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The Plot to Save the Planet: How Visionary Entrepreneurs and Corporate Titans Are Creating Real Solutions to Global Warming
American entrepreneurs, corporate tycoons, and financiers are plotting what they do best—creating new industries that change the world and making billions in the process—a plot that will ultimately save the planet.
The Plot to Save the Planet is an illuminating and inspiring look at the “conspiracy” to make green technology the Silicon Valley of the twenty-first century—the creator of massive numbers of jobs and huge amounts of wealth. Suddenly, the ugly mudslinging between environmentalists and big business has abated, and these two previously opposed forces are now strange bedfellows in a race to head off climate change.
How is this new frontier being shaped? Brian Dumaine is your guide in this intriguing look into the very near future filled with colorful and informative stories about the entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate mavericks who are managing to pull off the feat of combining economic growth and environmental protection to battle global warming. You’ll read
• The savvy Why Warren Buffett is investing heavily in wind power; and why John Doerr, the venture capitalist and early backer of Google, is saying that “green tech is bigger than the Internet and could be the biggest economic opportunity of the twenty-first century.”
• The cars of the The competitively priced plug-in hybrids that will get 60 miles to the gallon, and the battle being waged by fifteen start-ups competing to capture the electric car market.
• The fuels without New sources of energy from plants such as prairie grass and algae that could capture a big chunk of the $300 billion U.S. wholesale gasoline market.
• The corporate Companies such as Duke Energy and GE who are creating the low-carbon business models of the future, as well as cleaner ways to provide our power needs.
• The energy-miser homes and The new Bank of America Tower in New York City and the green low- and middle-income homes being constructed by visionaries who were told it couldn’t be done and still be affordable.
• The “thin film” solar How it is making the cost of heating a home comparable to traditional methods without emitting greenhouse gas.
Plenty of obstacles still exist—among them resistance from the rich and powerful owners of the world’s oil supply, developing nations such as China with their reliance on coal, and an American public reluctant to give up their McMansions, SUVs, and extreme air-conditioning. But the battle cry has been sounded. The green overhaul of the utility, energy, construction, shipping, and automobile industries is well on its way and—contrary to prevailing fears—the ultimate solutions will sustain the environment without demanding huge sacrifices to our contemporary comforts and lifestyles.
The Plot to Save the Planet is an illuminating and inspiring look at the “conspiracy” to make green technology the Silicon Valley of the twenty-first century—the creator of massive numbers of jobs and huge amounts of wealth. Suddenly, the ugly mudslinging between environmentalists and big business has abated, and these two previously opposed forces are now strange bedfellows in a race to head off climate change.
How is this new frontier being shaped? Brian Dumaine is your guide in this intriguing look into the very near future filled with colorful and informative stories about the entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate mavericks who are managing to pull off the feat of combining economic growth and environmental protection to battle global warming. You’ll read
• The savvy Why Warren Buffett is investing heavily in wind power; and why John Doerr, the venture capitalist and early backer of Google, is saying that “green tech is bigger than the Internet and could be the biggest economic opportunity of the twenty-first century.”
• The cars of the The competitively priced plug-in hybrids that will get 60 miles to the gallon, and the battle being waged by fifteen start-ups competing to capture the electric car market.
• The fuels without New sources of energy from plants such as prairie grass and algae that could capture a big chunk of the $300 billion U.S. wholesale gasoline market.
• The corporate Companies such as Duke Energy and GE who are creating the low-carbon business models of the future, as well as cleaner ways to provide our power needs.
• The energy-miser homes and The new Bank of America Tower in New York City and the green low- and middle-income homes being constructed by visionaries who were told it couldn’t be done and still be affordable.
• The “thin film” solar How it is making the cost of heating a home comparable to traditional methods without emitting greenhouse gas.
Plenty of obstacles still exist—among them resistance from the rich and powerful owners of the world’s oil supply, developing nations such as China with their reliance on coal, and an American public reluctant to give up their McMansions, SUVs, and extreme air-conditioning. But the battle cry has been sounded. The green overhaul of the utility, energy, construction, shipping, and automobile industries is well on its way and—contrary to prevailing fears—the ultimate solutions will sustain the environment without demanding huge sacrifices to our contemporary comforts and lifestyles.
- GenresNonfiction
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
3 people are currently reading
30 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 23, 2019
Fascinating detail about possible green alternatives
I found this interesting, but not as hopeful as I think Brian Dumaine intended. All the green ideas and enterprises envisioned by the entrepreneurs that Dumaine talked to depend on being cost effective. Solar panels, wind turbines, scrubbed coal, safe nuclear, ponds of algae eating CO2, ethanol from switchgrass, etc., will not be developed until they can produce energy as cheaply as fossil fuels. Dumaine even has a chapter with a subtitle that spells it out: Chapter 2: "Green is the Color of Money: Nothing Happens without Money."
These green alternatives will become cost effective when governments either install a carbon tax that will raise the cost of fossil fuels or otherwise subsidize the green alternatives. Dumaine, incidentally likes the idea of a carbon tax as opposed to what is called a "cap and trade" system in which companies or nations that do little polluting can sell shares to companies or nations that are polluting more. In this way corporations and nations will be encouraged through the marketplace to reduce their polluting ways. The sad thing is that right now it looks like the world as a whole and the US in particular are not ready to decide which, if either, of these solutions to employ.
Another way green alternatives can become cost effective is to wait until fossil fuels become scarce and therefore so expensive that solar, wind, etc., are cheap without subsidies. The danger with this plan--which is the one we have been following willy-nilly--is that by then we may be berthing our ships at the port of Memphis, Tennessee and growing our bananas by Canada's Hudson Bay. That is, if we're lucky. More likely we will be engaged in brutal warfare for scarce resources while we watch the poor people of the world starve to death. And in any case our standard of living will plummet since the relatively high standard of living we enjoy today is based on available, inexpensive energy which will become scarce without alternatives.
