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The Plot to Save the Planet: How Visionary Entrepreneurs and Corporate Titans Are Creating Real Solutions to Global Warming
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List Price:
$25.95
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Manufacturer: Crown Business
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.4083
EAN: 9780307406187
ISBN: 0307406180
Label: Crown Business
Manufacturer: Crown Business
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2008-06-24
Publisher: Crown Business
Release Date: 2008-06-24
Studio: Crown Business
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Editorial Reviews:
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American entrepreneurs, corporate tycoons, and financiers are plotting what they do best—creating new industries that change the world and making billions in the process—a plot that will ultimately save the planet.
The Plot to Save the Planet is an illuminating and inspiring look at the “conspiracy” to make green technology the Silicon Valley of the twenty-first century—the creator of massive numbers of jobs and huge amounts of wealth. Suddenly, the ugly mudslinging between environmentalists and big business has abated, and these two previously opposed forces are now strange bedfellows in a race to head off climate change.
How is this new frontier being shaped? Brian Dumaine is your guide in this intriguing look into the very near future filled with colorful and informative stories about the entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate mavericks who are managing to pull off the feat of combining economic growth and environmental protection to battle global warming. You’ll read about:
• The savvy investors: Why Warren Buffett is investing heavily in wind power; and why John Doerr, the venture capitalist and early backer of Google, is saying that “green tech is bigger than the Internet and could be the biggest economic opportunity of the twenty-first century.”
• The cars of the future: The competitively priced plug-in hybrids that will get 60 miles to the gallon, and the battle being waged by fifteen start-ups competing to capture the electric car market.
• The fuels without fossils: New sources of energy from plants such as prairie grass and algae that could capture a big chunk of the $300 billion U.S. wholesale gasoline market.
• The corporate mavericks: Companies such as Duke Energy and GE who are creating the low-carbon business models of the future, as well as cleaner ways to provide our power needs.
• The energy-miser homes and buildings: The new Bank of America Tower in New York City and the green low- and middle-income homes being constructed by visionaries who were told it couldn’t be done and still be affordable.
• The “thin film” solar energy: How it is making the cost of heating a home comparable to traditional methods without emitting greenhouse gas.
Plenty of obstacles still exist—among them resistance from the rich and powerful owners of the world’s oil supply, developing nations such as China with their reliance on coal, and an American public reluctant to give up their McMansions, SUVs, and extreme air-conditioning. But the battle cry has been sounded. The green overhaul of the utility, energy, construction, shipping, and automobile industries is well on its way and—contrary to prevailing fears—the ultimate solutions will sustain the environment without demanding huge sacrifices to our contemporary comforts and lifestyles.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Fascinating detail about possible green alternatives
Comment: I found this very interesting, but not as hopeful as I think Brian Dumaine intended. All the green ideas and enterprises envisioned by the entrepreneurs that Dumaine talked to depend on being cost effective. Solar panels, wind turbines, scrubbed coal, safe nuclear, ponds of algae eating CO2, ethanol from switchgrass, etc., will not be developed until they can produce energy as cheaply as fossil fuels. Dumaine even has a chapter with a subtitle that spells it out: Chapter 2: "Green is the Color of Money: Nothing Happens without Money."
These green alternatives will become cost effective when governments either install a carbon tax that will raise the cost of fossil fuels or otherwise subsidize the green alternatives. Dumaine, incidentally likes the idea of a carbon tax as opposed to what is called a "cap and trade" system in which companies or nations that do little polluting can sell shares to companies or nations that are polluting more. In this way corporations and nations will be encouraged through the marketplace to reduce their polluting ways. The sad thing is that right now it looks like the world as a whole and the US in particular are not ready to decide which, if either, of these solutions to employ.
Another way green alternatives can become cost effective is to wait until fossil fuels become scarce and therefore so expensive that solar, wind, etc., are cheap without subsidies. The danger with this plan--which is the one we have been following willy-nilly--is that by then we may be berthing our ships at the port of Memphis, Tennessee and growing our bananas by Canada's Hudson Bay. That is, if we're lucky. More likely we will be engaged in brutal warfare for scarce resources while we watch the poor people of the world starve to death. And in any case our standard of living will plummet since the relatively high standard of living we enjoy today is based on available, inexpensive energy which will become scarce without alternatives.
Reading this book makes it clear that our energy and pollution problems are with us not because we lack ideas on how to combat them. Dumaine demonstrates that there are ideas aplenty, from hydrogen fuel cells to solar panel farms to ocean wave turbines to geothermal energy, etc. What we lack is the political will to do what is necessary to enact these ideas and the wisdom to choose the right combinations since it is clear that there is no single solution to replacing fossil fuels. When I say "political will" I mean we have to elect people who will have the courage and the foresight to look beyond tomorrow's bottom line and see the consequences clearly some decades down the road when fossil fuels will be in short supply relative to demand, when the only economically feasible answer will be to burn massive amounts of coal in the quick and dirty way coal is burned today. The result will be the return of the horrific pollution that darkened the skies of 19th century London, only this time the extent of the clouds will be greatly increased.
