Review by Kirkus Book Review
The noted environmentalist and writer serves up a paean to the emerging dominance of renewable energy. McKibben, a pioneer in writing about climate change (his first book,The End of Nature, appeared in 1989), holds that it's too late to stop global warming: "Our best hope now is simply to stop the heating of the earth short of the point where it cuts civilization off at the knees." If we're going to reach that best hope, we'll have to force the issue and stop working at our current pace, which, he gloomily adds, seems unlikely. After all this, though, McKibben becomes a bit more optimistic, as he profiles technologies that can provide necessary relief. In 2024, he writes, more than nine-tenths of the world's new electricity came from renewables; China now has the industrial capacity to produce all the photovoltaic equipment the world needs to replace fossil fuels; batteries are becoming ever more efficient and can increasingly be thoroughly recycled, such that we need not mine the earth for more minerals. What's wanted, writes McKibben in a polemic that stays refreshingly shy of hyperbole, is political will, and this can be done. As he notes, California "managed to produce from renewable energy more than 100 percent of the electricity it was using for long stretches of the day," and that figure is only growing. Still, he recognizes, the fossil fuel industry is fighting tooth and nail to keep Big Oil predominant, and the present presidential administration is antagonistic to anything that smacks of environmental responsibility, such that "the US might decide to become an island of internal combustion, and then the essential nation might turn out to be China," which would suit China just fine. A compelling argument for altering our energy regime before we're toast, if that's not already the case. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
