from oil, does Yergin take account of a topic beloved of some environmentalists: the idea of a carbon bubble, that is, the idea that we actually now have more oil that we can safely use?