 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com In the tradition of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Thomas L. Friedmam's Hot, Flat, and Crowded, prominent journalist Amanda Little maps out the history and future of America's energy addiction in a wonk-free, big-picture, solutions-oriented adventure story. After covering the environment and energy beat for more than a decade, Amanda Little decided that the only way to really understand America's energy crisis was to travel into the heart of it. She embarks on a daring cross-country power trip, and describes in vivid, fast-paced prose the most extreme and exciting frontiers of our energy landscape. At her side we visit an offshore oil rig, the cornfields of Kansas, the Pentagon's fuel-logistics division, the Talladega Superspeedway, New York City's electrical grid, and laboratories creating the innovations of a clean-energy future. As Little explains, energy is everything: It grows our crops, fights our wars, makes our plastics and medicines, warms our homes, moves our products and vehicles, and animates our cities. How did we develop this insatiable appetite for fossil fuels? Little travels through history to track the evolution of America's energy addiction: the 1897 installation of the world's first power plant (a Thomas Edison–J. P. Morgan venture); the 1901 Spindletop gusher that threw open the era of cheap American fuel; FDR's encounter with a Saudi king that set the stage for our dependence on Middle Eastern oil; General Motors' early decision to sell big guzzlers rather than small, efficient cars. Little illustrates how abundant oil and coal built the American superpower—even as they posed political and environmental dangers to the nation and the world. More important, we learn how the same American ingenuity that got us into this mess can get us out of it. With next-generation candor and optimism, Little explores the most promising clean-energy solutions on the horizon, arguing that everything we know about our past teaches us that we can solve the problems of our future. Hard-hitting yet forward-thinking, Power Trip is a lively and impassioned travel guide for all readers trying to navigate our shifting landscape and a clear-eyed manifesto for the younger generations who are inheriting the earth. |
Average Customer Rating:  A real Power Trip through the current energy landscape in the US. This is a book for anyone interested in catching up on the potentially most important sector of the near future.
Ms. Little gives a comprehensive overview of how energy is produced and consumed with a focus on how the status quo is improved. Thus, a topic which in the past has often made for books focusing on the gloom and doom aspects is given a completly different connotation. It is still made clear that we should not stay on the current path and that we need to pay more attention on how we consume energy. Ms. Little however does not tell her readers that they will have to sacrifice everything but that they will have to improve everything. An approach that holds tremendous opportunities for entrepreneurs and businesses.
In conclusion this book aims (and succeeds) at making it clear that environmentalists and big business should work together for the benefit of the planet instead of trying to fight each other until they drop. And any book that succeds at that is a book one can only recommend. Terrific book addressing difficult subject By taking a "we can do this and here is how" approach, Power Trip not only outlines our current energy crisis and options but gives hope that this is a problem we can and will solve. As we turn the corner from what was to what will be, Power Trip is an invaluable guide of what is possible as we redefine energy consumption.
Essential and Electrifying Read Power Trip is 21st century journalism at it's very best. What makes Power Trip a pleasure to read is what makes it important to read--Little seeks and finds the technologies, the people, and the companies who are day by day making it more possible for the good life and the green life to sustain each other. In a field where bias abounds,a field frequently defined by polar oppositions of environment and economics, Little has written a book that constructs a path beyond that divisiveness, a path, she effectively argues, will lead to economic and ecological success.
Little's willingness to examine how her own passions for consumption and impulses towards conservation tangle and resolve work together to create a tender and adventurous tone, that underscore an informed optimism that is never naive, an informed politics that is never shrill, and a narrative thread that is taunt, paragraph by paragraph, that place Power Trip at the top of the Energy Book list. Wonder what it is about Nashville that it has produced the two most significant environmental writers of the last decade-- Al Gore and now Amanda Little. The Real Deal Like a great documentary, this book tells a story we should all understand-- and sweetens the medicine so it goes down easy. It is fast paced, character-heavy, and packed with information you'll find yourself sharing in passing conversations. Little has taken the massive scope of this issue and made it a story about people - one about all of us. Her depth of knowledge is intense, her humor is surprising, and her optimism is contagious. Comprehensive, Knowledgeable, Inspired! THRILLING! I didn't think a book about such a potentially dry and depressing topic could be such a magical journey -- Ms. Little takes us down the rabbit-hole of energy sourcing, generation and consumption, pulling together engrossing and occasionally hilarious anecdotes with impressively assembled data and well-balanced analysis. This is not a partisan screed, but rather, an exceedingly well-informed and forward-thinking vision of how we can prioritize our use of petrochemicals and leverage new technologies to mitigate climate change. This book is required reading, and Ms. Little a national treasure -- the next generation of American ingenuity. |  |
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