Carbon ideologies

Review by New York Times Review

as one of the greatest challenges facing the planet, climate change deserves serious treatment by a great writer who combines deep reporting with a compelling literary style - someone who can explain the overwhelming scientific evidence of warming and its human causes, and of the need for action. William T. Vollmann would seem to be just the writer for that challenging project. Superhumanly prolific and willing to take on the toughest topics, he packs research and voice into his impassioned works. "Rising Up and Rising Down," his exploration of violence, spans seven volumes. He is also a celebrated novelist, winning the National Book Award in 2005 for "Europe Central." So is this the book on climate change we've all been waiting for? Maybe not. "Carbon Ideologies," Vollmann's two-volume exploration of the energy sources we use and the mess we are in, is prodigiously reported but sprawling and undisciplined. At more than 1,200 pages, it is "several times longer than its contractually stipulated maximum," Residents he tells us. "My publisher asked me to cut it. But for some reason, I just didn't want to." Vollmann's many fans are drawn to his literary hoarder aesthetic, and they will not be disappointed. The first volume, "No Immediate Danger," deals mostly with the nuclear disaster at Fukushima; the second, "No Good Alternative," takes on coal, oil and natural gas. He has stacked his reporting high, giving us interview after interview with local people in places ravaged by our need for power and by our wastefulness: those living near the nuclear plant, occupants of West Virginia hollers whose communities have suffered environmental wreckage from coal mining, unhappy neighbors of fracking pads, coal workers in Bangladesh and oil workers in Abu Dhabi. We hear them at great length, but with little interpretation or analysis. Vollmann also provides a lengthy primer on energy sources and calculations, discussing how much energy it takes to make, for example, concrete or nylon. This massive speed bump stretches from near the beginning of the first volume to Page 219. However, he allows, "since 'Carbon Ideologies' is primarily a record of people's experiences, if you skip my tables and their numbers, my point will remain clear enough; better yet, any mathematical errors might then escape your censure." (As for those mathematical errors, the writer Will Boisvert has pointed out that when Vollmann writes "in each two days of 2009, the world burned the entire oil output of 1990," the figure is off by 289 days.) The interviews show people who, as Vollmann says of his Japanese subjects, "tried to believe in the goodness of corporations and the sincerity of cabinet ministers, or else shut out of mind what could not be helped. They lacked comprehension of the various waves and particles that threatened them, not to mention the units of measurement used in media pronouncements. We all learned to live with what we could not see." Similar themes of ignorance and resignation play out in interviews with those he meets in Nitro, W.Va.; Ruwais, Abu Dhabi; or Greeley, Colo. Climate change, like the residual radiation in Japan, is invisible to them. They're all just trying to get by. Meanwhile, boosters of these industries explain that the jury on climate change is still out (it isn't), and that, as a Colorado banker states, "science is the new religion." The prose can be moving. Of an evacuated town near Fukushima, Vollmann writes, "By now the trees had already started to decompose, so that when they formed up the sides of houses, they infiltrated them like subtly woven rattan, perfectly fitted by the weaver-upholster called death." It also shows some of his trademark bawdiness: Vollmann samples radiation levels around Japan using a dosimeter and a device he becomes very fond of, a "pancake frisker," of which he wants us to know: "Three buttons decorated it. When I pressed the leftmost one, the machine úttered a three-tone chirp not unlike the sound one of my sweetest girlfriends used to make when she climaxed." In telling us all of this, Vollmann repeats phrases throughout the two volumes, sometimes as mournful echoes and elsewhere as sarcastic commentary. Discussing our wasteful ways, and the enormous amounts of energy that have gone into all of the things that we use and the things that we do, he asks a dozen times, "What was the work for?" Discussing the mendacity of officials in Japan, he repeats their warnings not to give in to or spread what they refer to as "harmful rumors." The coal passages get heavy rotation of the phrase "the regulated community," which he carries on into discussion of other regulation-averse fossil fuel industries. Throughout both volumes, he says he is writing this book not for today's reader, but for those in the devastated future, repeatedly referring to the time "when I was alive." Which brings us to the biggest problem with this monumental