Power Hungry

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table of Figures

 

Praise for
Power Hungry

“Bryce douses the green energy movement with a cold shower of facts and figures, ones that collectively remind us that a transition to wind and solar power would take decades, that it would be astronomically expensive, that it would make the U.S. reliant on China for turbines, and that it would lead to ‘energy sprawl.' For all the intuitive appeal of renewable energy,
Power Hungry
makes a convincing case that decarbonizing the world's primary energy use will mean letting the sun shine and the wind blow while embracing natural gas as a bridge to nuclear energy.”

—James McWilliams, Freakonomics Blog

“Bryce has compiled a catalogue of hard facts and statistics that puncture just about every myth you will read in breathless accounts of the coming ‘Green Economy'.”

—William Tucker,
The American Spectator

“Bryce deftly sets out to debunk the myths of the ever-popular going green campaign and answers more specific technological difficulties and cost containment issues.... His views will undoubtedly be rejected or disbelieved, but he backs up those views with hard evidence provoking readers to do the math for themselves, verify statistics, and basically, check up on him with more than ninety pages of references, statistical appendixes, and energy data notes. This is the must-read book for the twenty-first century.”

—M. Chris Johnson,
San Francisco Book Review

“[S]hould be mandatory reading for U.S. policymakers. ... The promise of renewables has consistently been oversold by the political class. Solar and wind energy both suffer from major structural deficiencies.... Our current national energy debate is heavy on passion and hyperbole; it could use a sizable dose of historical perspective and empirical reality.”

—Duncan Currie,
The National Review

“I have long known that there is nothing remotely ‘green' about putting wind farms all over the countryside, with their eagle-slicing, batpopping, subsidy-eating, rare-earth-demanding, steel-rich, intermittentoutput characteristics. But until I read Robert Bryce's superb and
sober new book
Power Hungry,
I had not realised just how dreadfully bad for the environment nearly all renewable energy is....

Bryce's book is more than a demolition of renewable energy. It contains a fascinating and detailed account of the shale gas revolution and of the latest developments in modular nuclear technology. It makes a persuasive case that this century will be dominated by ‘N2N' energy—natural gas to nuclear—and that the consequence of the rise of both will be continuing steady decarbonisation of the economy. This is the best book on energy I have read. It confirms my optimism—and my rejection of the renewable myth.”

—Matt Ridley,
The Rational Optimist

“Bryce is especially good at explaining why fossil fuels have become entrenched as our main energy sources.”

—
Philadelphia Inquirer

“A brutal, brilliant exploration.... If
Power Hungry
sounds like a supercharged polemic, its shocks are delivered with forensic skill and narrative aplomb.... It is unsentimental, unsparing, and impassioned; and, if you'll excuse the pun, it is precisely the kind of journalism we need to hold truth to power.”

—
Wall Street Journal

“His magnificently unfashionable, superlatively researched new book dares to fly in the face of all current conventional wisdom and cant.... I have never yet found any book or author who does a more thorough, unanswerable job of demolishing universally held environmental myths than Mr. Bryce does.... Mr. Obama is reputed to be an omnivorous reader of serious intellectual volumes. He should drop everything else and put Robert Bryce's invaluable book at the top of his list. So should every senator and Congress member and every self-important, scientifically illiterate pundit in America, right and left alike. They will all learn a lot.”