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220 of 236 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nutrition Action for Energy Appetites, April 16, 2010
This review is from: Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future (Hardcover)
With Power Hungry, energy journalist and Austin apiarist Robert Bryce marshals lots of accurate numbers in context to make plain how modern culture exacts power from energy to save time, increase wealth, and raise standards of living. He also dispenses common sense to citizens and policy makers for an improved environment, a better, more productive economy, and more enlightened civil society. Inspired by the environmental economics of Rockefeller University's Jesse Ausubel and the University of Manitoba's prolific Vaclav Smil, he makes the case for continuing down the path of de-carbonizing our machine fuels--a process begun two hundred years ago when we turned from wood to fossil fuels and huge reservoirs of impounded water. As the world's population continues to urbanize, people will inevitably demand cleaner, healthier, environmentally sensitive energy choices.
Today, the world uses hydrocarbons for 90 percent of its energy, getting a lot of bang for its buck. Bryce offers convincing evidence that, over the next several generations, particularly since broad energy transformations require much time and financial investment, relatively cleaner burning natural gas will provide a bridge to pervasive use of nuclear power--" the only always-on, no-carbon source than can replace significant amounts of coal in our electricity generation portfolio." And if nuclear ultimately becomes the centerpiece for the electricity sector, which constitutes about 40 percent of our total energy use, this development would accelerate the de-carbonization of the transportation and heating sectors as well.
His narrative transcends the current climate change debate. He thinks the evidence on either side is equivocal, at best provisional, and, even if it could be proven conclusively that humans were responsible for precipitously warming the earth by producing a surfeit of carbon dioxide, there is little that could be done about the situation now that would be consequential or practical, except embrace imaginative adaptation approaches.
Bryce organizes his ideas around four interrelated "Imperatives" that serve as a prime motif for human history and explain much contemporary circumstance: power density, energy density, scale and cost. He shows that, although energy is the ability to do work, what people really crave is the ability to control the rate at which work gets done--power. Performing work faster means more time to do something else. This begets an appetitive feedback loop, where more power unleashes more time to produce more power. As the scale of this process increases, costs are reduced, making what power creates more affordable.
In terms of economic efficiency and improved ecosystems, producing the most power in the smallest space at a scale affordable by all is what present and future enterprise should ensure.
The power density of fossil fuels, expressed in watts, BTUs, or horsepower, has been the lynchpin of our modernity, although they will eventually become depleted, perhaps over a few centuries or much sooner, as various peak oil and coal scenarios suggest. (Bryce shows that worldwide oil's marketshare has fallen over the last 35 years and the rate of decline will likely continue.) And they do have negative environmental consequences. Particularly coal, with such environmentally treacherous extraction techniques as strip mining/mountaintop removal, and toxic emissions. But their overall benefits at present outweigh the negatives in a comprehensive cost benefit analysis. Which is why they're so popular.
Hydrocarbons lift people out of poverty, literally empowering them to better health, wealth, and productivity. "The key attribute of hydrocarbons is their reliability," a precondition for coordinated economic and social convergence, which is the very hallmark of modern life. Planning to replace their capacity successfully will demand great ingenuity and the most advanced technology--not hyped-up premodern gadgetry like industrial wind technology.
Over the first seven chapters of his book, Bryce lays out the gargantuan scale of our energy consumption, bound on the one side by the existence of nearly seven billion people and the thirst for increasingly denser power supplies on the other. He shows why, if oil didn't exist, we'd have to invent it. Deploying helpful charts and graphs throughout, he demonstrates that we will not, indeed cannot, quit using hydrocarbons any time soon, since our daily consumption is equivalent to 226 million barrels of oil, equal to the total daily output of twenty-seven Saudi Arabias.
The world consumes nearly 7 billion horsepower a day, albeit unevenly, since Americans consume energy at 18 times the rate of people in Pakistan and India. America leads the world in reliable horsepower and produces about 74 percent of the primary energy it consumes. Moreover, it has more hydrocarbon reserves than any other nation. Yet, despite all this power, the United States leads the world in energy efficiency and per capital carbon emission reductions over the last fifteen years.
So why are so many willing to trade the high power density of coal, natural gas, and oil for such unreliable, low-power-density sources as wind and solar? Part II, The Myths of Green Energy, attempts to answer this question. Bryce looks closely at the claims for wind especially and debunks them all as mainly the result of snake oil, a too-gullible public suffused in scientific illiteracy, "happy talk" from media (viz, Thomas Friedman), and self serving bombast from industry pundits like T. Boone Pickens. Thinking that wind technology, for example, could put a dent in the use of fossil fuels as an "alternate" energy source is just plain goofy, akin to believing that a book of matches could melt a glacier. Believing that corn and cellulosic ethanol are friends of the environment and consumers is downright Orwellian. In truth, they reduce efficiency and performance while damaging machine engines, and raise the cost of food by shrinking food supply while depleting millions of acres of soil and siphoning off a sea of water. For shame.
