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Amanda Little - Power Trip LP: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells--Our Ride to the Renewable Future

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Book:
Power Trip LP: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells--Our Ride to the Renewable Future
Author:
Amanda Little
Publisher:
HarperCollins
Genre:
Books / Romance novel
Year:
2009
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In the tradition of Eric Schlossers Fast Food Nation and Thomas L. Friedmams Hot, Flat, and Crowded, prominent journalist Amanda Little maps out the history and future of Americas energy addiction in a wonk-free, big-picture, solutions-oriented adventure story.

After covering the environment and energy beat for more than a decade, Amanda Little decided that the only way to really understand Americas energy crisis was to travel into the heart of it. She embarks on a daring cross-country power trip, and describes in vivid, fast-paced prose the most extreme and exciting frontiers of our energy landscape.

At her side we visit an offshore oil rig, the cornfields of Kansas, the Pentagons fuel-logistics division, the Talladega Superspeedway, New York Citys electrical grid, and laboratories creating the innovations of a clean-energy future. As Little explains, energy is everything: It grows our crops, fights our wars, makes our plastics and medicines, warms our homes, moves our products and vehicles, and animates our cities.

How did we develop this insatiable appetite for fossil fuels? Little travels through history to track the evolution of Americas energy addiction: the 1897 installation of the worlds first power plant (a Thomas EdisonJ. P. Morgan venture); the 1901 Spindletop gusher that threw open the era of cheap American fuel; FDRs encounter with a Saudi king that set the stage for our dependence on Middle Eastern oil; General Motors early decision to sell big guzzlers rather than small, efficient cars.

Little illustrates how abundant oil and coal built the American superpowereven as they posed political and environmental dangers to the nation and the world. More important, we learn how the same American ingenuity that got us into this mess can get us out of it. With next-generation candor and optimism, Little explores the most promising clean-energy solutions on the horizon, arguing that everything we know about our past teaches us that we can solve the problems of our future.

Hard-hitting yet forward-thinking, Power Trip is a lively and impassioned travel guide for all readers trying to navigate our shifting landscape and a clear-eyed manifesto for the younger generations who are inheriting the earth.

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Power Trip

From Oil Wells to Solar CellsOur Ride to the Renewable Future

Amanda Little

Photo by Brian Harkin/The New York Times/Redux

For C ARTER
trip leader, power source

Contents

Confessions of a Petroleum Addict

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Oil

The Story of the American Century

Over a Barrel: The Boom and Bust of Americas Domestic Oil Empire

War and Grease: How Oil Built and Sustains a Military Superpower

Road Hogs: Why a Hundred Years of Joyriding Has Us Running on Empty

Plastic Explosive: From Baggies to Boob JobsOur Love Affair with Synthetics

Cooking Oil: How Fossil Fuels Feed the World (and Energy Shortages Could Starve It)

Chain of Fuels: The Story of a 20,000-Mile Spinach Salad

Short Circuits: Why a High-Tech Superpower Has a Third-World Grid

Greener Pastures

The Dawn of the New Energy Era

Earth, Wind, and Fire: How Renewable Energy Will Dethrone the Powers That Be

Autopia: Detroit Does the Electric Slide

City, Slicker: Building Energy-Smart Homes and the Cities of Tomorrow

Fresh Greens: Not Your Grandmas Eco-MovementMeet the New Pioneers

Confessions of a Petroleum Addict

The trouble started on an August afternoon in a remote field in northern Ohio, miles from any town large enough to be marked on a standard road atlas. The field was empty except for scattered deciduous treesmaple, poplar, oakthick with late-summer leaves. The ground was scrubby and parched. A nearby river rolled lazily in the summer heat. The only trace of humanity hung above the treesan electrical cable known as the Harding-Chamberlin Line, carrying 345,000 volts of power.

By three oclock the air temperature had risen to 90 degrees, and the cable itself had reached nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheitroughly twice its average temperature. The aluminum core of the 3-inch-thick wire was expanding with the heat and beginning to sag.

