Mad Like Tesla
Climate change solutions so crazy they just might work! A search for the contemporary Nikola Tesla; considered a mad scientist by his society for predicting global warming more than 100 years ago — fuels this analysis of climate issues, which introduces thinkers and inventors who are working to find possible ways out of the energy crisis.
From Louis Michaud, a retired refinery engineer who claims we can harness the energy of man-made tornadoes, to a professor and a businessman who are running a company that genetically modifies algae so it can secrete ethanol naturally, these individuals and their unorthodox methods are profiled through first-person interviews, exposing the social, economic, financial, and personal barriers that prevent them from making an impact with their ideas.
The existing state of green energy technologies, such as solar, wind, biofuels, smart grid, and energy storage, is also explored, creating a sense of hope against a backdrop of climate dread.
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Nikola Tesla wasa scientific pioneer whose inventions and predictions about the future of technological development were derided in his day by his contemporaries. Tyler Hamilton's book attempts to find current-day equivalents to Tesla working in the clean energy industry - people who have ideas that sound crazy at first, but end up being surprisingly plausible.
And boy, does he know how to pick his subjects. We've got in-depth discussions about the energy production capabilities of perpetual motion machines, cold fusion, biomimicry, ethanol production via algae (pond scum), and tornado power. And that's barely half the list.
Some of the techniques proposed - such as the man who wants who wants to generate power by creating a stationary tornado or the company that is researching the possibility of building solar panels in space to collect solar energy and beam the stored energy to Earth via microwave beams - are wacky, to say the least.
However, some of the other innovations in the book sound extremely viable, like the companies attempting to increase energy efficiency through biomimicry or create vast quantities of ethanol using genetically modified cyanobacteria. In these cases, the main thing holding these companies back is institutional inertia, which is quite depressing.
Parts of the book make reference to extremely recent events, such as the hurricanes that happened in Joplin earlier in 2011 or the reactor meltdown at Fukushima after the Japanese earthquake and tsunam in March 2011. The timeliness and quick turnaround are striking, but I fear that such topicality could date the book extremely quickly.