books
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'The Quest' questioned
A read of Daniel Yergin's new book, The Quest, reveals holes in his arguments, mostly centered around his discussion of peak oil.
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Fareed Zakaria, Daniel Yergin, and the elite disdain for clean energy deployment
In the New York Times Book Review, Fareed Zakaria has a review of Daniel Yergin's new book, "The Quest," that reads like a capsule summary of current elite conventional wisdom on energy.
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Green is the new red: environmental activists under attack
Will Potter on the eerie parallels between the Red Scare and the kind of repression and paranoia the green movement faces today.
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Bill McKibben avoids the fetal position
Bill McKibben's new Global Warming Reader brings together a range of writing on climate change.
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Do we have a moral obligation to stop screwing up the planet?
Barack Obama, Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama, and Ursula K. Le Guin walk into a bar book … No, it’s not a joke; it’s an ambitious project that aims to make a rock-solid moral case for environmental action. It started with the print book Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril […]
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Why the sustainable food movement should learn to love Nathan Myhrvold’s ‘Modernist Cuisine’
The most expensive cookbook you’ll (n)ever buyNathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine — in all of its six-volume, 2,438-page splendor — explicitly aims to “reinvent cooking.” Maybe it will; and it will almost surely reinvent a certain kind of high-end book retailing. It sells for a cool $625, and its initial 6,000-copy print run has already sold […]
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Alexis Madrigal chats about Danish wind power and how to fail well (also, sensors)
This is the fourth in a series from my conversation with Atlantic tech channel editor Alexis Madrigal about themes and stories from his new book, Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. DR: Something that comes up again and again in your book is this seemingly irreducible mystery of wind and how […]
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Alexis Madrigal chats about energy forecasts and nuclear PR
This is the third in a series from my conversation with Atlantic tech channel editor Alexis Madrigal about themes and stories from his new book, Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. DR: Let’s talk about energy forecasts. They seem to have substantial sway over what we do on energy policy despite […]
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Alexis Madrigal chats about boom-and-bust fossil fuels and the promise of cheap electricity
This is the second in a series from my conversation with Atlantic tech channel editor Alexis Madrigal about themes and stories from his new book, Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. You can read part one here. DR: Earlier you mentioned technological momentum. But in a lot of these episodes [from […]