Customer Reviews

The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(21)

 

 

This is very close to being a science book, but the topic keeps it from being strictly a science book. The topic is necessarily conjecture about how we will meet future energy needs. The authors, however, are honest about what is conjecture on their part and what is science, and point to the recent development of inexpensive LED lighting as an example of how long-term plans to save energy (by investing in flourescent lighting) end up being foiled by new technological developments. Their primary suggestion, with regard to energy policy over the next few years, is to see what new technology develops and adapt to it, rather than take our current technological knowledge and assume that it will apply 30 years from now. This is in stark contrast to similar books that attempt to use current scientific and technological knowledge to predict doom for the world with remarkable confidence.

The most engaging and scientific part of the book is the discussion of efficiency and energy and entropy. Most of the author's optimistic conclusions arise from their observations made here. Efficiency often ends up being misused, by their reasoning, to make two incorrect conclusions about energy policy. One such incorrect conclusion is that the US economy makes very, very inefficient use of its energy. To the contrary, such a conclusion assumes that somehow energy in coal form is equivalent to energy in electrical form is equivalent to energy running a laptop PC. The authors argue, convincingly, that energy in coal form is mostly useless, and part of it gets spent reversing entropy enough to generate electricity, and again in the PC, part of it is spent keeping the processor cool enough to actually work. The energy spent in the purification process is not "waste," hence their subtitle "the virtue of waste." That is not to say that figuring out how to spend less energy in the conversion process is undesirable, but it will always be there, and it will always be a fairly high percentage. (The most efficient process ever devised was a rocket engine, about 60% efficient.)

The second aspect of efficiency that the authors point out is that designing more efficient processes does not, overall, save energy. When processes become cheap and easy, they get used more, and demanded more, hence the PC explosion since 1980. Similarly, cars were made more efficient, and thus it became cheaper and easier to drive more often, so we all did. Energy use exploded with more efficiency, not less.

Where the authors enter the policy and philosophical realm, these ideas about efficiency and entropy and "ordered energy" are used to generate a general picture about how humanity has progressed from earlier times, giving reason for optimism into the future. The thesis is fairly simple: using energy enables us to gain more energy, and we don't run out of fuel because what we are really looking for isn't more fuel but more useful energy. Before electrical power became standard, the demise of our forests was the dire prediction, but they've been growing back since electricity became ubiquitous. In 1910, we spent 27% of farmland just to "fuel" our horses for transportation; now, our entire transportation grid, including roads, oil wells, refineries, and so on uses less land than that, while moving orders of magnitude more people and goods. Their philosophical analysis: we use far more dense, ordered energy, which enables us to preserve the environment more efficiently as well as do what we want more efficiently. There is no -objective- reason to predict that this trend would end in some fuel crisis, and every fuel crisis of doom prediction has proven false. Technology has always provided a new way of gaining energy efficiently. We can't predict how it will handle the next step, but there is no reason to believe that it won't do so beyond one's own natural pessimism.

The strength of this book is that it doesn't read like Michael Moore or Ann Coulter, but deals with issues from solid science and pragmatic principles. It definitely leans toward the right side of the political spectrum, mostly in a libertarian way. It takes environmental concerns seriously, though not as seriously as environmental activists would like. The issue of global warming is addressed tangentially; addressing it directly would be its own book. They do not dismiss the idea of anthropogenic CO2 causing global warming out of hand, but rather point out technological ways of eliminating CO2 from emissions while still using coal and oil as primary sources of fuel. They also point out that the amount of land needed to supply our energy needs with current wind/solar technologies would be prohibitive; a power plant plus coal mine takes up very much less space than fields of windmills or huge arrays of solar panels, greatly increasing humanity's "footprint" on the earth. The current technical state of fuel cells is discussed fairly thoroughly, along with reasonable speculation about the future of automobile technologies. Further, they point out that if less CO2 emissions is a primary goal, then we should seriously consider further development of safe nuclear power. They don't advocate it, per se, but rather point out that it is a technological option.

