An engaging state of the union by an important leader in solar power.
Pioneering solar power entrepreneur Williams (Chasing the Sun: Solar Adventures Around the World, 2005) chronicles how he left journalism to become an advocate for the distribution of solar energy around the world.
In 1979, the author was invited to join President Jimmy Carter's newly formed Department of Energy to help promote the use of solar power. At the time, nuclear power was still in the ascendancy, and the program did not take off. Nonetheless, five years after Carter left office, “the country was using 15 percent less electricity…[due to] government sponsored energy saving programs.” This was the beginning of the author’s dream to transform the lives of the billions of people living in the developing sector who lacked access to electricity—by making it possible for them to purchase individual solar installations. Since the cost of extending the electric grid to these remote villages was prohibitive, photovoltaic cells would be competitive, and they would not “[destroy] the global environment.” Williams developed a plan to set up a nonprofit organization that would be a pilot program to demonstrate the feasibility of his vision. His job would be to solicit funds and then look for countries where he could apply his “concept of small-is-beautiful solar power for householders” and recruit locals to run the project. In 1990, he launched the Solar Electric Light Fund, which sold solar installations at cost, with grants from the World Bank, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and other major philanthropic institutions. This pilot project succeeded brilliantly in proving the viability of a commercial market for solar energy in the developing sector, and it laid the basis for major government-sponsored programs in India and China. Today, with the reduced cost of photovoltaic cells, “America is now the world's fifth-biggest solar market, after Germany, Spain, Italy, and China.”
An engaging state of the union by an important leader in solar power.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3377-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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