Books & Music...

When it comes to sequels, I'm generally not a big fan, good trilogies withstanding. For example, take the original Batman movies, not the Christian Bale version that made Batman cool again, but the ones with George Clooney and Val Kilmer and Arnold Schwarzenegger. By the second one of those, I was wishing Batman would disappear to his cave, never to be seen again.

But in Fred Krupp, president of the Enviromental Defense Fund, and Miriam Horn's new book, Earth: The Sequel, this is one sequel I can get into. It delves into common misconceptions about the green movement and even exposes a few eco-solution ideas as less than helpful to the overall cause. But hope is at the epicenter of its message, hope that we can change and a few great ideas about some ways to creating a healthier planet.

Here's a green nugget from Earth: The Sequel (W.W. Norton, March 2008):

"Biofuels may play a smaller role than photovoltaics or solar thermal electricity in reducing global carbon emissions, for one simple reason: plants are far less efficient at converting an acre of solar radiation to usable energy. They did not evolve, after all, to optimize energy production, but to adapt, survive, and reproduce. Even switchgrass, a cutting-edge energy crop, is less than one-hundredth as efficient as the best solar cell. It converts just 0.3 percent of incoming solar energy into chemical energy; Spectrolab's solar cells, by contrast, convert 42 percent. It also has ongoing needs for nutrients and requires all the work of growing, harvesting, and processing. The amount of water demanded by biofuels production is immense, with most crops requiring about a thousand tons of water for each ton of biomass.
"There is also a notable irony associated with biofuels production. In pursuit of climate-friendly transport fuel, the industry has generated increased demand for coal—the most polluting of the fossil fuels. Throughout the Midwest and Plains states, ethanol developers are either building their own coal-fired boilers to generate the heat and pressure they need, or are buying electricity from local utilities or co-ops that, in turn, are planning new coal-fired power plants to meet the new demand."