Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives [Hardcover]

 

 

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This is an interesting, informative and challenging book which is not without its flaws. The book sets out to describe the history of our quest for sources of energy and thus motive power starting largely with wood, moving on through coal and ending up with oil and electricity. The book is a scathing critique of our deplorable dependence on oil with its massively negative impact on the environment, our health and our political honesty. Unfortunately, although the book is ostensibly in chronological order, it jumps backwards and forwards in time and is inclined to be rather repetitive.

The story as a whole is extremely depressing since, again and again, it describes the damage done by monopolistic practises, patent abuses and unsavoury greed. It may well be the case that our dependence on oil could have been avoided to a large extent with more extensive use of electric power but this never happened because of underhand deals and plain avarice. The railroads in America could have been almost entirely electric had it not been for deliberate obstructionism. The Milwaukee Railroad produced the most magnificent electric engines which easily outperformed steam engines but their success was fatally hampered by price fixing of copper, deliberate acquisition of rights of way and other factors. And, in the end, American railroads never became fully electrified and it was left to Europe to take advantage of American technology.

Electrified street cars and electrically driven cars were likewise prevented from enjoying fair competition with the relentless scheming and underhand dealing to make gasoline powered vehicles the only choice. A grandiose collaborative scheme between Henry Ford and Thomas Edison to market an affordable electric car came unstuck because of dishonest testing of Edison's nickel/iron batteries, a disastrous fire in Edison's research complex (possibly arson?) and the advent of the first world war. The end outcome was that electrical vehicles were effectively closed out of consideration.

The book closes with a plea for a new Manhatten project to move us away from our dependence on oil as speedily as possible by using geothermal, wind solar and other sources of power.

The final chapter makes the case for switching from gasoline to hydrogen as the fuel of choice  either by directly replace gasoline with hydrogen or by generating electricity using fuel cells. One intriguing option is being pursued by Craig Venter (of human genome fame) who has set up a company called Synthetic Genomics which is exploring the possibility of creating microbes which would generate hydrogen  in a completely non-polluting manner -- as a by-product of their metabolism.

Black closes off by saying:  Many believe the notion that man inherits the earth. Not so, he only holds it as a precious legacy for succeeding generations. It is hard to read this book without concluding that time is of the essence and the sooner we move beyond our fixation on oil the sooner we will be able to return the earth to a more wholesome and healthy state --both environmentally and politically.

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