work: not its length, or the way it might test your tolerance for sarcasm, but the author's tendency to assume the absolute worst consequences of climate change. After describing the amount of energy that goes into making glass, he adds, "I hope that you have at least inherited a few of our windowpanes. Maybe you pried them out of drowned properties and fitted them into your caves." As someone who writes about climate change for a living, I can tell you that if we continue down the path we are on, things will get very bad. Coastal cities will be severely damaged, and some lost; international climate migration will uproot the lives of millions. Changed climate patterns will worsen drought and wildfires in some areas, and river flooding and hurricanes in others. And because carbon dioxide persists so long in the atmosphere, even if we magically flipped a switch today, things are already pretty certain to stay very bad for hundreds of years to come. All of that is awful enough, without having to go full-on Cormac McCarthy. I'm a fan of scientists like Katharine Hayhoe, who warns against overdosing on unwarranted gloom. As she puts it, "Doomsday messaging just doesn't work." Too much scare, and people give up hope and stop trying to bring about change. Vollmann, by contrast, gives short shrift to renewable energy sources like solar power that can help to provide a pathway to a less damaged future. He writes: '"Carbon Ideologies' largely neglects solar power, that being associated with decentralization and environmental benignity. Indeed, solar is an ideology of hope - not my department." Toward the end of the second volume, Vollmann writes: "So I wouldn't be surprised if you in the future had worked out efficient solar energy generation. Perhaps your solar-powered pumps have not yet failed to keep the ocean from overtopping your diked-up cities." Reading these two books did have an effect on me; I became even more conscious of the resources I waste in my own life. I found myself wondering why I burn fossil fuels by driving two miles to a lovely park where I take my morning run, instead of trotting around my own neighborhood. It's not that I stopped doing it, but I do feel worse about myself. Maybe that's what the work was for. ? JOHN Schwartz is a science writer for The Times, focusing on climate change. He is the author of "This Is the Year I Put My Financial Life in Order."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 12, 2018]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Much of this book is an attempt to witness, writes Vollmann, a National Book Award-winning novelist and author of compassionate works of investigative nonfiction. Vigilant in his precision, open-mindedness, and candor, Vollmann takes on global warming, elucidating the science used to measure the impact of carbon-based fuels and nuclear energy on the atmosphere and Earth, and analyzing the ideologies, or assertions, that keep the energy industries churning, no matter the consequences. Vollmann provides an extensive, richly sourced primer of mind-seizing quantifications about greenhouse gases emitted by agriculture, transportation, power plants, and manufacturing, vividly conveyed information matched by arresting enumerations of negligence and malfeasance. The rest of this chronicle, the first of two vast volumes, examines nuclear power in a meandering inquiry shaped by Vollmann's risky journeys to Fukushima, Japan, in the wake of the 2011 tsunami and reactor meltdowns. His poignant conversations with nuclear refugees, unnerving visits to contaminated towns, telling photographs, and stubborn attempts to measure radiation all attest to the terror, sorrow, and eerie normalization of this ongoing disaster. Vollmann's careful descriptions, touching humility, molten irony, and rueful wit, combined with his addressing readers in the hot dark future, make this compendium of statistics, oral history, and reportage elucidating, compelling, and profoundly disquieting. And the story continues: No Good Alternative, due out in June 2018, focuses on fossil fuels.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Fossil fuels and nuclear power pose equally apocalyptic threats, according to this fact-strewn, muddled opening volume of a massive two-volume cri de coeur on energy. Addressing an imagined reader of the future, when climate change has made the earth a scorched wasteland, novelist and journalist Vollmann (Uncentering the Earth) opens with a guilt-stricken primer on mankind's heedless production of greenhouse gases-then proceeds to attack nuclear power, one of the largest sources of low-carbon energy. Much of the book covers his travels in Japan, where he roamed the environs of the Fukushima nuclear accident of 2011 taking readings with a radiation meter, talking to locals, and shuddering at desolate vistas of evacuated towns-the fruit, he contends, of a callous "nuclear ideology" that saddles humanity with poisoned landscapes. Vollmann's critique doesn't quite make a coherent case that Fukushima's spew will have significant health effects (the scientific consensus says otherwise); instead he veers between sarcastic jibes-"unlike its three main rival fuels, nuclear could be fun!"