EARTH: THE SEQUEL

Reviewed 2/10/2010

Earth: The Sequel, by Fred Krupp

EARTH: THE SEQUEL
The Race To Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming
Fred Krupp
Miriam Horn
New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008

Rating:

5.0

High

ISBN-13 ?978-0-393-06690-6
ISBN-10 ? 279p. HC $24.95

Errata

Page 16: "The sun does not shine twenty-four hours a day or every day of the year—far from it in some regions."
  Inaccurate: S/B "is not visible twenty-four hours a day" or something similar. With a nod to Master Kan of TV's Kung Fu (actor Philip Ahn): "It shines... somewhere. You do not see it."
Page 21: "But when those guys at AT&T built the first transistor with silicon, well you know what that set off."
  This quote from Conrad Burke is inaccurate. Actually, the very first working transistors were made from germanium,1 a more forgiving material than silicon. The first practical silicon transistor was made by Gordon Teal, working at Texas Instruments in 1954.
Page 22: "In the space of five months in 2007, it pushed efficiencies from 2 percent to more than 9 percent, meaning that a percent of incoming solar energy comes out as electricity."
  This does not compute. I'm not sure what was intended, but by definition a 9-percent efficient solar cell puts out more than "a percent", meaning 1 percent, of electricity.
Page 26: "...soon after the film Under the Tuscan Sun was released, in a vain attempt to lure actress Diane Lane onto his board."
  Fame was the name of this game: A vain game to gain Lane... Sounds like a Lane excuse.
Page 168: "Regeneration from ammonium carbonate also occurs under high pressure..."
  S/B "ammonium bicarbonate".
Page 171: "...the flue gases are chilled to temperatures low enough—40°C below zero (-40°F)—to make the carbon dioxide precipitate out all by itself, into dry ice."
  Dry ice forms at -78.5°C (-109.3°F).2.
Page 187: "And at the Weyburn oil field in Saskatchewan, Canada, 8,000 tons of carbon dioxide a day, about equivalent to the emissions of a 400-megawatt coal plant, is piped in from the Great Plains synfuels plant in North Dakota..."
  Number error: S/B "are piped in".
Page 188: "A major informal test of carbon sequestration has been underway for several decades..."
  Missing space: S/B "under way".
Page 197: "Two and a half acres of rainforest contains between 120 and 300 tons of carbon..."
  Number error: S/B "contain".
Page 199: "But just as immediate and immense carbon reductions can be achieved by reducing deforestation..."
  Word order: S/B "immense and immediate". (It simply sounds better.)
Page 209: "He still speaks with a prophet's eloquence about the global transformation that is now underway."
  Missing space: S/B "under way".
Page 223: "As Detroit likes to remind everyone, the last successful car start-up was Walter Chrysler's namesake company in 1925."
  True, if you define successful as "operating right now." I would rather define it as having brought a product to market. American Motors did that. So did several other companies that started after 1925.3
1 Although the team at AT&T Bell Labs began with silicon, they could not make a transistor amplify current until they switched to germanium. See PBS's Miracle Month.
2 For reasons unknown, the author seems to be remembering the point at which Celsius and Fahrenheit temperatures match.
3 The list of defunct American auto manufacturers is a long one; I've heard that there have been over 1,800 car companies in the U.S. Scanning the list shows quite a few that began after 1925. These include Allstate (1952-1953); American Motors (1954-1987); Corbin Motors (1997-2003); Crosley (1939-1952); Delorean (1975-1982); DeSoto (1928-1961); and Nash Motors (1950-1954).
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