The Conundrum
By David Owen
- Release Date: 2012-02-07
- Genre: Environment
Description
Look out for David Owen's next book, Where the Water Goes.
The Conundrum is a mind-changing manifesto about the environment, efficiency and the real path to sustainability.
Hybrid cars, fast trains, compact florescent light bulbs, solar panels, carbon offsets: Everything you've been told about living green is wrong. The quest for a breakthrough battery or a 100 mpg car are dangerous fantasies. We are consumers, and we like to consume green and efficiently. But David Owen argues that our best intentions are still at cross purposes to our true goal - living sustainably and caring for our environment and the future of the planet. Efficiency, once considered the holy grail of our environmental problems, turns out to be part of the problem. Efforts to improve efficiency and increase sustainable development only exacerbate the problems they are meant to solve, more than negating the environmental gains. We have little trouble turning increases in efficiency into increases in consumption.
David Owen's The Conundrum is an elegant nonfiction narrative filled with fascinating information and anecdotes takes you through the history of energy and the quest for efficiency. This is a book about the environment that will change how you look at the world. We should not be waiting for some geniuses to invent our way out of the energy and economic crisis we're in. We already have the technology and knowledge we need to live sustainably. But will we do it?
That is the conundrum.
Reviews
Green?
4By Flash For ThatDo we really want a green planet? We know how to fix it, but can't get ourselves to change. We only focus on reusing and recycling, but forget the first and most important part, REDUCE!The Solution?
4By universemanThe author correctly and eloquently describes the conundrum, but gives up completely at the point of looking around for the solution. Instead, he lists a few dozen already-discredited ideas which he himself (in the rest of his book) explains at great length, won't work. The obvious point that humans will need to learn to adapt to the high-carbon, perhaps hot-Earth that is an inevitable outgrowth of the conundrum, is totally unexplored. Our technology should (and will) shift from conservation and decarbonization to mitigation, by necessity, once the truly intractable depth of the very real conundrum reaches the mass consciousness.
