Download or read book Ending Our Addiction to Oil written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Science. Subcommittee on Energy and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Freedom From Oil How the Next President Can End the United States Oil Addiction written by David Sandalow and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2008 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I plan to deliver an address from the Oval Office one month from today. The topic will be oil dependence.” With these opening words, Freedom from Oil takes the reader to the highest levels of government, as Cabinet members and White House aides debate how to break our addiction to oil. In a fast-moving narrative, David Sandalow shows how to solve this problem while offering a unique window into the White House at work. A White House veteran, Sandalow explores what would happen if the next President made breaking the United States' addiction to oil a top priority. In crisp and clear prose, Sandalow explains the size of the challenge and then offers a powerful message of hope. “This issue unites Americans,” he writes. “Game-changing technologies are at hand.” Plug-in cars, biofuels and measures to improve traffic are all part of the solution. Throughout the book, profiles of fascinating individuals help bring serious policy dialogue to life. From the commander of U.S. forces in western Iraq to a grandmother in northern Alaska to an electric car entrepreneur to the winner of the Indianapolis 500, Freedom from Oil is filled with stories of people whose lives have been touched by oil dependence-and are working to find solutions. Drawing on both his government experience and energy expertise, Sandalow depicts the President's top advisers as they explore options, shape solutions and create national policy, culminating in an inspiring speech by the President to the nation.
Download or read book The End of Oil written by Paul Roberts and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2005-04-05 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A stunning piece of work—perhaps the best single book ever produced about our energy economy and its environmental implications” (Bill McHibbon, The New York Review of Books). Petroleum is so deeply entrenched in our economy, politics, and daily lives that even modest efforts to phase it out are fought tooth and nail. Companies and governments depend on oil revenues. Developing nations see oil as their only means to industrial success. And the Western middle class refuses to modify its energy-dependent lifestyle. But even by conservative estimates, we will have burned through most of the world’s accessible oil within mere decades. What will we use in its place to maintain a global economy and political system that are entirely reliant on cheap, readily available energy? In The End of Oil, journalist Paul Roberts talks to both oil optimists and pessimists around the world. He delves deep into the economics and politics, considers the promises and pitfalls of oil alternatives, and shows that—even though the world energy system has begun its epochal transition—we need to take a more proactive stance to avoid catastrophic disruption and dislocation.
Download or read book Lives Per Gallon written by Terry Tamminen and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2006-10-02 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "America is addicted to oil. The diagnosis is clear, but what's the true price of dependence? Who's paying with their lives? Who's profiting? And, most importantly, what's the cure?" "Terry Tamminen, Special Advisor to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, provides real answers in this indictment of the oil economy and the corporate titans that drive it. With all eyes focused on soaring prices at the pump, Tamminen reveals oil's more insidious costs: tens of billions spent annually to secure our global supply; crops ruined by petroleum pollution; cancer, asthma, and birth defects caused by car exhaust; and the list goes on. Simply living in a smog-filled city can be as dangerous as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day." "Like big tobacco, Tamminen argues, the oil and auto industries have deceived us to line their own pockets. With tales of corporations knowingly exposing citizens to poisonous chemicals, conspiring to derail public transportation, and purposely disablng their own pollution controls, he builds a case against powerful industries." "And he shows how demanding accountability, as the public did through successful lawsuits against cigarette companies, could help pave the road to sustainable energy. Instead of subsidizing oil companies and auto makers through huge tax breaks, Tamminen proposes collecting damages and investing in clean technologies."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Coming Clean written by Michael Brune and published by Counterpoint. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Brune, executive director of Rainforest Action Network (RAN), shows us how we, as motivated citizens, can kick our own fossil-fuel habit and pressure policymakers and corporations to change their energy priorities. His vivid reports remind us of the economic, environmental, moral, and public-health costs of fossil-fuel dependence, and how our government and international banks are complicit. Brune also describes the most promising developments in renewables, biofuels, and efficient design, and offers an inspiring vision of the clean energy future within our reach. Under Brune's leadership, RAN has had stunning success in getting corporations to green their business practices, and his activist skills and passion are at the heart of this book. Overflowing with pragmatic and well-tested advice, Coming Clean is rooted in the author's faith that Americans acting together can create profound change.--From publisher description.
Download or read book In Deep Water written by Peter Lehner and published by OR Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "First published by OR Books LLC, New York"--T.p. verso.
Download or read book Addicted to Oil written by Ian Rutledge and published by Harvard Common Press. This book was released on 2006-11-12 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortly before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, much of the US media denounced the liberal viewpoint that the conflict was more about securing oil reserves than liberating the Iraqi people. This book examines Iraq's oil production since the end of the war, with US companies first in line for the most lucrative contracts.
Download or read book Winning the Oil Endgame written by Amory B. Lovins and published by Earthscan. This book was released on 2004 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enough about the oil problem. Here?s the solution.Over a few decades, starting now, a vibrant US economy (then others) can completely phase out oil. This will save a net $70 billion a year, revitalize key industries and rural America, create a million jobs, and enhance security.Here?s the roadmap ? independent, peer-reviewed, co-sponsored by the Pentagon ? for the transition beyond oil, led by business and profit.
