renewable

Brune, Michael (2008) Coming Clean: Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.

The author is the executive director of Rainforest Action Network. Each chapter includes startling facts and recommended actions you can take personally (behavior and activism). But in the end, I couldn’t get through the book, even after renewing it at the library a couple times. Something else always seemed more appealing to read. After a while, my brain goes numb from facts and angry accusations. I recognize that there is an important role activists have but I’m not one of them. It doesn’t make sense to me to blame people. For example, in the book, Blume points out that the amount of money Citi and Bank of America will spend to invest in or finance renewables is a fraction of what they have invested in traditional energy. Um, well, have you checked the mutual funds in your 401-K recently? This is a societal problem and vilifying certain organizations seems counter-productive to me. I’ll admit that sometimes they need a shot across the bow but I don’t care to be the one with the cannon.

That said, this book is well researched so there are a lot of good factoids here that (in moderation) could spice up a presentation:

• Alberta tar sands oil: to get one barrel of oil, you dig up 4 tons; it has 3x the ghg’s of conventional oil.
• US subsidies for oil: $39 billion including guarding the Alaskan pipeline and Persian Gulf (2007)
• Transportation: US spend about 1 billion on Amtrak (2003) but China is spending $16-20 billion on passenger rail. The EU allocates about 20% of their transportation budget to this; US, 2%
• Coal: American Lung Association estimates that coal plants cause 550,000 asthma attacks, 38,000 heart attacks, 12,000 hospital admissions and 24,000 premature deaths.

For those of us in the US where we still don’t have an energy policy, it’s sobering to see the investments that China, Europe, Japan and even Mexico are putting into things like high-speed rail. However, since the book was published in 2008, many of the factoids are now several years old.