-and alarmism about "gamma rays stabbing through me." Nuclear power and energy policy deserve a more thoughtful, less biased exploration than Vollmann gives them. Photos. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Vollmann (The Dying Grass, 2015, etc.) apologizes to the future that we've ruined, charting how our choices of energy sources made the planet scarcely inhabitable."Back when I lived," writes the author early on, "some of us believed that heavily polluting coal could somehow lift people out of poverty without impoverishing us in any more fundamental way. We believed that because it was convenient to believe it. So we kept the lights on." The italics are his, but in any event, it's a feint: we won't get deeply into coal until the second volume of this Carbon Ideologies series. The first is heavy going enough. Famously loquacious, Vollmann writes, without apparent irony, that his "little book" is full of questions and not solutions, true enough save that the little book stretches out over more than 600 pages and embraces a couple of dissertations' worth of data and research notes. In the main, the author's focus is on nuclear power, for, as he also notes early on, "the future for which I write will most likely also be a more radioactive time," not just because nuclear power may be the only way out of fossil fuel dependencyrenewables make more sense, but they apparently don't offer enough bang for the buck for the corporate mindsetbut also because, given the likelihood of accidents, the world is likely to have plenty of loose isotopes rolling around. Vollmann chronicles his travels to the site of the Fukushima reactor disaster, asking questions that journalists have not: "What color was the tsunami?" "Is it safe here?" It will come as no comfort to know that Fukushima won't, in fact, be safe for another 500 yearsthough, counsels one decontamination specialist, it may take only 300 years. That there are two or more answers to the question is emblematic, for every matter that the author raises leads onto many others, yielding a dense butas always, with Vollmannrewarding, impeccably researched narrative.Vollmann promises a second volume to comeand perhaps more beyond that. Only the irradiated future will tell. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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When We Kept the Lights On We all have in us the ghosts of long-vanished things, of fallen cities and marvelous machines. Gene Wolfe, 1982 Someday, perhaps not long from now, the inhabitants of a hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet than the one on which I lived may wonder what you and I were thinking, or whether we thought at all. This book is for them. When I read another embrittled document predicting the disappearance of bison from the American Plains, my melancholy is untainted by urgency. Captive bison do survive, but the great herds have been gone since 1884. And as I write this book about coal, oil, natural gas and atomic power, I do my best to look as will the future upon the world in which I lived--namely, as surely, safely vanished. Nothing can be done to save it; therefore, nothing need be done. Hence this little book scrapes by without offering solutions. There were none; we had none. All the same, it may not be uninteresting to learn what went on in the minds of buffalo hunters, Indian killers, coal miners, freeway drivers, homeowners and nuclear engineers. In the time when I lived, it was still possible to meet Americans who disbelieved in global warming, although the ones I knew became shyer and rarer in about 2013. In 2016, they helped elect Donald Trump President, upon which their various carbon ideologies naturally came roaring back. "We sure need a good Sierra snowpack this year," said a contractor friend of mine. "Skiing was lousy last year and the year before. If we can only get some snow, that will make those global warming people shut up."--That was just before Christmas. Come spring, the snowpack was 6% of what we had been calling normal. But why not call California a special case? Up in Washington the snowpack was a full 16% of what it should have been; and by May, "seeing things happen at this time of year we just have never seen before," Governor Inslee declared a "statewide drought emergency."--Fortunately,my contractor friend was vindicated, and those global warming people utterly foiled, for after a long dry year, the subsequent winter blew flurry-rich,and by January the Sierra snow level had reached 115%! February turned unseasonably warm. The leftwing hoaxers got impudent again. As for the skeptics, they took strength in the fact that carbon forecasters of other stripes had been wrong before, in token of which I quote from my grandfather's Mechanical Engineers' Handbook , copyright 1958: Petroleum would soon run out! The peak of production in the United States should come about 1965 . . . World shortage of petroleum may be expected to begin about 1960 .