Here are 100 books that Electrify fans have personally recommended if you like
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As an economist at the European Commission, Adjunct Professor in Paris, former fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and now a first-time author, I thrive at the intersection of academia, think-tanks, and policy-making. My academic soul leads me to seek answers to the big questions: what is economic growth and how does it relate to the success of civilization, to science and technology, to people’s wellbeing, and to nature. My practical focus leads me to draw the policy implications of all this for how we ought to fight climate change. My critics accuse me of being an optimist. I take it as a compliment: the future of humanity is in our hands.
Bill Gates has managed the impossible task of writing a detailed book on the technological fixes we need across the board to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century, but doing so in plain language that is appropriate for the widest of audiences.
This is key because the green transition will affect everybody’s life and cannot be left in the hands of experts and technocrats. Perhaps my only grievance towards the book is that at times it feels like a long laundry list of green desiderata, without taking time to think about the social, economic, and political implications of the transformation.
Nonetheless, it remains a go-to reference for anybody working in the decarbonization space.
In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical - and accessible - plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe.
Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide toward certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions…
I am an astronomer and educator (Ph.D. Astrophysics, University of Colorado), and I’ve now been teaching about global warming for more than 40 years (in courses on astronomy, astrobiology, and mathematics). While it’s frustrating to see how little progress we’ve made in combatting the ongoing warming during this time, my background as an astronomer gives me a “cosmic perspective” that reminds me that decades are not really so long, and that we still have time to act and to build a “post-global warming future.” I hope my work can help inspire all of us to act while we still can for the benefit of all.
When I was 8 years old, I plastered our house with anti-smoking stickers. It greatly annoyed my parents—but they quit smoking. Alas, a couple other close relatives did not, and both ended up dying from smoking-related diseases.
Part of the reason they did not quit was surely the decades-long campaign by tobacco companies to sow doubts about the dangers of smoking.
This book illuminates the strategies that the tobacco companies used to get a few scientists to spread these doubts, and I was amazed to see how the exact same strategies—and in some cases the very same scientists—have been used to sow doubt about climate change. Reading this book makes clear that the disinformation campaign is organized and dangerous.
The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. Our scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers.
Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific…
I’ve dedicated my career to renewable energy, because I think it really will save us from climate change disaster. Solar, wind, and advanced energy storage will usher us into the 21st century. I’ve seen many innovative people and companies use technology to create a better future. We still have a long uphill battle to reverse climate change, but we now have the technology that can help save our planet. It is time to implement it. These five books (in very different ways) give us the tools and understanding of how renewable energy will shape the future.
The impending doom of climate change has been stressing me out for over a decade. It feels like my son will inherit a world that resembles the dystopian futures of Mad Max or Blade Runner. But the future we’re entering into will be more nuanced than that.
This book helped me realize that the future may not be as bleak as I had once imagined. The environmental alarmists may have good intentions, but their efforts might be causing more harm than good.
Climate change is real but it's not the end of the world. It is not even our most serious environmental problem.
Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world's last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today's Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions.
But in 2019, as some claimed "billions of people are going to die," contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong…
Throughout my life, I have been fascinated by humanity’s place within deeper time. As a boy, I collected rocks and fossils, and at university studied geology. The long term has also been a theme running throughout my journalism career at New Scientist and the BBC, and it inspired my research during a recent fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. I believe we need to embrace a deeper view of time if we are to navigate through this century’s grand challenges – and if we can, there’s hope, agency, and possibility to be discovered along the way.
Vincent is a social anthropologist who spent a number of years in Finland completing a truly fascinating piece of fieldwork: he studied the people involved in planning the spent nuclear waste depository at Onkala.
This is a huge undertaking and responsibility, requiring its architects to project their minds tens of thousands of years into the future. Through his fieldwork, Vincent drew out various broader lessons for how to think longer-term.
What’s striking about Onkala is that the people involved in the planning are simply normal Finnish people tasked with an extraordinary job. To me that shows that deep time can be accessible to everyone, and indeed this is a theme that Vincent explores himself: seeking out long-term time in everyday experience can be cathartic, he argues.
