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

By David Owen

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594485615
• ISBN13: 9781594485619
• Release Date: February 2012
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 7.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

This book completely changed my perspective of “Green” energy, everyone should read this.

I read this through, then immediately read it again to let it all click together in my mind. I thought I knew a lot about sustainability, green energy, and why everything isn’t just running on solar panels already, but I was only half informed, and this book has changed my perspective on what it means to have truly green energy systems. I’m recommending this to everyone I know because I found it so truly fascinating and humbling. This book is well-thought out and argued, with clear examples and evidence to inform the reader about the issues and solutions (even the ones we don’t like) when it comes to energy and truly living sustainably as a global, human populace. Informative, interesting, and eye-opening, this will spark change in the way we think about our energy use, and what sort of future we really want for humanity.