No Good Alternative
Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
“The most honest book about climate change yet.” —The Atlantic
“The Infinite Jest of climate books.” —The Baffler
An eye-opening look at the consequences of coal mining and oil and natural gas production—the second of a two volume work by award-winning author William T. Vollmann on the ideologies of energy production and the causes of climate change
The second volume of William T. Vollmann's epic book about the factors and human actions that have led to global warming begins in the coal fields of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, where "America's best friend" is not merely a fuel, but a "heritage." Over the course of four years Vollmann finds hollowed out towns with coal-polluted streams and acidified drinking water; makes covert visits to mountaintop removal mines; and offers documented accounts of unpaid fines for federal health and safety violations and of miners who died because their bosses cut corners to make more money.
To write about natural gas, Vollmann journeys to Greeley, Colorado, where he interviews anti-fracking activists, a city planner, and a homeowner with serious health issues from fracking. Turning to oil production, he speaks with, among others, the former CEO of Conoco and a vice president of the Bank of Oklahoma in charge of energy loans, and conducts furtive roadside interviews of guest workers performing oil-related contract labor in the United Arab Emirates.
As with its predecessor, No Immediate Danger, this volume seeks to understand and listen, not to lay blame--except in a few corporate and political cases where outrage is clearly due. Vollmann is a carbon burner just like the rest of us; he describes and quantifies his own power use, then looks around him, trying to explain to the future why it was that we went against scientific consensus, continually increasing the demand for electric power and insisting that we had no good alternative.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The world's attachment to fossil fuels is questioned at length but with little depth in this second volume of the author's scattershot jeremiad on global warming and unclean energy. Journalist and novelist Vollmann (Rising Up and Rising Down) reports on public opinion in hydrocarbon hotspots, including West Virginia coal towns ravaged by pollution and mountaintop removal; Colorado natural gas lands, where fracking has frayed nerves; and United Arab Emirates oil fields, where fearful immigrants work for a pittance. In rambling interviews with townspeople, workers, government officials, and anticarbon activists, he uncovers both dismay at the local downside of fossil fuels and support for them as necessary sources of jobs, energy, and cultural tradition despite the prospect of climate change. While the reportage is evocative, Vollman's case against carbon-tolerant "ideologies" relies on glib sarcasm thanks to fracking, he jibes, Americans "could go on generously warming the world!" and undigested factoids (for example, that coal byproducts are in everything from stockings to pills) that never add up to a coherent argument. His ideological biases constantly intrude, especially in his ill-informed attack on nuclear power, a leading low-carbon energy source; the book often feels like a confused, omnidirectional assault on all of industrial civilization. The result is long but feckless, a lightweight analysis of energy and society. Photos.