These technical discussions alone are worth the price of the book. I love it that they quote Richard Feynman and Sadi Carnot; more pretentious authors would quote Einstein or Newton in an attempt to sound respectable. Feynman had a remarkably keen and common-sense approach to science and physics, which the authors use to their advantage.

The authors write no particular prescription for our energy issues, except to point out that no predicted crisis has ever come to pass, and that we probably shouldn't write regulations based on current technology in an attempt to speed the development of future technology. Fuel cells are all well and good, but basing our current policy on them before the technology has become economical isn't practical, and might get in the way of other, more useful technologies that we don't even know about, yet.

Overall, I find this an honest expression of the optimistic side of the energy debate, and is therefore a good source of material for those interested, whether they agree or disagree with the conclusions.

In this breezy and somewhat obtuse tome of energy babble Huber and Mills enthuse about an endless supply of energy with a kind of breathless giddiness that would shame even the late economist Julian Simon, author of the notion of perpetual economic growth. Essentially what Huber and Mills are telling us is this: we will not run out of energy until the atoms of the universe dissipate into the final stage of entropy some trillions of years from now.

More immediately, as the oil patch runs dry we will convert the hybrid-electric engine (now coming hugely onto market) to the electric engine, which will get its power from electricity generated from coal and nuclear plants, and when we run out of coal and uranium, fusion will be practical and then something else--after all, matter is energy and vice-versa, and with a sufficiently advanced technology, we should be able to extract the energy even in a lump of rock.

They are right, we are not about to run out of energy. I give them a "duh" on that. The sun still has five billion years to go. Furthermore, energy is really just an exploitable contrivance between the relatively hot and the relatively cold. What is important, as the authors never tire of mentioning, is the "ordering" of energy. That is, how energy can be concentrated and aimed at some kind of useful enterprise, such as a laser beam or a logic gate in a computer and not dissipated into the atmosphere as heat. (Although they insist that this dissipation, this "waste," is not only okay, but to be celebrated as evidence of our technological prowess. What they should be saying is that the less we dissipate, the less we pollute, the more technologically adept we are.)

Here's another of their pronouncements: "As we have seen, most of the energy we consume is used to process and purify energy itself." This quote is from page 138, but you'll find essentially the same expression several other places in the book. In fact, there is a lot of deliberate repetition as though the authors are giving a didactic seminar to some corporation's employees (or massaging the CEO)--which is what I suspect they sometimes do. This may account for the fact that they often sound like they want to stand up and shout: "American workers you are the most productive in the world--rejoice! Now get back to work."

Yes, most of the energy we consume is used to process and purify energy itself. Ergo, the more energy we use the more energy we use. Or if that isn't clear, try this: energy use increases because energy use increases.

This tautology is not without (again) its didactic merit. The first large-scale use of the coal-powered steam engine was to pump water out of coal mines. In other words, energy was used to gain more energy.

In the same vein (sorry), on page 136 the authors have a graph showing that the United States, the wealthiest nation on earth, has the highest per capita energy consumption while lesser nations are less wealthy and use less energy. The authors conclude, "The more energy a nation uses, the richer it gets."

A tautology employed to catch our eye is one thing, but confounding cause with effect is quite another. Measuring energy use is already measuring wealth. Wealth and energy use are positively correlated because they are inseparable. People are poor in Bangladesh not because they don't use enough energy. They don't use enough energy because they can't afford to.

The real reason per capita energy use has increased in this country is because we have gotten wealthier. And the reason we have gotten wealthier is mostly related to globalization and free trade, to increased productivity because of technological advances, to education and science, to the greater employment of women in the workplace, and to the use of cheap labor, both from poorly paid illegal immigrants and relatively cheap outsourced labor. This is not to mention the exploitation of the natural resources of other countries and indirectly their cheap labor.