A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth.
We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book, Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far future—to become, as he terms it, more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge, he says, is to learn…
I’m a science and technology journalist who has reported on neurotech and bioelectricity for over 15 years, for publications includingNew Scientist, IEEE Spectrum and Quartz. After a formative experience in a DARPA brain-stimulation experiment, I began to dig into the history and science of bioelectricity, trying to understand both the science at the level of membrane biophysics, and the history and psychology of how biology lost custody of electricity. My resulting book is an effort to create a repository of the real, rigorous studies that have advanced our understanding of this fascinating science at an accelerating rate in the past 20 to 40 years - and what the new science means about the future.
Gruesome experiments extended Luigi Galvani’s early work with frog cadavers into human ones.
Victorian-era scientists shocked the bodies of executed prisoners, or sold improbably electrical cures, all in the hopes of finding the answers to questions about the boundary between life and death.
Iwan Rhys Morus chooses four case studies that explain how science got to grips with electricity and its effects on the human body, and what the intersection implied about both.
The book provides lasting insights into why electric medicine is still widely associated with pseudoscience today.
For the Victorians, electricity was the science of spectacle and of wonder. It provided them with new ways of probing the nature of reality and understanding themselves. Luigi Galvani's discovery of 'animal electricity' at the end of the eighteenth century opened up a whole new world of possibilities, in which electricity could cure sickness, restore sexual potency and even raise the dead. In Shocking Bodies, Iwan Rhys Morus explores how the Victorians thought about electricity, and how they tried to use its intimate and corporeal force to answer fundamental questions about life and death. Some even believed that electricity was…
I am a Scottish geographer and energy specialist. I love nature and snow and don't want to see it destroyed or lost. I wrote Carbon Choices, on the common-sense solutions to our climate and nature crises, to share my expertise and passion to help people to make a difference. People, businesses, and governments all need to understand the serious consequences of climate change. Education is the first step towards taking action. Carbon Choices focuses on the solutions, many of which are 'common sense', to protect people and nature upon which we all depend.
David MacKay does something unusual for a university professor. He brings all the talk about energy and climate change to life. A fantastic analysis of energy in all its forms, bringing it down to earth. His book answers the real questions that we need to ask, such as how much land would be needed to power the United Kingdom from renewable energy? His answers are detailed in graphs and pictures making them accessible and easy to understand. This brings a sense of realism and raises the conversation to the next level.
Addressing the sustainable energy crisis in an objective manner, this enlightening book analyzes the relevant numbers and organizes a plan for change on both a personal level and an international scale--for Europe, the United States, and the world. In case study format, this informative reference answers questions surrounding nuclear energy, the potential of sustainable fossil fuels, and the possibilities of sharing renewable power with foreign countries.
While underlining the difficulty of minimizing consumption, the tone remains positive as it debunks misinformation and clearly explains the calculations of expenditure per person to encourage people to make individual changes that will benefit…
My expertise in Caribbean and Chinese affairs derives from having an interest in the two regions since college, which was then pursued through a MA in Asian Studies from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Connecticut. On the employment front, I worked for 3 regional banks (as an international economist), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Credit Suisse, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, KWR International, and Aladdin Capital Management (as head of Credit and Economics Research) and Mitsubishi Corporation. Since I left Mitsubishi I returned to my two favorite interests, Asia and the Caribbean.
Yurgin is the grandmaster of global energy politics, starting with his seminal, The Prize, and most recently The New Map. The latter is an amazing sweep of where global energy markets are heading, which takes into consideration the shift away from oil, gas, and coal to green or alternative sources of energy. His outlook is that the transition to a carbon-lite world is going to be much bumpier and more time-consuming than many people wish for, considering the issues of climate change, economic realities, and geopolitics. An insightful and excellent read.