Download or read book Oil Power and War written by Matthieu Auzanneau and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of oil is one of hubris, fortune, betrayal, and destruction. It is the story of a resource that has been undeniably central to the creation of our modern culture, and ever-present during the darkest exploits of empire the world over. For the past 150 years, oil has become the most essential ingredient for economic, military, and political power. And it has brought us to our present moment in which political leaders and the fossil-fuel industry consider extraordinary, and extraordinarily dangerous, policy on a world stage marked by shifting power bases. Upending the conventional wisdom by crafting a “people’s history,” award-winning journalist Matthieu Auzanneau deftly traces how oil became a national and then global addiction, outlines the enormous consequences of that addiction, sheds new light on major historical and contemporary figures, and raises new questions about stories we thought we knew well: What really sparked the oil crises in the 1970s, the shift away from the gold standard at Bretton Woods, or even the financial crash of 2008? How has oil shaped the events that have defined our times: two world wars, the Cold War, the Great Depression, ongoing wars in the Middle East, the advent of neoliberalism, and the Great Recession, among them? With brutal clarity, Oil, Power, and War exposes the heavy hand oil has had in all of our lives—and illustrates how much heavier that hand could get during the increasingly desperate race to control the last of the world’s easily and cheaply extractable reserves.
Download or read book The Energy of Slaves written by Andrew Nikiforuk and published by Greystone Books. This book was released on 2012-08-17 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A robustly researched and smoothly written overview of the many challenges confronting our devotion to fossil fuels” from the author of Tar Sands (Quill & Quire). Ancient civilizations relied on shackled human muscle. It took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities. Nineteenth-century slaveholders viewed critics as hostilely as oil companies and governments now regard environmentalists. Yet the abolition movement had an invisible ally: coal and oil. As the world’s most versatile workers, fossil fuels replenished slavery’s ranks with combustion engines and other labor-saving tools. Since then, cheap oil has transformed politics, economics, science, agriculture, and even our concept of happiness. Many North Americans today live as extravagantly as Caribbean plantation owners. We feel entitled to surplus energy and rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. But endless growth is an illusion. In this provocative book, Andrew Nikiforuk, winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, argues that what we need is a radical emancipation movement that ends our master-and-slave approach to energy. We must learn to use energy on a moral, just, and truly human scale. Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute “In his cautionary tale about the evils of oil . . . Nikiforuk makes his case for impending doom if we don’t mend our energy-spending ways.” —The Star “In this cogently argued book, Andrew Nikiforuk deploys a powerful metaphor. Oil dependency, he writes, is a modern form of slavery—and it’s time for a global abolition movement.” —Taras Grescoe, author of Shanghai Grand “A startling critique that should rouse us from our pipe dream of endless plenty.” —Ronald Wright, author of On Fiji Islands
Download or read book Losing Our Way written by Bob Herbert and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From longtime New York Times columnist Bob Herbert comes a wrenching portrayal of ordinary Americans struggling for survival in a nation that has lost its way In his eighteen years as an opinion columnist for The New York Times, Herbert championed the working poor and the middle class. After filing his last column in 2011, he set off on a journey across the country to report on Americans who were being left behind in an economy that has never fully recovered from the Great Recession. The portraits of those he encountered fuel his new book, Losing Our Way. Herbert’s combination of heartrending reporting and keen political analysis is the purest expression since the Occupy movement of the plight of the 99 percent. The individuals and families who are paying the price of America’s bad choices in recent decades form the book’s emotional center: an exhausted high school student in Brooklyn who works the overnight shift in a factory at minimum wage to help pay her family’s rent; a twenty-four-year-old soldier from Peachtree City, Georgia, who loses both legs in a misguided, mismanaged, seemingly endless war; a young woman, only recently engaged, who suffers devastating injuries in a tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis; and a group of parents in Pittsburgh who courageously fight back against the politicians who decimated funding for their children’s schools. Herbert reminds us of a time in America when unemployment was low, wages and profits were high, and the nation’s wealth, by current standards, was distributed much more equitably. Today, the gap between the wealthy and everyone else has widened dramatically, the nation’s physical plant is crumbling, and the inability to find decent work is a plague on a generation. Herbert traces where we went wrong and spotlights the drastic and dangerous shift of political power from ordinary Americans to the corporate and financial elite. Hope for America, he argues, lies in a concerted push to redress that political imbalance. Searing and unforgettable, Losing Our Way ultimately inspires with its faith in ordinary citizens to take back their true political power and reclaim the American dream.
Download or read book Adapting to the End of Oil written by Maynard Kaufman and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adapting to the End of Oil: Toward an Earth-Centered Spirituality Americans, who burn more fossil fuels than any other country, will have a hard time adapting to the end of cheap oil. This book explains how our materialistic values evolved to make us such wasteful consumers and how corporations profi t at our expense. The bad news is that rising prices of oil may bankrupt our economy unless we learn how to reduce our energy use. The good news is that earth-centered values are being affi rmed by increasing numbers of people. The book shows how earth-centered spirituality can help us live more modestly on the earth and preserve the climate.
