A meticulous primer on achieving a WWS energy transition emphasizing the engineering—the easy part.
How to solve our climate, energy, and pollution crises with today’s tools.
Few readers will disagree with Jacobson, a Stanford professor whose work “forms the scientific basis of the Green New Deal,” when he points out that “burning things—coal, gas, oil, and biomass—has produced the prosperous world that we in the West inhabit” but also dismal environmental damage. A steady stream of solutions pour off the presses, mostly describing futuristic technology or nations cooperating to a degree never seen in history. In fact, Jacobson maintains, 95% of the technologies that we need are already commercially available, and we know how to build the rest. Everyone, the author included, agrees that the world must move away from combustion and toward electrification and learn to provide direct heat and energy through clean, sustainable sources—namely, wind, water, and solar, or WWS. Happy not to encounter another voice of doom or utopian fantasy, readers may settle back to enjoy this common-sense narrative, but they will need to pay close attention. While Jacobson discusses ways to speed adoption of cost-effective systems that are now competing successfully in the marketplace, mostly he delivers technical descriptions of how they work and the science behind them—e.g., the design and operation of a run-of-the-river hydropower plant versus a conventional facility. Readers distant from high school physics and chemistry will relearn the basics of electricity, photovoltaic cells, semiconductors, and power grids. In this expert, densely detailed, and mostly realistic text, Jacobson offers some surprises. For example, battery- and fuel cell–powered cargo vessels and airplanes are now in advanced development. In the final chapter, the author examines policies essential to building a 100% clean infrastructure. These descriptions are heavily technical, and the author admits that overcoming political hurdles will be a greater challenge. The book includes a foreword by Bill McKibben.
A meticulous primer on achieving a WWS energy transition emphasizing the engineering—the easy part.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781009249546
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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