Another "point" Huber and Mills make is that a greater use of energy in, for example, gas-guzzling SUVs is not necessarily wasteful since more powerful engines using more fuel gain for their users time. Yes, if you go 90 miles per hour you will get where you're going sooner than if you chug along at 65--that is, unless you're on the freeway at rush hour.

There are a few slurs in the book aimed at people the authors don't think are too bright, such as greens and environmentalists. One of those slurs with the most ironic quality is the one aimed at George Orwell. After attempting to dismiss Orwell's dystopian vision in "1984," the authors write that all kinds of non-dystopian things were happening "While Orwell was typing..." (p. 135) The implication one gets is that Huber and Mills are writing, composing and edifying while George Orwell was only "typing." The irony is not so much that these two gentlemen are not in the same league as Orwell as writers and thinkers, but that Orwell's vision is upon us this very day with poverty, pollution and perpetual war, whether Huber and Mills notice it or not.

One more point about which the authors are dead on right. We won't run out of oil because as oil becomes scarce its price will no longer be competitive with other energy sources and so there will always be some crude left in the ground. QED: we won't run out of oil.

If you want to know about peak oil, read Beyond Oil (2005) by Kenneth S. Deffeyes. If you want a contretemps to the views of Huber and Mills, I recommend Brian Czech's Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train (2000). And if you're interested in the prospect for a hydrogen economy, The Hype about Hydrogen (2004) by Joseph J. Romm is excellent.

Those who have an interest in energy questions in general and so-called "peak oil" in particular may find the book, The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, The Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy by Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills, to be an interesting object of study on several levels.

Immediately one is stuck by the very cover of the book. "Bottomless wells?" "Endless energy?" "Waste is Virtuous?" Wow. It also features a gasoline nozzle spouting copious amounts of gas into a deep pool of it, suggesting cornucopian reserves of the stuff.

Have we been holding back all this time? Have we been flagellating ourselves to conserve and find alternatives for no good reason? Are we finally free from all of those nay saying curmudgeons? Is it time to widen the garage and get that shiny new Hummer we always wanted, critics be damned?

Well, not so fast.

Upon reading the book, one sees that although many of the claims in it are sensible enough, they are not quite as sensational as they first seemed on the cover. Probably the quickest way to illustrate this is by taking each phrase of the title and applying a bit of translation based on the contents of the book.

Phrase: "The Virtue of Waste"

Translation: "Waste" energy (e.g. heat, light, etc. not put to what humans deem "useful" work) is an everyday part of the use of any energy and in the refinement of energy (say, crude oil into gasoline.) This is decidedly not news to anyone. This has nothing to do with human ethical considerations of whether you should buy a Hummer, drive a tractor-trailer to work or just light up a swimming pool of gasoline for the pyromaniac pleasure of watching a mushroom cloud explosion. Its about a fundamental law of physics that no one could disobey if they wanted to. Describing this as "virtue" is a little bit strange, to say the least.

A really great point the book makes, however, is that conservation is useless. That's right. Useless. Until a scaling back on an absolutely universal scale is achieved, for every bit of fuel saved, it will be spent somewhere else. Among other factors, when someone saves money at the pump, they spend it at the store. Energy is consumed either way.

As an aside, much of this discussion centered on the concept of "entropy". A slight mark against their usage of the term is that they cast it as a measure of order and disorder. It is my (admittedly limited) understanding that this conception of entropy is somewhat ancient and has fallen out of favor. It is more about energy dispersion than any notion of order/disorder. For example, entropy can increase while geometric "order" also increases, such as in a spontaneous crystallization. Be this as it may, the thrust of their arguments is still understandable, though some rigor may possibly be lacking.

Phrase: "The Twilight of Fuel"

Translation: We spend the great majority of our energy and money refining energy and directing to toward a "useful" purpose. In the end, only a small fraction of energy is used for, say, getting us to the market. Also, raw energy (e.g. crude oil) has been so cheap until now, that the cost of buying it is a relatively small and continually shrinking fraction of the cost of our increasingly sophisticated usage of it. Again, no great news bulletin here, and the books authors themselves occasionally do let it slip that this doesn't make raw energy stores any less crucial to the whole process. No raw energy stores, no more "increasingly sophisticated" uses for it, and no more marginalizing of the cost of raw fuel, since it isn't even there to be marginalized.

