Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

Humans cannot survive without extracting energy from the environment. Black (Pennsylvania State Univ., Altoona) accompanies readers on a four-part journey that identifies and describes the physical and social processes connected with exploiting various resource types in the succession of energy exchange economies of societies past and present. Beginning with wind and wood (the "biological old regime"), he moves to the regime of steam, coal, and oil (1400-1920, from powering colonialism to supporting everyday life), arriving finally at the energy-intensive regime of national security driven by electricity and nuclear power. Black's accessible narrative clearly explains the engineering and societal entailments of each scenario. As Black tells it, the greatest social and physical transformations occurred with the uptake of coal and oil. Black poses an inconvenient question with regard to the future: "Game over or game on?" is this author's way of "divining our energy future" in an epilogue that begins "Our earthly disaster unfolds in real time, attacking our planet's infrastructure often out of human sight or perception" (p. 273). Comparing today's atmospheric CO2levels with Pleistocene levels (revealed by ice core sampling data), Black envisions a new stage of industrialization to enable a sustainable energy exchange regime capable of supporting continued human existence on planet Earth.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.