A thoughtful approach to widespread solar energy that omits some practicalities but delivers a realistic vision of a better...
A writer offers a proposal for combating both climate change and economic inequality through solar energy.
Stayton (Power Shift, 2015) presents an aspirational guide to saving the world through the extensive adoption of solar power and other forms of renewable energy combined with automatic dividend payments. The dividends would convert the profits from the sale of energy into an unconditional basic income. The enthusiastic book is divided into two parts. The first section is written from the perspective of a person in the year 2099 explaining how the solar-driven system has transformed the world. The second returns to the present to examine how the strategy could be implemented. The 2099 narrator, who is not named, reveals that “my parents…took the extra step of registering me for my standard solar energy array” at birth. The narrator then explains the mechanics of being entitled to a lifetime of monthly payments from the earnings of a cooperatively managed array. The disbursements make government welfare programs unnecessary; the solar panels spark economic expansion (“Solar acts like a local oil well for generating growth”); everyone is more physically and financially secure; and carbon emissions drop substantially. After exploring the future, the author provides a detailed and comprehensive framework for the political, technological, and practical changes necessary to make the solar regime feasible, from infrared-opaque panels that allow arrays to work on farmland to the cooperatives that manage and maintain the equipment and distribute the dividends. Although the book’s premise is utopian, Stayton supplies a painstaking and largely plausible road map for achieving it. In this plan, the increased costs of fossil fuels make higher-priced solar energy viable. The “solar profit margin” is a panacea, and the author explains how its cyclical impacts become self-sustaining once they have been established. The question of how to attain the structural changes necessary to create a solar energy system (“We can accomplish all this without Draconian laws, massive ‘moonshot’ tax expenditures, political movements, or revolution”) is largely glossed over. (“Step 1: convince government bodies that regulate utility rates to establish a high buy-back price”; “That change requires political will to overcome the resistance from vested interests and conventional economists who insist that energy prices must remain low.”) While this is an understandable omission, it is also the volume’s one substantial weakness. But aside from that, the book is thorough in elucidating both the logic and mechanics of the system, with a substantial and well-researched discussion of basic incomes and a compelling argument in favor of higher energy prices (“Since low energy prices are holding back the transition to clean energy, it’s time to reexamine that conventional wisdom”). In addition, Stayton includes an appendix that dives into the numbers in order to prove that the system is physically possible and economically effective (“If we can get 25% of our energy from wind and hydropower, and if we install about 10 kilowatts of PV panels for each person on the planet, then we can meet all of our adjusted energy needs in the future”).
A thoughtful approach to widespread solar energy that omits some practicalities but delivers a realistic vision of a better world.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9904792-3-9
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Sandstone Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Naughty good fun from an impossibly sardonic rogue, quickly rising to Twainian stature.
The undisputed champion of the self-conscious and the self-deprecating returns with yet more autobiographical gems from his apparently inexhaustible cache (Naked, 1997, etc.).
Sedaris at first mines what may be the most idiosyncratic, if innocuous, childhood since the McCourt clan. Here is father Lou, who’s propositioned, via phone, by married family friend Mrs. Midland (“Oh, Lou. It just feels so good to . . . talk to someone who really . . . understands”). Only years later is it divulged that “Mrs. Midland” was impersonated by Lou’s 12-year-old daughter Amy. (Lou, to the prankster’s relief, always politely declined Mrs. Midland’s overtures.) Meanwhile, Mrs. Sedaris—soon after she’s put a beloved sick cat to sleep—is terrorized by bogus reports of a “miraculous new cure for feline leukemia,” all orchestrated by her bitter children. Brilliant evildoing in this family is not unique to the author. Sedaris (also an essayist on National Public Radio) approaches comic preeminence as he details his futile attempts, as an adult, to learn the French language. Having moved to Paris, he enrolls in French class and struggles endlessly with the logic in assigning inanimate objects a gender (“Why refer to Lady Flesh Wound or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”). After months of this, Sedaris finds that the first French-spoken sentiment he’s fully understood has been directed to him by his sadistic teacher: “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” Among these misadventures, Sedaris catalogs his many bugaboos: the cigarette ban in New York restaurants (“I’m always searching the menu in hope that some courageous young chef has finally recognized tobacco as a vegetable”); the appending of company Web addresses to television commercials (“Who really wants to know more about Procter & Gamble?”); and a scatological dilemma that would likely remain taboo in most households.
Naughty good fun from an impossibly sardonic rogue, quickly rising to Twainian stature.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-316-77772-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
PERSPECTIVES
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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