The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse - Softcover

Owen, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1594485615 ISBN 13: 9781594485619

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2012

Synopsis

Look out for David Owen's next book, Where the Water Goes.

The Conundrum is a mind-changing manifesto about the environment, efficiency and the real path to sustainability.

Hybrid cars, fast trains, compact florescent light bulbs, solar panels, carbon offsets: Everything you've been told about living green is wrong. The quest for a breakthrough battery or a 100 mpg car are dangerous fantasies. We are consumers, and we like to consume green and efficiently. But David Owen argues that our best intentions are still at cross purposes to our true goal - living sustainably and caring for our environment and the future of the planet. Efficiency, once considered the holy grail of our environmental problems, turns out to be part of the problem. Efforts to improve efficiency and increase sustainable development only exacerbate the problems they are meant to solve, more than negating the environmental gains. We have little trouble turning increases in efficiency into increases in consumption.

David Owen's The Conundrum is an elegant nonfiction narrative filled with fascinating information and anecdotes takes you through the history of energy and the quest for efficiency. This is a book about the environment that will change how you look at the world. We should not be waiting for some geniuses to invent our way out of the energy and economic crisis we're in. We already have the technology and knowledge we need to live sustainably. But will we do it?

That is the conundrum.

About this title

About the Author:

David Owen is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author more than a dozen books. He lives in northwest Connecticut with his wife, the writer Ann Hodgman.

Review:

“Owen's unflinching perspective is particularly refreshing.”—Mother Jones

“Elegant... Owen's core argument is not that we shouldn't try to save the environment. Rather, he says that our focus on technological innovation, particularly efficiency, is misguided.”—Slate

“A contrarian page-turner”—Bloomberg Businessweek

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1594485615
• ISBN 13: 9781594485619
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 261