Short version: “Great book, worth reading, deserves a spot on the shelf between Flannery and Monbiot [!]”
Treehugger’s Lloyd Alter of Canada reviewed my book after a small dispute over my review of George Monbiot’s book Heat (he liked the book, I didn’t). His bottom line on Hell and High Water:
It is well written and very informative, a window on America for those of us who cannot quite figure out what goes on down there.
Interestingly, his “favourite line in the book” comes from conservative messaging guru Frank Luntz — and it is a line progressives and scientists should take to heart:
Did I mention that repetition is a good strategy for messaging?
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Joe: “So what is the realistic solution? What “wedges” do you endorse to stave off catastrophe?”
I am an architect by training, and I see that 40% of energy waste is from buildings. Even more comes from bad planning, where there is continued expansion of suburban development and rapid growth of retiring boomers building second homes.
Yet it is not that difficult to build zero-energy single and multiple family dwellings and offices. It is not impossible to legislate zoning standards so that every house that is built must be within a ten minute walk of transit. Combine that with your sixty MPG car and have we not taken a serious dent out of our needs for fuel and power?
In the rich countries. But what do the rapidly developing countries with lots of cheap coal do?
To Lloyd Alter: Romm’s eight point program to save the world is given early in Hell and High Water:
1. Launch a massive performance-based efficiency program for homes, commercial buildings, and new construction.
2. Launch a massive effort to boost the efficiency of heavy industry and expand the use of cogeneration (combined heat and power).
3. Capture CO2 from 800 new large coal plants and store it underground.
4. Build it 1 million large wind turbines (or the equivalent in renewables such as solar power).
5. Build 700 new large nuclear plants while shutting down no old ones.
6. Every car and SUV achieves an average fuel economy of 60 miles per gallon.
7. Every car can run on electricity for short distance before reverting to biofuels.
8. We stop all tropical deforestation, while doubling the rate of new tree planting.
All of these are doable, though #5 is difficult to do quickly enough to make a difference, and #8 is very very difficult to do. #3 isn’t exactly easy, as carbon capture and sequestration is in its infancy.
#1 is one of the most important, as you observe. Government policies, incentives, and regulations can make an enormous difference though. As an example, consider that in 2003 Californians used 6,732 kWh per capita, when the national average was 11,997 kWh per capita, or 78% more. http://tinyurl.com/zfehv
To learn more about why, see http://tinyurl.com/sluoy
If you got the U.S. down to California’s level, and you applied the 1634 TWh (tera watt hours = 10^12 watt hours) to burning less coal at power plants, you could save 1.6 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions each year. (For context, U.S. CO2 emissions are about 6.0 Gt of CO2 per year, and there about 1.0 GT CO2 equivalent emissions of other greenhouse gases.)