Another disturbing thing about reading this hopeful and very interesting book is what has happened since the book was written. With the global financial crisis upon us, the venture capital for green alternatives has dried up like a shallow pond fanned by hot desert winds. Suddenly we are not using as much oil as we did just a few months ago. The result: a precipitous fall in the price of oil. What this means is that many green alternative projects are suddenly not cost effective. Oil at $150 a barrel makes solar and wind farms good investments. At $50 a barrel, they are likely to lose money.
Incidentally--or not so incidentally, depending on your perspective--our children and grandchildren, whether they like it or not, are subsidizing our use of fossil fuels. They will have to pay the environmental costs. Dumaine quotes Hermann Scheer, a member of Germany's parliament as expressing this view, and then explains: "...though it looks like we now enjoy cheap fossil fuels, the fact is that we are dumping the real costs--the droughts and floods caused by global warming, air pollution, and world conflicts--on our children and their children. It is not the legacy decent people should leave their offspring." (p. 171)
Dumaine estimates this de facto subsidy at about $500-billion worldwide per year. He estimates that the true price of gas to society is $3 to $4 more than we currently pay. (p. 172) If the real cost were added on in the form of a carbon tax, green alternatives would become cost effective and investors would not fear becoming suddenly priced out by an OPEC decision to pump a lot more oil.
In answer to those who think that green technologies need to stand on their own without government subsidies, Dumaine notes that "many twentieth-century American industries would not have developed as quickly as they did--if at all--without government largesse." He points to the auto industry which benefited from the billions of federal dollars that our government invested in the interstate highway system as an example. He could add the trucking industry as well.
One of the reasons for this head in the sand attitude so prevalent in the United States is the faith-based belief that the future will take care of itself or that something like the "rapture" will come and make all our good intentions moot. And then there are people who care only about themselves and the here and now. Not so strangely that is the way corporations, by their very nature, "think." It is these short-sighted and bottom-line directed entities that are largely making the decisions for us about how we will fuel our economies. We need to make those decisions ourselves.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fresh Ideas + Entrepreneurial Attitude = Green Future, Great Book!
Comment: Brian Dumaine's "The Plot to Save the Planet" is excellent. As a college student interested in environmental issues, I hear a lot about the coming environmental apocalypse and the heavy burden of CO2 that my generation will inherit. How refreshing to read about real ways to turn the tide!
Dumaine's book focuses on green technologies that have been substantially developed and invested in already -- technologies that can help to reduce our carbon footprint today, whose impact will only grow as investors and consumers continue to recognize their green power and economic viability. It is fueled by the idea that the same creative, entrepreneurial sensibility that got us into this climate change pickle can --- and will --- get us out of it.
"The Plot" covers everything from electric cars to carbon munching algae to green architecture. It is divided by chapter into segments on each of these topics, profiling green up-starts and their venture capital supporters, describing how the new technologies work, how they could reduce our CO2 output, and how they are getting big. Each chapter represents one part of the puzzle, and Dumaine shows that a mosaic of all these new ideas could have an enormous effect.
The book is infused with the author's enthusiasm for the possibilities offered by these new technologies, and the enthusiasm is contagious. "The Plot to Save the Planet" is a highly informative, fun read, written for the layman. Check it out --- you'll enjoy yourself, learn a lot, and feel much better about the many ways we can turn around our energy crisis.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Reasons for hope
Comment: Fortune magazine veteran Brian Dumaine has just published a highly readable new book. It will be of interest to anyone in need of having their spirits lifted from the assumptions that we will be hostages forever to third world oil despots, or that global warming must inevitably lead to Pittsburgh being the next great beach town.
He identifies technological advances that are likely to play a significant role in lessening our middle east oil Jones, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. What makes this an exciting read is that these are not theoretical laboratory experiments, these are tested technologies that are already working their way into daily economic life, or at minimum are in the prototype stage. My favorite is the algae that eats carbon and poops biodiesel.
Dumaine is a guy who looks more at home in wingtips than Birkenstocks - another reason to feel some optimism after reading the book. He has done his own research and filtered all these ideas through the screen of how much venture capital each idea is attracting. The VCs get plenty of things wrong, but it is not usually because they have failed to thoroughly consider the economic viability of an idea, and these all pass the test.
Read it. You'll sleep better.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Sustainable Future
Comment: The author explains that "green= growth". Ultimately,
carbon emissions drive costs up on many fronts.
Traffic jams cost $65 billion dollars annually.
The book provides some unique engineering feats to
promote the "green" goal. For instance, a raised floor
in a building facilitates an efficient use of the
duct system so that night air cools the building from
the bottom up. Resultingly, less air conditioning is used.
The Pope Manufacturing Co, of Hartford has built an
electric car costing $98,000. The Tesla auto costs .02/mile
to drive. Transportation is known to account for 20% of
Greenhouse gases. Walmart has cut back energy use by
creating "green supercenters" . Lower energy use means more
profits. i.e. This feat is accomplished by using motion
sensors to control the freezer light.
The German government guarantees that renewable energy
companies will make money. Heiner Gartner has created a
solar energy complex ; wherein, 10,000 solar panels
fuel 1500 houses. Q Cells is a profitable solar energy
company. Carbon sequestration is a process; wherein,
greenhouse gases are buried. The ABB Grid System is a
Swiss company specializing in power. The author explains
a scenario; whereby. the Mojave Desert can power the
entire West Coast.
This book ought to be read by the entire USA Congress.
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