Libros UCLV { BETA }

This book makes two paradigm-challenging claims. First, physical energy plays a far more fundamental role in economic productivity and growth than most of the economists advising business and government have ever acknowledged. The implications for everyone who breathes, especially during the coming period of hoped-for recovery and transition to the clean-energy economy of the future, are enormous. Energy services aren’t just a large part of the economy; they’re a major part of what drives the economy. And if that is so, both the economic recovery and the energy transition will take far longer than the Obama administration has counted on—unless investment is targeted to the very specific technologies and industries that make energy services cheaper. Shotgun spending won’t do that. Second, the energy economy of the industrial world is so deeply dependent on fossil fuels that even the fastest conceivable growth of wind, solar, and other renewable-energy industries cannot substantially replace oil, coal, and natural gas for at least several decades. Virtually the entire capital infrastructure of the country—roads and highways, electric power plants, transmission lines, airlines, shipping, steel, chemicals, construction, and home heating and cooling—depends on fossil fuels. Even if the use of electric cars and solar roof panels were to grow as fast as the Internet did, they would still account for only a drop in the ocean of energy we will use during the next two decades.