Turner also takes a fascinating look at Germany’s renewable business model and the revolutionary work of the late solar energy expert Herman Scheer. Unlike most greens, Scheer recognized that the carbon pollution now acidifying oceans and destabilizing continental climate patterns was a symptom of a bigger problem. The real issue remains the burning of dirty fuels. Scheer eschewed complex international agreements such as the doomed Kyoto Protocol and promoted clean-tech and smart-energy policies at home. He also saw change not as burdensome duty but as an economic opportunity. He was right on both accounts. At a cost of $50 per citizen per year, Germany’s feed-in tariffs created a $50-billion solar industry and 300,000 jobs.
Any energy leap, Turner says, also has to involve the restoration of public places. After Copenhagen took the automobile off its streets and gave pedestrians the freedom to stroll or cycle in the 1970s, urban life became human again. The Danes understand that there is life between buildings and that livable cities nourish culture instead of machines. The mayors of Bogota and Medellin also discovered that the best way to fight crime and poverty was to ban the automobile.
In the end, Turner’s high-speed analysis overplays the importance of energy efficiency and plays down the imperative of consuming less. If one regards bigness as the source of social misery (and I do), then renewable projects such as industrial wind farms are both green monstrosities and more industrial thinking. But I greatly admire Turner’s contagious enthusiasm and recommend his book as a compelling menu for energy reform. Even people working in the oil patch will find its striking analysis invigorating, while “ethical oil” extremists will huff and puff like indignant slaveholders.
But for politicians wedded to the shackling revenue of hydrocarbons, Turner’s reporting will come as a revelation. Do your municipal, provincial and federal politicians a favour, and send them copies: Our oil-besotted politicians need every “cognitive leap” they can find.
Andrew Nikiforuk, a long-time critic of rapid oil sands development, is the author of Empire of the Beetle, a surprising look at the landscape-changing power of bark beetles. He is writing a book on how oil changed civilization.
