50 Energy Books

Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve  By Ian Morris Main Points: The book is based on the Princeton Tanner Lectures, where he tried to explain the wildly different ideas about "fairness". Where do ideas of fairness come from?  Two big theories on fairness Evolutionary psychology side Primatologists have shown that if you give a monkey a small pebble, you can train the monkey to give you back the pebble. You can give them a reward- a green pepper. The primatologists (Dr. Brosnan) said that every so often one monkey will get a cherry tomato as opposed to a small green pepper. Some monkeys look at their pepper and assume that life is unfair and eat the pepper. Some monkeys refuse to play the game. Some monkeys get angry and throw it at the experimentalist. Evolutionary built-in effect driven by genes: This brings about the concept of "monkey values" and how these values are passed on to the next generation depends on your g

The Age of Sustainable Development by Jeffrey D. Sachs Main Points: Johan Rockstrom's 2009 Nature  diagram on a Safe Operating Space for Humanity Anthropocene: We have left the Holocene, the period 10,000 years ago when agriculture got started until now. We are in a new geological epoch. Paul Krudsen coined this term and might have meant it as a metaphor that humanity had become so large that it could change the planet. If you apply the same criteria to the end of former epochs, would you say that we are in a new era? The answer is yes.  Three events about 43 years ago made an impact: (1) UN Conference on Environment and Development in Stockholm (2) Publication of 'Limits to Growth' and it is possible to overshoot the Earth's ecosystem (3) Jeffrey Sachs joined Harvard as a freshman.  Central component of the Industrial Revolution- it was the ability for the mega-transformation of energy. All work that we can do in the world- construction or running spi

The Making of the Atomic Bomb By Richard Rhodes As the French nuclear scientist Bertrand Goldschmidt once said, "From a laboratory bench in 1939, the Manhattan Project expanded in scale until by the end of the war it was comparable in scale of investment and number of employees to the United States Automobile Industry in 1945." Main Points: Over the years the idea of the making of the atomic bomb has shrunk in scale to one man (Robert Oppenheimer), one bomb (Hiroshima), and one place (Los Alamos). But the point of the book is to expand the view and broaden the perspective of this nuclear age- large, complicated, and expensive an effort it was. Critical mass of plutonium is about 5-6 kg and most modern weapons use plutonium cores of about 3 kg. It is a very dense metal, about twice as heavy as lead. Uranium takes a bit more materials (15 kg is the critical mass). We aren't talking about too much, but it was difficult to enrich this material. The Manhattan P