NO MIRACLES NEEDED

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.