Phrases: "The Bottomless Well" and "Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy"

Translation: Here they get almost metaphysical. They make the general claim that "the more energy we use, the more we get". In one sense this is certainly true, in that we use energy and smarts to get more energy. But one could just as easily describe the history of energy thusly: "When we find it, we eventually exploit it if we can." So far we've found energy, not because we absolutely had to, but because we just did. Then we exploited it. Today we find ourselves shackled to certain forms and usages of energy that we really do now depend on. We are compelled to find a way forward whether there really is one or not. This is an important distinction the authors appear to ignore.

Also, the "bottomless well" is not so much oil or gas, despite the word-imagery and cover art to the contrary, and despite the usual talk about how technology allows us to find more of it. The real bottomless well in the book appears to be solar energy. Essentially, the book talks about eventually moving to a hydrogen economy or possibly one based in coal/electricity or other mixtures. Well, a lot of people are talking about this and the book does nothing to advance any of these things, nor does it make it any more clear when it will all happen.

There is an interesting discussion about evolving the automobile toward an electric drive train so a battery, fuel cell or combustion engine can be easily swapped in or out. But these ideas are developed rather on the surface and not in much depth, and others have gone to great lengths proposing such things.

There really isn't any discussion at all on the controversy surrounding the issues of peak oil or the time frame for its occurrence, or how much overlap between peak oil and a new energy regime there will be for various publicly or privately funded scenarios. There is a general faith that "the market will provide" infused throughout the book, however. But as I said above, the market provision of past revolutions in energy source/consumption/usage happened in eras when they were not needed and provided conveniences/advantages which were relative novelties at first. Today's world cannot move forward without such things, which have grown from mere curiosities into vital life and death necessities.


Phrase: "The more energy we spend the more we get."

Translation: To arrive at this, they combine the ideas of the primacy of "logic" to the idea of energy spent in exploration and extraction to show how we are much better at finding and exploiting resources like oil than ever before. Thus, it is getting cheaper to produce. They cite the fact that energy has gotten cheaper over time as proof that it must be getting more abundant -- or something like that.

But first, this flies in the face of the book's own claims that most of the cost of energy - so far, anyway -- is in its processing. If processing is cheaper, naturally so will the cost of "fuel at the pump" be, as long as there are enough raw resources to meet demand. But that's the kicker; this doesn't automatically mean that reserves are in fact growing. They could be dead right that we're more efficient about finding and getting resources - shooting fewer "blanks" as it were -- but then conveniently miss the fact that we're still not finding increasingly more of it. Once you've picked the low-hanging fruit, it is of the essence that your technology and skill is needed to get the harder stuff at reasonable cost and avoid drilling "dry" wells, to put it crudely. These efficiencies do not necessarily mean equally greater discoveries and reserves. It may be so, but it isn't a necessary fact.

Given what I have already read on this subject, it seems clear that they are not only looking at the data differently, but that they are regarding completely different data entirely. Far from dealing with the warnings of certain energy experts, they are more or less sidestepping those concerns by whipping up some views that seem entirely beside the point.

So, in the end, although there is much in the book that is not at all objectionable and even interesting, I found the book falling a bit short of the grand claims on its cover.

I got this book because my work demands understanding
energy, and because Mr. William MS Gates was reading it
(Gates was also reading "The Singularity is Near",
according to an interview). It picked my curiosity.

Anyway, I enjoyed having read it. It argues very well
the threee items of the subtitle. Fuel will become less
and less important than the capital goods around energy
generation, as time goes by. If you cut down a tree for
firewood everything is fuel. If you generate electricity
from Uranium virtually everything is capital goods. Same
for renewables (wind generation, solar generation).
Waste is not always a bad thing -- it is a consequence of
putting energy to use, or refining energy for more demanding
use. And we will never run out of energy because we will
use our brains, and the energy we already have, to "find" more
energy (for instance, investing in capital goods).