Five hundred miles due east of that meadow I was sitting at my desk in New York City when, at 4:09 p.m., my computer suddenly shut down. The lights, music, and air-conditioning died. I heard a strange lurching sound as the elevator in my building froze with passengers trapped on board. I rushed to the window along with my officemates and was amazed to see traffic snarling to a halt up the entire length of Broadway as street signals went black. The Verizon landlines were dead and our cell phones had no signals. We hurried down eleven flights of stairs, into streets already thickening with crowds of evacuees. Storefronts, groceries, and cafs were darkened. Subway stations were emptying of travelers as word spread that the trains had no power and hundreds of people were stuck underground. It was 2003, and like most New Yorkers, we initially jumped to the same conclusionanother terrorist attack.

What had in fact happened to us, and to a majority of the residents of the metropolitan areas of New York, Newark, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Toronto, was a blackoutlarger than any other blackout in recorded history. One of the greatest achievements in industrial engineering, the 93,600 miles of electrical cable known as the Eastern Interconnection, had been brought to its knees. All because of unseen events in that distant Ohio meadow where an overloaded wire had drooped into high tree branches and short-circuited, triggering a massive cascade effect throughout the aging power grid.

As night fell, I walked up to Times Square to see its flashing billboards snuffed out, leaving the commercial El Dorado quaint and sheepish. I passed the main post office building and Bryant Park, where thousands of stranded commuters were sprawled in a mass slumber party, using their suit jackets and briefcases as pillows. Candlelight flickered in apartment windows, and I looked up past the walls of darkened buildings at a sky so brilliant with stars I could make out the soft haze of the Milky Way and the faint pulses of orbiting satellites.

Before-and-after satellite images of the event tell the story. In the first picture there is a thick streak of foamy white across the northeastern portion of the United States and southeastern Canada. In the second is just a scattering of faint droplets, the rest absorbed into the blackness of space. Fifty million Americans were without power.

Up to that point, I had spent most of my brief career as a journalist trying to gain a better understanding of the causes of just such eventsan understanding, more broadly, of the strengths and vulnerabilities of Americas energy landscape. The twenty-four-hour blackout made me realize how little I actually did know, and how much I still had left to learn.

Just out of college in 1997, I had started out as a technology reporter, swept up in the exuberance of the dawning digital agewhen stock prices jumped from 60 to $60 overnight, and business plans scrawled on cocktail napkins could get six-figure backing. I went on to write Urban Upgrade, a column in the Village Voice about how digital technology was transforming New York Cityfrom Wall Streets trading floor to the billboards of Times Squareinto an intelligent, networked, high-speed metropolis.

The more I learned over time about New Yorks electricity grid, the more shocked I was to discover that the torrent of pixels and megabytes newly pulsing through the city was sustained by an antiquated grid no smarter than a plumbing systemand much harder to repair. Moreover, this system was powered by the decidedly unfuturistic force of fossil fuels (specifically, coal and natural gas). I began to wonder: as cell phones, PDAs, ATMs, iPods, laptops, and flat-screen televisions proliferated, how long could this brittle grid hold up, and what kind of impact would these new pressures have on the environment?

My interest in Americas energy dependence redoubled after the events of September 11, 2001, this time focusing on a different aspect of our fossil fuel usagethe oil that powers our cars, trucks, buses, ships, and airplanes. That morning I was riding my bike over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan when, at 8:46 a.m., I watched the North Tower of the World Trade Center explode suddenly, inexplicably, into flames. All movementcars, bikes, pedestriansfroze. From where I stood on the crest of the bridge I saw, in the foreground, the orange plume of fire flaring skyward from the building. (It was ignited, we would soon learn, by 11,000 gallons of jet fuel from the tanks of American Airlines flight 11.) Dwarfed in the background was a dim fleck of light wavering from the Statue of Liberty. This attack and its tragic consequences would not have happened, as news coverage following the event made clear, without our presence in the Middle Easta presence closely tied to our reliance on the oil reserves heavily concentrated in that region.

The months after September 11 revealed further evidence of vulnerability and change in Americas energy system. Petroleum prices soared in response to the attack, as speculators feared interruptions to the flow of oil between the Middle East and the United States. Meanwhile, a group of two thousand scientists who constitute the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with a landmark (and widely ignored) report declaring that global warming was accelerating faster than ever predicteda phenomenon largely driven by our use of fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when burned. Then Enron, one of the worlds leading producers of electricity and natural gas, collapsed into bankruptcy amid revelations of widespread corporate fraud.

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