Steve McKevitt

This book is useful in many ways, and not in the way most might imagine. Firstly it takes a cautious optimistic position to climate change inpact all the while being very direct about the problems that compose it. Secondly since the book is now more than 6 years old one can look to follow-up the technology based proposals that are in here to discover that many have since failed, but some have made it.
By reading this book I feel I finally have a more direct familiar sense of the problem and its scale and how humanity will need to work to address it. This is a mixed crisis between energy and food production in the context of a changing climate.

I would love to see a new edition release of this book.… (altro)

Essentially this is a essay that has been padded out to book size. I usually blame editors for this, or some desperately dire financial circumstance afflicting the author. In this case, though, I think the book grew out of the essay because the author was just so annoyed that he couldn't contain his frustration and rage within decent bounds. But there's no doubt he has his point to make, and with a somewhat redeeming humility he sums up the entirety of his book in two pages at the end. If you are reading up on the intersection of technology and science and human culture, or interested in futurism or globalism or whatever the 'ism' that describes an interest in the world's current malaise, then this is not quite essential reading but sort of useful all the same. But read the end of the book before you bother with the whole. Ironically the book itself goes perilously close to proving the author's point, but also that he perhaps missed a bigger target - the way the world is cluttered up with 'almost' and 'not quite' useful things. The authors challenge to the reader - to filter the important things from the trash in our lives - is still valid, but it's a much larger ask in the real world of half truths and half lies.… (altro)