Download or read book Eating Fossil Fuels written by Dale Allen Pfeiffer and published by New Society Publishers. This book was released on 2006-10-01 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A shocking outline of the interlinked crises in energy and agriculture — and appropriate responses The miracle of the Green Revolution was made possible by cheap fossil fuels to supply crops with artificial fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. Estimates of the net energy balance of agriculture in the US show that ten calories of hydrocarbon energy are required to produce one calorie of food. Such an imbalance cannot continue in a world of diminishing hydrocarbon resources. Eating Fossil Fuels examines the interlinked crises of energy and agriculture and highlights some startling findings: The world-wide expansion of agriculture has appropriated fully 40% of the photosynthetic capability of this planet. The Green Revolution provided abundant food sources for many, resulting in a population explosion well in excess of the planet's carrying capacity. Studies suggest that without fossil fuel based agriculture, the US could only sustain about two thirds of its present population. For the planet as a whole, the sustainable number is estimated to be about two billion. Concluding that the effect of energy depletion will be disastrous without a transition to a sustainable, relocalized agriculture, the book draws on the experiences of North Korea and Cuba to demonstrate stories of failure and success in the transition to non-hydrocarbon-based agriculture. It urges strong grassroots activism for sustainable, localized agriculture and a natural shrinking of the world's population. Dale Allen Pfeiffer is a novelist, freelance journalist and geologist who has been writing about energy depletion for a decade. The author of The End of the Oil Age, he is also widely known for his web project: www.survivingpeakoil.com.
Download or read book A Different Democracy written by Steven L. Taylor and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four distinguished scholars in political science analyze American democracy from a comparative point of view, exploring how the U.S. political system differs from that of thirty other democracies and what those differences ultimately mean for democratic performance. This essential text approaches the following institutions from a political engineering point of view: constitutions, electoral systems, and political parties, as well as legislative, executive, and judicial power. The text looks at democracies from around the world over a two-decade time frame. The result is not only a fresh view of the much-discussed theme of American exceptionalism but also an innovative approach to comparative politics that treats the United States as but one case among many. An ideal textbook for both American and comparative politics courses.
Download or read book The End written by Marq de Villiers and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-03-30 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the fate of the world as we know it? Tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, pandemics, cosmic radiation, gamma bursts from space, colliding comets, and asteroids—these things used to worry us from time to time, but now they have become the background noise of our culture. Are natural calamities indeed more probable, and more frequent, than they were? Are things getting worse? Are the boundaries between natural and human-caused calamities blurring? Are we part of the problem? If so, what can we do about it? In The End, award-winning writer Marq de Villiers examines these questions at a time when there is an urgent need to understand the perils that confront us, to act in such a way as best we can for the inevitable disasters when they come. We can do nothing about some natural calamities, but about others we can do a great deal. De Villiers helps us understand which is which, and lays out some provocative ideas for mitigating the damage all such calamities can inflict on us and our world. The End is a brilliant and challenging look at what lies ahead, and at what we can do to influence our future.
Download or read book Blood and Oil written by Michael T. Klare and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Resource Wars, a landmark assessment of the critical role of petroleum in America's actions abroad In his pathbreaking Resource Wars, world security expert Michael T. Klare alerted us to the role of resources in conflicts in the post-Cold War world. Now, in Blood and Oil, he concentrates on a single precious commodity, petroleum, while issuing a warning to the United States-its most powerful, and most dependent, global consumer. Since September 11th and the commencement of the "war on terror," the world's attention has been focused on the relationship between U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and the oceans of crude oil that lie beneath the region's soil. Klare traces oil's impact on international affairs since World War II, revealing its influence on the Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Carter doctrines. He shows how America's own wells are drying up as our demand increases; by 2010, the United States will need to import 60 percent of its oil. And since most of this supply will have to come from chronically unstable, often violently anti-American zones-the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea, Latin America, and Africa-our dependency is bound to lead to recurrent military involvement. With clarity and urgency, Blood and Oil delineates the United States' predicament and cautions that it is time to change our energy policies, before we spend the next decades paying for oil with blood.
Download or read book The End of Energy written by Michael J. Graetz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-03-04 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forty years of energy incompetence: villains, failures of leadership, and missed opportunities. Americans take for granted that when we flip a switch the light will go on, when we turn up the thermostat the room will get warm, and when we pull up to the pump gas will be plentiful and relatively cheap. In The End of Energy, Michael Graetz shows us that we have been living an energy delusion for forty years. Until the 1970s, we produced domestically all the oil we needed to run our power plants, heat our homes, and fuel our cars. Since then, we have had to import most of the oil we use, much of it from the Middle East. And we rely on an even dirtier fuel—coal—to produce half of our electricity. Graetz describes more than forty years of energy policy incompetence and argues that we must make better decisions for our energy future. Despite thousands of pages of energy legislation since the 1970s (passed by a Congress that tended to elevate narrow parochial interests over our national goals), Americans have never been asked to pay a price that reflects the real cost of the energy they consume. Until Americans face the facts about price, our energy incompetence will continue—and along with it the unraveling of our environment, security, and independence.
