The Burning Answer
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Our society faces a choice. We could be enjoying a sustainable lifestyle but we have chosen not to. In three generations we have consumed half the oil produced by photosynthesis over eight million generations. In two generations we have used half our uranium resources. With threats from global warming, oil depletion and nuclear disaster, we are running out of options. Solar power, as Keith Barnham says, is our necessary solution.Barnham explains that the roots of solar energy lie in a little known equation E=hf, an equation which was coincidentally celebrated (and explained to the world) by Einstein in the same year he discovered E=mc2. He alleges that the former equation has been overlooked in favor of the latter, much to our detriment, and Barnham is here to offer us a solution: We can still turn things around and solar energy is the key.In this provocative, inspiring, passionately argued book, Keith Barnham outlines actions that any one and all of us can take to make an impact now and on future generations. The Burning Answer is a solar manifesto for the new climate-aware generation and a must-read for climate-change skeptics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In with renewables and out with everything else especially nuclear power is the message of this tendentious "manifesto" on energy policy. Barnham, a British physicist who developed a solar cell, QuantaSol, insists that "solar" power which in his usage includes not just photovoltaics but wind power, hydro-power, bio-gas, and other sources that derive circuitously from the sun's energy is the only sustainable energy that can save us from climate change. He begins with lengthy discussions of the physics of energy technologies, pitched at laymen but using maladroit metaphors that are simplistic yet difficult to follow. (Buzz Lightyear at a children's party is a favorite image.) He moves on to inadequate, rose-tinted treatments of the practical economics, performance, and reliability of renewable energy systems, glibly skating past their drawbacks; his analysis of the effect of photovoltaics on wholesale electricity prices is especially garbled and misleading. Much of the book is given over to anathemas against nuclear power that are similarly ill-considered and biased. (He numbers the element plutonium and the humble neutron among "the villains of our story.") Barnham's sloppiness with facts, murky explanations, dotty conceits ("We don't know if Stonehenge is saying nuclear waste is stored there"), and blatant propagandizing make this one of the worst accounts of energy policy to appear in recent years.
