Review by Frank Stajano, Cambridge
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.
|