Power to the People by Vijay Vaitheeswaran, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25, ISBN 0374236755 Reviewed by Fred Pearce
TO make sense of the shifting world of energy, you need a good guide. Vijay Vaitheeswaran鈥檚 Power to the People is a lucid guide to the new energy landscape, from Edison to Enron, from coal to carbon nanotubes. The energy industry may be the environmentalists鈥� number-one enemy. But it also offers us an unparalleled window to a sustainable future for our abused planet. For it is the only one among the great industries of our modern world 鈥� think water, farming, construction, mining, electronics 鈥� for which we can see an emerging blueprint of how things ought to be.
The building blocks are being assembled even as dinosaurs like Exxon continue to roam the Earth. Solar panels, wind turbines, hot rocks and the other forms of renewable energy grow ever faster. The ultimate means of storing and distributing their power 鈥� the hydrogen fuel cell 鈥� is well off the drawing board. Super-efficiency in transport through inventions like the Hypercar cannot be too far behind. And household-scale energy generation may yet prove as good at powering Californian suburbs as Indian villages.
Advertisement
It sometimes makes amusing reading to see the ideology of Friends of the Earth bent through the free-market prism of the Madras-born energy correspondent of The Economist. But there is food for thought in an analysis where, as one chapter title attests, 鈥淎dam Smith meets Rachel Carson鈥�.
Not everything is right. His obituary for big dams looks decidedly premature now that the World Bank is back in there loaning cash. Perhaps he believes too readily that markets will do the sensible thing and equate environmental and economic efficiency. But not many writers can bestride the worlds of politics and industry, economics and environmentalism with such authority. And this is as good a manifesto for the new energy world as you will find.