Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future - Softcover

Little, Amanda

3.89

130 ratings by Goodreads

9780007293995: Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007293992 ISBN 13: 9780007293995

Publisher: HarperPress, 2010

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Review:

‘Power Trip takes a most timely and complicated issue and weaves a fast, fun, and gripping story–one that's both candid and unflinching in its approach. Amanda represents the best of a new young perspective, a new voice of green’ Robert Redford

'Energy is the most important story in the world bar none, and no one has ever told it with more verve than Amanda Little. If you want to know how the world works, and why it may not work much longer, this is the book you need.' Bill McKibben, author of 'Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook
for Taking Action in Your Community'’

'Power Trip offers a panoramic view of our energy crisis - exploring past, present, future - with hope, passion and humor. Whether you are liberal or conservative, expert or novice, young or old, you will find adventure and insight in this book' Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

'Lively, engaging and most thought-provoking, Power Trip takes us on a journey through the very wide world of energy, from its colorful past to its high-tech future. Little answers the questions that perplex many - and, so importantly, identifies the key questions that only the future will answer.' Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Prize: the Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

From the Back Cover:

In the tradition of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Thomas L. Friedmam's Hot, Flat, and Crowded, prominent journalist Amanda Little maps out the history and future of America's energy addiction in a wonk-free, big-picture, solutions-oriented adventure story.

After covering the environment and energy beat for more than a decade, Amanda Little decided that the only way to really understand America's energy crisis was to travel into the heart of it. She embarks on a daring cross-country power trip, and describes in vivid, fast-paced prose the most extreme and exciting frontiers of our energy landscape.

At her side we visit an offshore oil rig, the cornfields of Kansas, the Pentagon's fuel-logistics division, the Talladega Superspeedway, New York City's electrical grid, and laboratories creating the innovations of a clean-energy future. As Little explains, energy is everything: It grows our crops, fights our wars, makes our plastics and medicines, warms our homes, moves our products and vehicles, and animates our cities.

How did we develop this insatiable appetite for fossil fuels? Little travels through history to track the evolution of America's energy addiction: the 1897 installation of the world's first power plant (a Thomas Edison-J. P. Morgan venture); the 1901 Spindletop gusher that threw open the era of cheap American fuel; FDR's encounter with a Saudi king that set the stage for our dependence on Middle Eastern oil; General Motors' early decision to sell big guzzlers rather than small, efficient cars.

Little illustrates how abundant oil and coal built the American superpower--even as they posed political and environmental dangers to the nation and the world. More important, we learn how the same American ingenuity that got us into this mess can get us out of it. With next-generation candor and optimism, Little explores the most promising clean-energy solutions on the horizon, arguing that everything we know about our past teaches us that we can solve the problems of our future.

Hard-hitting yet forward-thinking, Power Trip is a lively and impassioned travel guide for all readers trying to navigate our shifting landscape and a clear-eyed manifesto for the younger generations who are inheriting the earth.

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