Particularly interesting was its discussion of entropy and
the problems of measuring energy in BTUs (thermal units).

Why not five stars, then ? First their arguments shied away
from completely nailing some of the issues, often times stopping
just before the quantitative. Examples that come to mind: cars
will become electric, gas engines in vehicles will generate
electricity for an electric motor. New technology allows it.
Great concept, but why, exactly, not yet ? And then, when ?
They don't explain.

Another example: According to this book. Efficiency in an application
(as a rule) increases the use of energy in that application, instead of
decreasing it. Good argument: efficiency will make that application
more affordable thus more people will make more use of that application.
But where are the clearly cut data ? None is given.

I also did not like them jumping from discussing energy
facts and conclusions to a critique of regulation. While
the connection may obviously be there, the meshing of the
two things makes the whole science/technological discussion
sound biased.

As someone who has begun an effort to become knowledgable about energy alternatives, I find the material presented in this book to be, on the whole, a useful contribution to the subject.

By far the dominant theme of the book is:

Development of more energy-efficient technologies lead to greater, not less, energy use, since the reduced energy use for their existing applications is outweighed by energy consumption associated with their use in new applications.

A related point they make is that these expanded applications represent the successful meeting of broader set of human needs, and therefore this is something to be welcomed rather than shunned.

The authors posit this as a counterargument to the contention by environmentalists that the total useage of energy by human beings should be minimized.

I agree with the authors to the extent that I don't believe that overall energy useage per se is necessarily a valid gauge of environmental damage.


Where I feel the authors are not completely on solid ground on this issue, is on the way they extrapolate the industrial and technological revolution we have experienced in the last several hundred years to the future.

This view particularly manifests itself in the belief of the authors that we will be able to continue to apply human ingenuity toward extracting the raw energy we will need in order to perpetuate this progression.

(In my view, the authors' beliefs represent what I consider Cornucopianism, although they seem to feel that term applies to a quite different philosophy than theirs.)

This optimism is, of course, in stark contrast to that of "doomers" such as James Kuntzler, who envisions a near term devolution of human society due to lack of energy resources.

Essentially, the two camps are:

1). There are new energy sources (including improved processes for extracting more of existing sources) on the horizon and some combination of these will meet our (expanding) energy needs.

2). Oil is running out and the proposed alternatives all suffer from fatal flaws.

I believe 1 is likely to prove more accurate than 2, however I believe it is very possible that there will be a substantial disruption to the continuity of society if we are too slow to develop new sources as old ones run out.

Regarding the general assertion that expanding human knowledge/technology requires increasing energy useage, I find their argument persuasive, except for the premise that there will necessarily continue to be an expansion of technology at a pace equal to or greater than it is today. The authors cite recent developments like laser medical technologies. However, will we always want to pursue such advances, simply because they are possible? Will it be worth it to spend a lot of money to develop, for example, a new medical technology that heals a disease that afflicts a miniscule number of people?

I suspect that there are huge technological advancements that will occur in this century. But I don't agree that this is necessarily an ever-accelerating process forever, which would seem to be the view of the authors.


Some other points:

The authors made some good points in the discussion of current energy sources versus those derived from primitive agricultural methods. Their contention that the latter is not necessarily environmentally bening was pretty persuasive.

Their coverage of renewable energy sources is pretty spotty, since they seem to feel that nonrenewables are the best approach for the forseeable future. Their pessimism regarding solar and biomass energy, based on the fact that those sources are very diffuse, I believe is well founded. I believe a high-efficiency biomass approach, however, such as the proposed use of algae farms to generate biodiesel, would, if proven successful, somewhat mitigate this shortcoming of such energy sources. Also, I believe wind has major potential, although they give it little discussion.

They find nuclear power an attractive option, and my mind is open on that, although their discussion of it is rather brief and doesn't delve into some of the key issues- how plentiful is the fuel for conventional fission and the question of breeder reactors.

