Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells---Our Ride to the Renewable Future - Hardcover

Little, Amanda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061353256 ISBN 13: 9780061353253

Publisher: Harper, 2009

Synopsis

Power Trip is an adventurous, wonk-free, big-picture, solutions-oriented narrative by leading young journalist Amanda Little that maps out the history and future of America’s energy addiction. Infused with next-generation candor and optimism, Power Trip examines the ways in which oil and coal have shaped America as an international superpower—even as they posed political and environmental dangers to the nation and the world. Hard-hitting yet optimistic, Power Trip is a manifesto for the younger generations who are inheriting the earth.

About this title

About the Author

Amanda Little’s award-winning columns on green politics and innovation have appeared in Grist.org, Salon.com, and Outside magazine. Her articles have been published in the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Wired, O, The Oprah Magazine, and the Washington Post. She lives with her husband and daughter in Nashville, Tennessee.

From the Back Cover

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.

Reviews

The inscription on a granite obelisk in Beaumont, Tex., claims: On this spot on the tenth day of the twentieth century, a new era in civilization began. On that scrubby mound of dirt gushed a fountain of oil that sprayed for days, tripled U.S. oil production overnight and set off a frenzy that revolutionized the industrial age. Previously, crude oil and its derivative, kerosene, held little more value than cheap ways to heat and light homes, but as wildcatters, engineers and investors began to conjure how the new fuel could power—and liberate—people, oil grew integral to modern life. Environmental journalist Little picks up during the summer blackout of 2003, when a massive line of electrical cable shorted, leaving six major metropolitan areas without power for days. Reflecting on the impact of the power outage, Little examines the role fossil fuels plays in her own life, and out of her self-examination emerges a thoughtful—if occasionally self-conscious—book that gives energy neophytes an accessible way to learn about fossil fuels and their fallacies. (Oct.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061353256
• ISBN 13: 9780061353253
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 446