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