"The battle of the energy titans comes down to one great contest: nuclear vs. coal."

[OKIsItJustMe]

53. Don’t pretend that an excerpt from a book is the entire book

The major thrust of the book is not that there are only two choices for power, coal or nuclear. (Oddly enough, the review linked to below doesn’t even mention nuclear power.)

Since the book is not entirely about this issue, I believe it is safe to assume that at least a few of the 1,000’s of references do not refer to this point.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/20/mark-lynas-god-species-review

[font face="Times, Serif"][font size="5"]The God Species by Mark Lynas - review[/font]
[font size="4"]A brave look at the environment[/font]
Peter Forbes
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 20 July 2011 05.00 EDT

The political and environmental profile of climate change has been dramatically reconfigured in the past two years. A wave of activism has dissipated and a broad consensus on the necessary measures broken thanks to the failed Copenhagen summit and the anti-global-warming lobby's apparent triumph in the Climategate emails affair. Mark Lynas is one of a growing band of influential figures, along with James Lovelock, Stewart Brand and George Monbiot, who now argue that the approach of most Greens to climate change needs to change.

Lynas puts it briskly in this new book. "Gobal warming is not about overconsumption, morality, ideology or capitalism. It is largely the result of human beings generating energy by burning hydrocarbons and coal." Inevitably, the beliefs of most environmentalists involve a cluster of other goals and ideological imperatives but if some of these are inimical to the need to reduce carbon emissions then, Lynas believes, a decoupling is necessary.

…

He is level-headed about issues that have become intensely emotive, and recognises that the debate around climate change has become polarised on political grounds: libertarians with little understanding of science don't want to acknowledge that there are natural limits to human activity. They then feel free to equate the climate agenda with "socialism by the backdoor". But of course there really are natural limits, in the form of the great natural cycles: carbon, nitrogen, water, and so on.

…

It's certainly a useful concept for the kind of planetary management that Lynas believes is now necessary. He is wonderfully sane and cogent on difficult issues, explaining why organic farming is not an option globally and why we need genetically engineered crops. The natural limit to food production is set by nitrogen which, in a form usable by plants, is rare in nature. We owe our present 6.9bn population to the 100-year-old Haber-Bosch process of nitrogen fixation to produce fertilisers. Take that away and the current population is already twice the Earth's carrying capacity. Our best hope for the future is to genetically engineer a nitrogen-fixing plant (the green kind) to replace nitrogen-fixing plant (the heavy industrial kind).

…[/font]