In this fresh and gutsy analysis, Amanda Griscom Little lays bare America’s energy past, present and future and shows how the innovatory designs that got it to its current energy crisis will actually save it from ruin.
In this smart, fluent and easy-to-read narrative, Little delivers a confident and constructive narrative that promises to move America, (and therefore the rest of the world) beyond the despair and the doom and gloom that has been plaguing our news stories and the media.
Little takes us on a trip through the past, present and future of our energy landscape, clearly demonstrating how America's energy consumption first began. Every step of it's astronomical rise is set out – from Thomas Edison's light bulb discovery in the early 1800s to Roosevelt's Faustian deal with Ibn Saud which was to turn oil from a commodity into the single most powerful political, military and economic catalyst of the world. As she reveals the staggering facts, oil's gargantuan influence on our everyday lives becomes clear. Without it we are nothing, and yet somehow we have allowed it to instruct every facet of our existence.
With authority and an extensive breadth of knowledge, and using examples of the greatest energy users in the world, Little turns many of the old and tired outlooks for the future of sustainability on its head. Never before has America been so capable or so in need of change.
An energetic and fresh polemic that inspires and fascinates in equal measure, “Power Trip” does for energy what “Fast Food Nation” did for nutritional health, changing forever the way we think and feel about our energy and its future.
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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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