-- If only!-- As for coal, in predicting that American production would reach its height in about 1975 the Handbook was not far wrong, but it anticipated that a world shortage of total world fossil fuels . . . would be noticeable around that same year, which is precisely when a build-your-own-alternative-style-house primer warned us all: A Federal Power Commission staff study, released in January of 1975, concluded that natural gas production from the forty-eight contiguous states has reached its peak and will decline for the indefinite future .--We were all on theverge of getting cold!--But in 1993 the National Coal Association announced that "at present rates of use" our coal reserves can be expected to last nearly 250 years. There are about 1,000 tons of recoverable coal for every man, woman and child in the United States. Then came fracking, which afforded gas enough to toast us in our planetary oven. In each of these dull and distant comedies, we got condemned to future deprivation, and then the diagnosis brightened! (I myself got cynical; I didn't care; I chalked it up to financial manipulation.) In 1999 my atlas advised me that oil might last another 40 years if we were lucky. And in 2015, as I sat beside the automatic gas fire, writing Carbon Ideologies , Iran announced intentions to increase her gas output by 40% in the next five years, while coal prices fell farther; oil prices had just decreased again: There remained enough fossil fuels to choke us all! So why not deal sharply with pessimists, or refrain from dealing with them at all? Mr. Jonathan Lee, whose company rented out supertankers, felt as excited as a rookie because you are seeing history change before your eyes! China and India meanwhile began seizing a bargain opportunity to top off their petroleum reserves . The prior errors of prophecy proved that no one knew anything about anything; therefore, climate change was the merest hot air. Not far from the disbelievers dwelled those who couldn't be bothered about "an ecosystem somewhere." In 2016 a kindly barber told me: "I don't really think none about it, although I have to say that when I see people pick up cigarette butts from the sidewalk I appreciate their caring, and people that care about the earth, I mean, that's nice, and when I think about the polar bears losing their land, I do feel touched about that, because I care a lot about animals." For him, an ecosystem was something to watch on television while he ate takeout pizza. He was a decent fellow who had never been consulted by the carbon vendors--whose systems of extraction and delivery had long since become invisibly ubiquitous. In 2014 my friend Philip, a cheerful, hardworking realtor in his early 40s, allowed that global warming might exist, but that it was natural and "evolutionary"; the human race had little to do with it. For years we had drunk together and listened to each other, so I asked him to tell me more. "Why should I concentrateon anything that stresses me out?" he demanded, and when I saw that the subject might dent his cheerfulness, I changed it. Kindred sorts reassured me that our new weather was "natural" and cyclical,and therefore required no action. Indeed, precious little action was taken. For more than 40 years, Homer City Generating Station in Pennsylvania has spewed sulfur dioxide from two of its three units completely unchecked ,. . . because it is largely exempt from federal air pollution laws. . . Last year, the facility released 114,245 tons of sulfur dioxide, more than all of the power plants in neighboring New York combined . This pollutant was both a killer of many organisms and a dangerous "precursor" gas with unpredictable effects on the climate. In 2011,the Environmental Protection Agency finally demanded that Homer City cleanup. After threatening immediate and devastating consequences and losing a lawsuit,the utility found a way to comply--without even raising its electricity rates. When I read this tale in the newspaper, my first emotion was happy astonishment that mitigation had proved so practicable--after which I felt all the more amazed that Big Coal kept digging in its heels against reducing harmful emissions elsewhere--and was allowed to do so--while Big Oil and Big Frack behaved much the same. (As for Big Nuke, its mantra, as we shall see, was: No immediate danger .)