The Energy Book: Supercharge your life by healing your energy

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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? Yes. Oliver says that we have a big problem. We know that we want to continue to be able to use large amounts of energy, we know that it’s going to be difficult to switch to entirely non-fossil fuel sources and give people cheap reliable energy, therefore, as sensible human beings, we need to think about what happens if we cannot pull down our fossil fuel use fast enough. And what the book is really about is a plea for people to start thinking about this, rather than saying— as they tend to do at the moment—that we shouldn’t talk about geoengineering because it makes us think we have an excuse for not doing anything about carbon emissions because we can always get rid of the problem by throwing up a few thousand tonnes of sulphates into the upper atmosphere. 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.

Rhodes, best known for his histories of the atomic bomb, here turns his attention to the history of energy sources and how humans have developed and transitioned between them. Beginning with wood, Rhodes documents the development and transition to coal, steam, whale oil and other "burning fluids", electricity, oil, nuclear energy, and renewable sources.While he outlines the technology behind the energy sources, he focuses on the social, commercial, and political responses to the development, maturation, and adoption of each new energy source as it first is resisted by, augments, and then takes its place alongside or displaces the previous accepted sources. Rhodes looks for the spark of the unique and interesting characters and events that make the history engaging and enlightening. For example, the wood economy in England was threatened by the depletion of forests, the costs of transportation from increasingly distant forests, and the loss of timber needed to build and maintain the tall ship naval fleet that guarded fortress Britain. Adoption or displacement owed at least as much to these human issues than to the technical advantages or limitations of each energy source. 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. When I started writing about climate change I thought that advanced societies would solve the greenhouse gas emission problem largely by reducing energy consumption by changing habits and improving efficiency. But, as time went on, I came to realise that most people did not want a world in which energy was scarce or its use guilt-generating. They wanted to be able to use it freely and cheaply. Our wish to have a prosperous lifestyle tends to overwhelm our desire to be good climate citizens, even though we know today’s energy consumption has implications for the future of humanity. So, I moved from working on climate change to working on how we make energy cheap but also without deleterious consequences for the global atmosphere. People have lived and died, businesses have prospered and failed, and nations have risen to world power and declined, all over energy challenges. Ultimately, the history of these challenges tells the story of humanity itself. The final chapter contains a stunningly accurate picture of where energy conversion should be headed, and it deserves to be read by all thinking people who care about both the environment and humanity - which are one and the same.

In The Planet Remade, leading science writer Oliver Morton takes us on a thrilling journey through the world of geo-engineering. Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America’s Power by Meghan L. O’Sullivan

Extract from the book:

Life in this universe is not a simple mechanic organisation of physical elements, rather it is a matrix of energies and intelligences.