Books with connections to Sunlaw's social and community activities

The Most Powerful Idea in the World by William Rosen explores the extraordinary impact of the steam engine.  This invention is still the basis of the industrial revolution and the core of all virtually all the major energy and industrial technologies in use today.  If you get a chance, look at the history of steamboats, submarines, and trains in addition to this book.

Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley presents a very different view of the past, present and future than the more common romanticized past and doom and gloom future.  My experience is that no one is very good at predicting the future, so understanding both points of view is essential to understanding energy and environment.

If you don't know who Samuel Insull is, and the history of how he invented and commercialized the electric utility grid as we know it, it is impossible to understand how new technology can be implemented at scale.

I recommend two books about Insull, one by a biographer (The Merchant of Power by John Wasik), and the second is Insull's autobiography.  Reading both is important to get the whole picture.

The risk of tort litigation drives a vast number of business decisions in the research, development, demonstration, commercialization, world-class scale deployment, design, build, finance, ownership and operation of energy and environmental facilities.  In John Grisham's The King of Torts this fictional account informs the reader of the how and why of mass tort litigation.  This is an area most academic institutions and students are very weak in.

The Burning Wire, by Jeffrey Deaver.  An excellent discussion of the electric utility grid and electricity in general is set in this page-turning murder mystery.

Sunlaw ran into opposition spearheaded by one of the people featured in this book

The military provides a very high percentage of professionals in the energy business.  Where elese can one get hands-on experience with big engines, nuclear power, or other energy-related equipment?  Blind Man's Bluff by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew explores the history of the Submarine Service.  To anyone serious about understanding energy, learning about these men and women, and the missions they undertook is very interesting.

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The history of oil is crucial to understanding the economics of all energy systems.  There is so much misunderstanding of the history of the price of oil, and why the prices fluctuated as they did.  Billions of dollars and mountains of political and social capital have been wasted by the alternative energy and environmental communities because of the assumption that history will not repeat itself.  In addition, the history of oil is an example of how an energy technology grew to dominate the world.  This, of course, is exactly what alternative energy producers want - for their technology to dominate the world the same way oil gas and coal currently do.  learn from these lessons or re-invent the wheel.  Again. 

I have been calling myself a "Ghost of Alternative Energy Past."  In writing this paragraph I am reminded how grating it has become to watch folks repeat the same mistakes over and over again.  You want to do solar, wind, smart grid, nuclear, geothermal, biofuels, wind, wave, shale, underground coal gasification - learn from the successful implementation of the technologies that made it.  Ignore this knowledge at your peril. 

Models, especially financial models, permeate every aspect of the energy world.  In many cases models have replaced common sense and intuition in business decisions and policy debates.  These models have an aura of invincibility - but they are often deeply flawed because no one, and no model, can tell the future.

Indeed I've often thought that some kind of "creeping determinism" is at work in the energy/environmental world.  An appropriate analogy may well be the "Tulip Craze" - a mass delusion about the value of tulips.  Anyway, it is important for the student of energy history to understand how popular delusions impact energy.

The Informant is about a whistle-blower in an energy-related business and what happens to him and the company.  The movie is based on the book "Conspiracy of Fools" by Kurt Eichenwald.  The reason they are listed here is that under the current system of forcing environmental technology improvements it requires an operating, successful powerplant to disclose information that is viewed as whistleblowing by most of the energy industry.  This creates a serious issue that has slowed technology progress in the United States.

There is a passage in A Reporter's Life by Walter on air pollution that exemplifies the 1970's view of the environment, and an enduring understanding of the nature of the environmental movement.

It's always good to know where you started.  "A World Transformed" edited by Joshu Paddison has firsthand accounts of California before the gold rush.  Gives one a sense of the pre-industrial revolution environment.

Scale is everything in energy and environment.  Previous books have illustrated how the oil world got so big.  "The H-P Way" by David Packard is a wonderful look at the beginnings of computers and the management approaches that provided the foundation for the interconnected world we have today.

Massive implementation of energy systems, especially ones like biofuels, requires extensive presence in countries all over the world.  Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin documents a little known debacle arising from the beginning of mass production of the automobile.  These same mistakes have been repeated many times, and are an intrinsic limit on the rate and reliability of international expansion of major energy innovations.