Bryce reinforces the theme of his previous book, Gusher of Lies. The energy business is so vast and intricately global that it dooms any nation's quest for energy independence. Those who think more hybrid cars, wind machines, and solar cells will free the United States from its dependence on imports will be shocked to discover that those technologies hinge on rare earth elements obtainable almost exclusively in China. Which fact largely explains why the Chinese are rapidly becoming a dominant manufacturer and exporter of "green" technologies.
Bryce relishes challenging flimflam. Power Hungry demolishes the notion that oil is dirty; that carbon capture/sequestration schemes can be globally effective; that cap-and-trade/taxation/renewable energy credit ideas for reducing carbon dioxide emissions can do anything but worsen the situation, at the expense of tax and ratepayers; that plug-in electric cars will soon revolutionize the transportation sector; and that efficiency, desirable as it is as a means of conservation, can change the world.
Bryce's conclusions about better policy follow the logic of Sherlock Holmes: "When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." By eliminating the imposters and exposing the disingenuous, he is then able to engage in rational discourse about the genuinely probable technologies that will in future slake our ginormous craving for power.
He states the problem in a way that suggests solutions. If society seeks cleaner air and water, if consumers seek cheaper energy, if environmentalists seek open vistas and large swaths of untrammeled nature, if politicians seek a significant reduction of greenhouse gasses while maintaining, even expanding, the power requirements of modernity--then the future of energy conversion for electricity must hinge on increased use of natural gas in the near term while the world prepares for nuclear power over the long haul. Given the magnitude of the situation, anything else is hope. And prayer.
Recounting the sorry recent history of natural gas supply, Bryce explains how pandering politics and the coal industry combined to reduce its availability, making the public think the resource had been exhausted, However, new discoveries of extensive shale deposits in the United States, along with improvements in extraction technologies, now make natural gas much more available. That it burns 50 percent cleaner than coal, emits no toxic particulates, and is so versatile, make it the ideal transitional fossil fuel for the next generation or so. As more supplies become available, costs will continue to drop, making natural gas more appealing to consumers. To protect against damaging the ground water and pollutant leakage through gas lines, the industry would have to be carefully regulated, particularly in remote areas during the extraction process.
Still, as good as they are, carbon-based fuels, even those as beneficial as oil and natural gas, continue to put us at odds with our potential for informed stewardship of the planet. Our best scientists tell us we must do better in achieving goals of sustainable biodiversity and healthier ecosystems. To do so, we should sooner than later move beyond sloganeering and heavy reliance on fossil fuels.
As Bryce says, "nuclear goes beyond green." It provides two million times the power density of fossil fuels and can be contained in a small area, preserving the countryside. Concerns about its safety because of exaggerated news accounts of the damage inflicted by the Three Mile Island/Chernobyl accidents, along with the dramaturgy wrought by...
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89 of 106 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Going, Going, Gone. Another Home Run for Bryce, April 27, 2010
You just have to feel sorry for the advocates of global warming. They've had a bad year. First it was the continuation of a decade of stable or slightly cooling weather, completely unpredicted by the climate models. Then it was the devastating scandals, not only in the Climate Research Unit but in NASA and the IPCC as well. To add insult to injury, there was the jarring failure of Copenhagen. Then the failure of Congress to adopt a cap and trade scheme when they had a Democratic President and overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate. Now the coup de grâce, Robert Bryce hits yet another home run by completely demolishing the argument for renewables in his new book Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future.
Bryce is really pissing me off. I am an energy policy expert. His earlier book Gusher of Lies was an excellent rebuttal to the demagoguery on oil imports. But oil wasn't my thing so I gave him a pass and enthusiastically supported his book. But now he writes Power Hungry about the idiocy of many of the arguments supporting "green energy." This is my field and so I am truly in awe of his ability to so cogently skewer mindless advocates of green.
Bryce is addicted to numbers. He is ruthless in presenting numbers that make his points. His main weapon is the tyranny of big numbers. Many ideas sound good in the abstract--e.g., wind power, electric cars, cellulosic ethanol--but fail miserably when put into the context of US energy demographics.
