Global warming, power failures, tanker spills and energy wars: our profligate ways have doomed us to suffer such tragedies, right? Perhaps, but Vijay Vaitheeswaran, Environment and Energy correspondent of The Economist, sees great opportunity in the energy realm and Power to the People is his fiercely independent and entertaining look at the economic, political and technological forces that are reshaping the world's management of energy resources. In it, he documents an energy revolution already underway - a revolution as radical as the communications revolution of the past decades.
From the corporate boardroom of a Texas oil titan who denies the reality of global warming to a think tank nestled in the Rocky Mountains where a visionary named Amory Lovins is developing hydrogen fuel-cell technology that could make the internal combustion engine obsolete, Vaitheeswaran gamely pursues the people who hold the keys to our future. Man's quest for energy is insatiable. It is also essential. By avoiding the traditional divide that pits free markets against the wisdom of conservation and the need for clean energy, Power to the People debunks myths without debunking hope.
What people have said about the book:
`As good a manifesto for the new energy world as you will find'
Fred Pearce, New Scientist
`Vaitheeswaran's book is by far the most helpful, entertaining, up-to-date and accessible treatment of the energy-economy-environment problematique available'
Scientific American
`Debunk[s] some of the "truisms" currently spouted on both the left and the right. [Vaitheeswaran's] lucid and entertaining book is informative and insightful'
Publishers Weekly
`In the easy, fluent style that makes Vijay Vaitheeswaran so readable in The Economist, Power to the People examines the energy future, including the prospects for fossil fuels, with a calm rationality that will surely command the respect of people across the political spectrum. It does so in a spirit of optimism that doesn't prescribe a disruptive trade-off between preserving our environment and providing enough energy for continuing human progress'