If fusion proves successful, it will presumably render most all of this moot. If their assessment of the amount of deuterium in the earth's seawater is accurate, it would appear that fusion could meet mankind's energy needs through the entire rest of the time the earth is capable of supporting life.

The authors give a huge coverage of the technology of "digital power". (perhaps the author with the physics background happens to have worked directly in this area?) As I understand it, they are saying that a vast array of mechanical-driven hardware is going to be replaced with electronically-controlled electric hardware, in a wide range of factory machinery as well as consumer products such as automobiles. I was not particularly familiar with this; they have piqued my curiosity to look into this further.

The Bottomless Well offers counterintuitive insights into energy consumption and production. For instance, does it make sense that more fuel efficient cars result in using more fuel? Yes it does and we can follow the logic easily.

People who spend $100 a month on gasoline to do the groceries and to go on weekend trips, might choose to commute by car if their car's fuel efficiency is doubled. They'll wind up spending $125 or $150 dollars a month using the car three times as much. When something becomes cheaper to use, people don't pocket the savings, they use it more. Data going back centuries backs up this finding.

What about production? The authors argue that our whole reasoning about energy production is wrong. First they remind us that energy cannot be produced, that it cannot be created out of nothing; that's basic physics. By "energy production" what we really mean is a change of state: sunlight causes chemical reactions that produce carbon compounds that eventually become biomass, the biomass is transformed through heat and pressure into fossil fuels. Energy is progressively absorbed and locked in until the fossil fuels are extracted and burned millions of years later.

Second, they point out that most of our energy consumption is used in energy production. For instance when burning coal, we have to mine the coal and ship it to the plant. We have to spend 30% or so of the plant's production to scrub the CO2 out of the plant's emissions. Much of the electricity produced is lost in resistance while travelling on the power grid between the plant and your refrigerator.

A lot of energy is spent shaping and delivering energy when and where we need it. It takes a lot of energy to power a medical laser that will fix a cornea, but only a minuscule amount of energy is delivered to the eye. The rest of the energy is spent ensuring a well-defined area is heated to a precise temperature for an exact number of milliseconds. It's all about order: burning coal results in electricity delivered over a grid to a hospital that will power a device to heal a cornea. The energy was transformed from a low order to a higher order, from fire to electricity to a laser beam.

As a book, I find the authors repeating themselves a few times and I think their written style is a bit bombastic, but they offer invaluable insights that counter parts of what Bjorn Lomborg calls the Green movement's Litany. Recommended.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

No reviewer can say that this is a perfect book, perfectly organized, etc. HOWEVER, what the authors have to say must be said. And what they say must be understood, and quickly.

They do a great job in this book of blowing away all the myths and sloganeering associated with power and energy. The whole face of power and how it is used in the world is changing. Policy makers in Washington, DC, have fallen completely behind, and our nation will fall by the wayside, too, if we do not understand the concepts described in this book.

The book is well-written, but tends to repeat itself. This is acceptable to me as a reader, because I understand that the authors are trying to make several points very clear and have to pound them in over and over. Some readers may find that irritating.

This book helped me to remember something I learned in school, but had lost touch with: there is a Second Law of Thermodynamics, and we ignore it at our peril.


If we, or any society, decides to pass on some important source of power, don't worry, someone else will come along and use it instead. Huber has said this over and over: if someone "conserves energy", such as using less gasoline, someone else will be happy to take that energy for themselves. For instance, if the United States decides to not use certain energy sources for environmental reasons, the Chinese have no problem using that source for their economy. Poverty and "clean-ness" go hand in hand. If one person voluntarily wishes to live in poverty, by all means go ahead. However, every other human on the planet will gladly get out of poverty.

A character in the recent dystopian science fiction film The Island works all day injecting fluids into wires that disappear into the wall next to him. He is never told "where these wires go," and his curiousity to find out eats away at him. Without this crucial contextual knowledge, his understanding of his own role in the system is facile.