I marvel that Bryce could deliver a nugget of new insight on literally every page. (I realize I am leaving myself open to abuse.) But he does. The list would be too long of all the fascinating nuggets that Bryce has so artfully strung together in an altogether gripping story of our modern day energy dilemma. A few will suffice to make the point:
* He presents the Four Imperatives of energy supply: power density, energy density, cost, and scale;
* He describes the technology advances that allow us to access huge natural gas shale resources;
* He discusses modular nuclear units (some as small as 25 megawatts);
* He absolutely skewers T. Boone Pickens and Amory Lovins;
* He devastates the argument that Denmark is an exemplar for relying on renewable energy; and
* He catalogues China's dominance in the "natural earth" resources essential for wind and solar.
It goes on and on.
Given all the attention given to literature that paints false pictures of green energy, I hope Bryce's book takes off like a rocket. The country very much needs this splash of cold water on the phony claims made for green energy.
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20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Valuable Source of In-Depth Energy Information, September 21, 2010
This review is from: Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future (Hardcover)
Few science books are worth reading each and every page. Climatism, by Steve Gorham (reviewed here in March), is an exception. Power Hungry is not, but without doubt it contains more than enough great information to make it a terrific buy for anyone with a strong interest in the nation's energy supply.
I recommend reading only about 20 pages a day, as it is very heavy on the numbers, but it's well worth a fun 15-day investment.
Comprehensive Research
Robert Bryce spent four years researching every aspect of American energy from a fairly objective point of view. As one currently under contract to compile a four-volume encyclopedia of energy for John Wiley & Sons, I can tell you Bryce has done an outstanding job.
From time to time he throws in his personal politics--which too many authors are inclined to do--and he has too much respect for the global warming alarmists for my comfort, but these do not detract too much from the excellent analysis of various energy technologies.
A full 54 pages devoted to references illustrate the comprehensive research Bryce has done, as well as the quality of his sources. He is at his best destroying many of the myths regarding renewable energy, providing powerful mathematical proofs that anyone can understand.
He is also excellent on nuclear energy, and I will use one of his chapters as the basis for a future article on small-scale nuclear power generation in a future issue of Environment & Climate News.
Useful Information
To convince you of the value of the book, in the remainder of this review I will simply offer a surfer's list of some of the wonderful nuggets of information this 394-page text contains:
* Natural gas supplies are bountiful, with a known 280 years of resources available at our present rate of consumption.
* The next time someone says we are addicted to oil, substitute the word "prosperity" for oil.
* Nearly 3 billion people relying on biomass energy would love to trade places with us.
* Power density is the key to all energy sources. Oil, gas, coal, and nuclear have high power density, whereas wind, solar, and other renewable power sources have terribly low density.
* Humans cannot live near wind farms because of the low-level noise produced by their massive blades, which has palpable physical impacts.
* Each megawatt of deliverable wind energy requires 870 cubic meters of concrete and 460 tons of steel, whereas a gas-fired plant requires only about 3 percent as much.
* In order for the Chinese to build a planned 12,700 megawatts of new wind power, they will have to add 9,200 megawatts of new coal power as back-up.
* Denmark's perceived leadership in successful wind power is a mirage. Denmark has not reduced carbon emissions, energy costs have tripled there, and the nation must export most of its wind power at below-market rates.
* The American Bird Conservancy estimates between 75,000 and 275,000 birds are killed each year by wind turbines.
* The United States, without strict government mandates, is already leading the world in reducing its carbon intensity and its energy use without doing any of the things environmental activist groups dictate.
* Each year, hundreds of thousands of people die in Third World nations from indoor air pollution caused by the burning of biomass. Power from coal, natural gas, and oil would improve living conditions and reduce pollution-related deaths.
* Although environmental activist groups strongly hype cellulosic ethanol, it is no closer to technological and economic viability than it was when first described in 1921.
* Ethanol cannot significantly reduce the demand for oil, because many products other than automotive fuel are extracted from oil.
* Batteries have improved, but not by the orders of magnitude required to enable battery-powered cars to compete with other forms of transportation.
* 2,000 tons of uranium can release as much energy as 4.2 billion tons of oil.
* Measured in units of output, wind and solar power are getting 15 times as much federal subsidy money as nuclear power.
Power Density the Key
The primary theme of this book is the importance of power density. As Bryce thoroughly documents, coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power provide such power density while wind, solar, and biofuels do not.
You will not find a book on energy that makes this important point more strongly than this one.
Jay Lehr, Ph.D. (jlehr@heartland.org) is science director of The Heartland Institute.
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