-- In 2017, a fellow who had repeatedly sued the EPA was appointed to run the agency. Well, after all, who gave a damn about some old ecosystem somewhere? (A newspaper item: Pounded Again, Coastal Town May Consider a Retreat . Just repairing and repairing the sea walls--it isn't a permanent solution with the ocean coming ever closer to us . Those words used to be exotic, back when I was alive.) Who could say whether somewhere might be here? That ecosystem's peculiarities had always lain beyond our ken. Although odorless methane might be accompanied by the scent of crude oil, and while carbon dioxide, that colorless gas with a faintly pungent odor and acid taste , sometimes heralded itself in jet trails and smokestack-clouds, both of these quickly vanished into our all-accepting sky. Then what? As a West Virginian pastor told me (you will meet him in the coal section): "Here you do see the smokestacks and you know that they do put off the smoke and everything, but it seems to me that the earth is so large and there are so many trees and everything that how could manmade equipment put up enough smoke to make a difference?" His question was absolutely reasonable. Answering it would have required the help of scientists, instruments and historical records. Even then, causation could never be proved. All one might hope to establish was plausible correlation with predictive value. Most of us were non-correlators; to us the clashing claims felt wearisome, complicated, inscrutable. It took me all my life merely to understand aspects of myself--and why shouldn't the latest scaremongers be as wrong as the Cassandras of  "peak oil"? In Bangladesh I met coal mine workers and even a labor union leader who had never heard of global warming; of course they asserted that there was "no alternative" to coal extraction. Indeed, they proved their own point. I remember another courteous old West Virginian who had just been speaking cogently about his childhood, his coal miner father and the decline of coal extraction in Appalachia; he grew vaguer when I requested his views on climate change: "I'm sure it's got something to do with the situation on TV"--meaning that he had seen television footage of weather-related disasters, and supposed that global warming might be part of the cause. "That's part of the pollution problem," he allowed. Then he added, and I failed to follow his logic, "That's why the EPA is doing what they are, stepping beyond their authority, I think, in a lotof ways." "Do you think coal contributes to global warming?" He reassured me: "They've got technology now that can cut all the pollution out." Had it only been so!-- In fact it was so a little bit , as Homer City unwillingly proved--but our captains of fuel and electricity resisted even that little for all they were worth, which was plenty. Anyhow, that good old man, who cannot be faulted for the incompleteness of his knowledge on greenhouse gases; and the disdainers of somewhere-nowhere ecosystems, the gloom-and-doom handwringers like me, the climate change deniers and the consoling weather-cycle asserters, we were all outnumbered by ordinary practical folks for whom cheap energy and a paycheck incarnated all relevance. One fellow wrote in to the newspaper: My son works in the coalfields ofsouthern West Virginia[;] he supports my two grandchildren by mining the coal that keeps the lights on in America --this last phrase being often used by my nation's carbon ideologues. So I know first hand the importance of winning the war on coal that Obama declared five years ago . Whether it was truly Obama who started it, who our enemy was, and whether America's lights might beneficially be dimmed here and there, failed to encumber him. The maintenance of his two grandchildren trumped other arguments; their needs caused him to know firsthand the small selfish thing that he knew. I will not celebrate him, but I decline to blame him, either. Why should his kin go hungry? (You in our future can go hungry instead; after all, we don't even know you.) In The Wall Street Journal 's "Notable & Quotable" section, a so‑called "environmental writer" enlarged his argument into a carbon eulogy: In 1971 China derived 40 percent of its energy from renewables. Since then, it has powered its incredible growth almost exclusively on heavily polluting coal, lifting a historic 680 million people out of poverty. . . A recent analysis from the Centre for Global Development shows that $10 billion invested in such renewables [as solar energy] would help lift 20 million people in Africa out of poverty. It sounds impressive, until you learn that if this sum was spent on gas electrification it would lift 90 million people out of poverty. So in choosing to spend that $10 billion on renewables, we deliberately end up choosing to leave more than 70 million people in darkness and poverty. In other words, back when I lived, some of us believed that heavily polluting coal could somehow lift people out of poverty without impoverishing us in anymore fundamental way. We believed that because it was convenient to believe it. So we kept the lights on. Excerpted from No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies by William T. Vollmann All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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