Energy in America: A Tour of Our Fossil Fuel Culture and Beyond
Those wishing to board the green-technology bandwagon might benefit from learning how the wagon is built and the existing road over which it must travel. This is a useful guide for those purposes. Green technologist Kelley identifies her audience as the concerned public rather than energy and policy experts. For the former, she inventories the existing energy infrastructure; its primary fuel supplies of coal, oil, and gas; and the pollutants they emit. Her tone steadily factual, Kelley caps her discussion of each energy element with a roster of Web sites of government agencies and advocacy organizations engaged in greening up America’s energy complex. Turning from the past to the future, Kelley explains technical attributes of renewable energy sources, ranging from solar panels to something called an anaerobic digester, and touts strategies for introducing them into the energy grid. Readers drawn to the issue of global warming but perhaps unsure of technological options for mitigating it will be better informed by Kelley’s knowledgeable overview of the green viewpoint on the generation and delivery of power. --Gilbert Taylor