A Wall Street Journal besteller and a USA Today Best Book of 2020
Named Energy Writer of the Year for The New Map by the American Energy Society
"A master class on how the world works." -NPR
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin offers a revelatory new account of how energy revolutions, climate battles, and geopolitics are mapping our future
The world is being shaken by the collision of energy, climate change, and the clashing power of nations in a time of global crisis. Out of this tumult is emerging a new map of energy and geopolitics.…
Aged six, I was first given a tiny piece of garden where I grew radishes and lettuces. I haven’t stopped growing my own food since! Everything about it is good for you and I have been writing about this for many years in various magazines and books. I have always been fascinated with the idea of self-sufficiency and love to read about methods old and new.
I have read this book several times it is so packed with ideas and inspiration. The author travels to a variety of communities, some small, some larger, and investigates how the people are tackling their ambition for self-sufficiency in numerous different ways. If you’re thinking of an alternative off-grid life of self-sufficiency then you will learn just as many ways that may not suit you as those that do. A great education into the realities of this sort of life.
Off-grid: a place, building or person without mains water or power. Static or mobile - in a house or a hut, a boat or a camper van - to live off-grid is all about loosending the ties that bind us to teh fmailiar world of commuting, mortgages, no time and fast food, in order to rediscover our place in the natural world. Complete with camper van, Nick sets off around the UK to find off-grid heaven and meet people who are living the dream. Along the way he runs into backpackers and businessmen, radical hermits and right-wing survivalists - and…
I’m a wilderness guide, community organizer, and writer focused on stopping the destruction of the planet. My work, which has appeared in The New York Times and been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists, has taken me to the Siberian Arctic to document climate change research, to the Philippines to work with grassroots communities defending tropical rainforests, and to Nevada where I began a protest movement against an open-pit lithium mine.
Most environmentalists today believe that wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars represent our path to a sustainable future. In Green Illusions, engineer Ozzie Zehner blows this thesis out of the water.
Green technologies, Zehner explains, require fossil fuels at every step in their production, maintenance, and disposal. But he is not advocating for continuing to use fossil fuels. Rather, Zehner argues that we have a consumption crisis, and that building more industrial products in factories will not solve the issue. He concludes by offering straightforward, common-sense solutions that actually move us in the right direction.
We don't have an energy crisis. We have a consumption crisis. And this book, which takes aim at cherished assumptions regarding energy, offers refreshingly straight talk about what's wrong with the way we think and talk about the problem. Though we generally believe we can solve environmental problems with more energy-more solar cells, wind turbines, and biofuels-alternative technologies come with their own side effects and limitations. How, for instance, do solar cells cause harm? Why can't engineers solve wind power's biggest obstacle? Why won't contraception solve the problem of overpopulation lying at the heart of our concerns about energy, and…
My motto is: we are techno-humans. Whatever nature or God created, we re-created. We move in cars, chat via the Internet, and eat industrial food. Technologies shape our bodies, identities, even imagination. That’s why the energy transition fascinates me. We propose to rip out and replace the technological foundations of the global economy. No less than the data revolution, energy transitions are about human re-invention. So, what kinds of human futures are we engineering? And can we design energy futures that make human futures better, more inclusive, more just? Figuring that out is my job as Director of the Center for Energy & Society at Arizona State University.
Power. We all need it. In the future, a lot of it will be solar. By 2050, half or more of global energy will come via photovoltaic technologies. That’s 100+ billion solar panels, with an annual churn of 2-4 billion. Which makes the solar industry one of the most important on the planet. Solar Power takes a hard look inside the solar industry: its materials, processes, facilities, workforces, waste streams, and landscapes. Mulvaney pulls no punches, but his fundamental message is simple: there are a lot of different ways to make and deploy 100 billion solar panels. The choices we make will have huge implications for how the benefits, costs, and risks of solar energy get distributed across different groups of people. Just like any other giant industry.
In this important new primer, Dustin Mulvaney makes a passionate case for the significance of solar power energy and offers a vision for a more sustainable and just solar industry for the future. The solar energy industry has grown immensely over the past several years and now provides up to a fifth of California's power. But despite its deservedly green reputation, solar development and deployment may have social and environmental consequences, from poor factory labor standards to landscape impacts on wildlife.
Using a wide variety of case studies and examples that trace the life cycle of photovoltaics, Mulvaney expertly outlines…