I have always felt this way about energy. I make all of my energy and resource consumption decisions on the basis of the folk wisdom that certain choices are good for the environment and the long term well-being of mankind. But since I don't know "where the wires go" my decisions are...shall we say..."faith-based."

This book traces our wires back to the source. It is by no means exhaustive, but as a brief popular history of energy, it is a fantastic book. The authors not only tell the story of energy since what they have so catchily dubbed the "carbohydrate economy" of the pre-industrial age, they also place this history in the context of physical law.

There are, however, two serious problems with this book, and they are closely related. First, like all of Peter Huber's books, it is extremely divisive. The authors don't just disprove environmentalist misconceptions, they RIDICULE them. In book after book, Huber consistently overplays his hand, happy to alienate potential converts so long as it pleased the choir. Like Nietzsche or Richard Posner, his good points are buried in cavalier sarcasm.

The second problem is that they fail to prove their most (jaw-droppingly) provocative theses (paraphrasing): 1) that waste is virtuous and 2) that we will never run out of energy. They make a compelling case that using energy to extract energy is expanding the practically-available supply. They also demonstrate that the price of fuel in decreasingly significant to the price of end-user energy. But it doesn't follow from either of these that waste is a good thing. Insignificant, MAYBE, but not virtuous. Huber would undoubtedly respond that he's just being an advocate, providing a counterweight to the grim greens. But the authors accuse environmentalists of Malthusian doom-saying even as they charge into this Panglossian optimism. For a nitpicking critic like Huber, this is a fatal flaw. He even concedes as much at one point, stating something to the effect that "if you wanna get all technical about it" the Second Law of Thermodynamics beats us all in the long run.

For any lesser intellect, this might not be a total cop-out. But the authors invoke the laws of physics as the gold standard of their own analysis. Dismissing these laws as technicalities whenever they don't fit the book's subtitle inflates the claims the authors can plausibly make and therefore (presumably) their book sales. Perhaps it was naive of me to hope that this book could tell me why my SUV-driving is a selfless gift to humankind, but I still expected a bit more.

I found this to be an entertaining, exciting, optimism-generating book, but after reading it I'm afraid I can't be as optimistic as the authors are. On the one hand, a large component of the book is essentially just spelling out the laws of thermodynamics, and it can't be argued with. Of the myths they debunk, in several cases they make their case quite well--there is always going to be energy waste (that's part of the laws of thermodynamics), increases in efficiency do not result in reduced consumption of energy, and overall demand for energy is continually increasing. I think their suggested path of oil-independence not by continuing to expand the burning of coal (as the U.S. has been doing for the last few decades) but by building new nuclear capacity is sensible. They suggest some other technologies that may also turn out positively (including nuclear fusion). Their comments on the alternative energy production methods already in place (diesel generators and delivery trucks) are fascinating.

Where I part ways with the authors is on their assumption that continued success in finding new sources of energy (or better ways at getting at current sources of energy) is inevitable. Yes, we've been successful so far, but this is one area where we can be certain that in a long enough run, the past will not predict the future. (Or, alternatively, they make the mistake of not looking at other relevant past records, like the records of both species extinctions and civilizations that collapse.) I was almost expecting the authors to cite Frank Tipler's The Physics of Immortality, as part of an argument for an infinite human future. They don't go quite as far as Tipler, arguing that we could upload ourselves into a computer simulation which would produce infinite computation and allow all possibilities to be realized in a finite future--they limit the future to "as long as the sun continues to shine, and the planet rotates, and the depths of the cosmos stay cold" (p. 188).

There is much of value in this book. Like a recent issue of The Economist (April 23-29, 2005), they present arguments for a rational environmentalism that accounts for costs and benefits, and show that steps to preserve a clean environment are a good and effective use of some of the increased energy consumption (at the cost of reduced efficiency).

I recommend the book, with reservations. The parts that are founded on implications of the laws of thermodynamics and solid research support are sound, but there are also claims which run far beyond the support provided (like "we will never run out of energy").

If you read through the customer reviews of this book, there are 4 types of review. Some seem likely to be helpful in making a purchasing decision. Others, not so much. A potential buyer would be wise to discount or ignore unhelpful reviews and count only the others.

1) Reviewers, like me, who found the book fascinating, well-written, informative; who admire Huber and Mills for taking on “common wisdom” like David slinging a stone at Goliath; who continually find ourselves paging back to check out an interesting factoid or re-read a particularly sweet gem of a logical argument. We all give the book 5 stars. Since you won’t know if you love it as much as we do until you actually read it, unless one of us is your friend and you are prepared to just take our word for it that the book is eminently read-worthy, our reviews probably aren’t all that helpful.

2) Reviewers who never even attempted to understand (or, perhaps, read) the book, but gave it a low rating (usually 1 star). These reviews are generally characterized by diatribes against evil oil profiteers. Had these reviewers flipped the pages at all, they might have realized that this book has pretty much nothing to say about oil specifically. Hint: oil is _not_ mentioned in the title! Also look out for references to “Intelligent Design” (which we can all see, for free on Amazon, does not show up at all in the book’s index). These reviewers also frequently rely on the “experts” defense, as in “So-and-so said we’re all going to run out of energy and die so this book is wrong.” Verdict: since they didn’t read it, why listen to them? Unhelpful.

3) Reviewers who read the book, thought about it, and obviously still didn’t get it at even the most basic scientific level. These reviews are generally characterized by claims that are not in keeping with basic high school-level thermodynamics. Incidentally, much of Bottomless Well is basically a layman’s grounding in basic high school-level thermodynamics. These folks tend to give 1 star, much like a completely colorblind person looking at a Van Gogh might say “what’s the big deal?”. Verdict: since they need to go back to intro physics class, why listen to them? Unhelpful.

3) Reviewers who read the book, thought about it, examined the facts, and disagreed with the conclusions. They tend to give somewhere between 3 or 5 stars. THESE ARE THE REVIEWS TO CONSIDER. These are basically the “lethargists” that Huber and Mills mention – that is, folks who want to reduce overall human consumption of (ordered) energy. Generally there are two potential reasons why these folks identify as “lethargists”. But for both of them, “Repent, the end is near” would be a good motto.

Of these reviewers, one group says, “I’ve read all of Huber and Mills’ evidence that we’re not in any danger of running out of energy sources anytime soon – and I still don’t believe it.”

The other group says, “It doesn’t matter that you _can_ drive a nuclear-powered automobile – you shouldn’t. “

Basically, all these folks are right. You can’t fight entropy forever. And fighting entropy in one place has to create a corresponding entropic effect someplace else. However, it is of course the timing of all this that is key. Presumably the first group believes that, even though everyone in the past who has ever said we were in imminent danger of running out of useable energy was wrong, they are correct this time.

As for the second group, one is tempted to ask – just whose consumption of (ordered) energy are you planning to curtail? It’s very easy to curtail the use of (ordered) energy by little brown people on the other side of the world, and quite another to turn off the heat in Mom’s house and let her freeze to death. Or, say, give up using the computer on which you typed your nifty little book review.

It’s difficult to determine why this third type of reviewer (both groups) doesn’t give the book 5 stars. Most of them seem to have derived quite a lot of benefit from reading the book – it gave them a foil against which to argue their own, competing opinions. Very few of these reviewers seem to have had a problem with the writing style, or the layout, or the logical argument of the book. In fact they seem to have, basically, enjoyed it (in the same way that we can “enjoy” a horror movie). But they give less than 5 stars because they disagree with the authors’ conclusions. The fact that you disagreed with the conclusions seems like a rather unfair basis on which to dock points – I didn’t particularly want Luke to get his hand cut off by Vader, but that doesn’t make it a bad movie. Thus, these group 3 reviews should in fairness probably be weighted towards “5 stars”.

That’s it, buy the book.