Reading this book makes it clear that our energy and pollution problems are with us not because we lack ideas on how to combat them. Dumaine demonstrates that there are ideas aplenty, from hydrogen fuel cells to solar panel farms to ocean wave turbines to geothermal energy, etc. What we lack is the political will to do what is necessary to enact these ideas and the wisdom to choose the right combinations since it is clear that there is no single solution to replacing fossil fuels. When I say "political will" I mean we have to elect people who will have the courage and the foresight to look beyond tomorrow's bottom line and see the consequences clearly some decades down the road when fossil fuels will be in short supply relative to demand, when the only economically feasible answer will be to burn massive amounts of coal in the quick and dirty way coal is burned today. The result will be the return of the horrific pollution that darkened the skies of 19th century London, only this time the extent of the clouds will be greatly increased.
Another disturbing thing about reading this hopeful and very interesting book is what has happened since the book was written. With the global financial crisis upon us, the venture capital for green alternatives has dried up like a shallow pond fanned by hot desert winds. Suddenly we are not using as much oil as we did just a few months ago. The result: a precipitous fall in the price of oil. What this means is that many green alternative projects are suddenly not cost effective. Oil at $150 a barrel makes solar and wind farms good investments. At $50 a barrel, they are likely to lose money.
Incidentally--or not so incidentally, depending on your perspective--our children and grandchildren, whether they like it or not, are subsidizing our use of fossil fuels. They will have to pay the environmental costs. Dumaine quotes Hermann Scheer, a member of Germany's parliament as expressing this view, and then explains: "…though it looks like we now enjoy cheap fossil fuels, the fact is that we are dumping the real costs--the droughts and floods caused by global warming, air pollution, and world conflicts--on our children and their children. It is not the legacy decent people should leave their offspring." (p. 171)
Dumaine estimates this de facto subsidy at about $500-billion worldwide per year. He estimates that the true price of gas to society is $3 to $4 more than we currently pay. (p. 172) If the real cost were added on in the form of a carbon tax, green alternatives would become cost effective and investors would not fear becoming suddenly priced out by an OPEC decision to pump a lot more oil.
In answer to those who think that green technologies need to stand on their own without government subsidies, Dumaine notes that "many twentieth-century American industries would not have developed as quickly as they did--if at all--without government largesse." He points to the auto industry which benefited from the billions of federal dollars that our government invested in the interstate highway system as an example. He could add the trucking industry as well.
One of the reasons for this head in the sand attitude so prevalent in the United States is the faith-based belief that the future will take care of itself or that something like the "rapture" will come and make all our good intentions moot. And then there are people who care only about themselves and the here and now. Not so strangely that is the way corporations, by their very nature, "think." It is these short-sighted and bottom-line directed entities that are largely making the decisions for us about how we will fuel our economies. We need to make those decisions ourselves.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
I found this interesting, but not as hopeful as I think Brian Dumaine intended. All the green ideas and enterprises envisioned by the entrepreneurs that Dumaine talked to depend on being cost effective. Solar panels, wind turbines, scrubbed coal, safe nuclear, ponds of algae eating CO2, ethanol from switchgrass, etc., will not be developed until they can produce energy as cheaply as fossil fuels. Dumaine even has a chapter with a subtitle that spells it out: Chapter 2: "Green is the Color of Money: Nothing Happens without Money."
These green alternatives will become cost effective when governments either install a carbon tax that will raise the cost of fossil fuels or otherwise subsidize the green alternatives. Dumaine, incidentally likes the idea of a carbon tax as opposed to what is called a "cap and trade" system in which companies or nations that do little polluting can sell shares to companies or nations that are polluting more. In this way corporations and nations will be encouraged through the marketplace to reduce their polluting ways. The sad thing is that right now it looks like the world as a whole and the US in particular are not ready to decide which, if either, of these solutions to employ.
Another way green alternatives can become cost effective is to wait until fossil fuels become scarce and therefore so expensive that solar, wind, etc., are cheap without subsidies. The danger with this plan--which is the one we have been following willy-nilly--is that by then we may be berthing our ships at the port of Memphis, Tennessee and growing our bananas by Canada's Hudson Bay. That is, if we're lucky. More likely we will be engaged in brutal warfare for scarce resources while we watch the poor people of the world starve to death. And in any case our standard of living will plummet since the relatively high standard of living we enjoy today is based on available, inexpensive energy which will become scarce without alternatives.
Reading this book makes it clear that our energy and pollution problems are with us not because we lack ideas on how to combat them. Dumaine demonstrates that there are ideas aplenty, from hydrogen fuel cells to solar panel farms to ocean wave turbines to geothermal energy, etc. What we lack is the political will to do what is necessary to enact these ideas and the wisdom to choose the right combinations since it is clear that there is no single solution to replacing fossil fuels. When I say "political will" I mean we have to elect people who will have the courage and the foresight to look beyond tomorrow's bottom line and see the consequences clearly some decades down the road when fossil fuels will be in short supply relative to demand, when the only economically feasible answer will be to burn massive amounts of coal in the quick and dirty way coal is burned today. The result will be the return of the horrific pollution that darkened the skies of 19th century London, only this time the extent of the clouds will be greatly increased.
Another disturbing thing about reading this hopeful and very interesting book is what has happened since the book was written. With the global financial crisis upon us, the venture capital for green alternatives has dried up like a shallow pond fanned by hot desert winds. Suddenly we are not using as much oil as we did just a few months ago. The result: a precipitous fall in the price of oil. What this means is that many green alternative projects are suddenly not cost effective. Oil at $150 a barrel makes solar and wind farms good investments. At $50 a barrel, they are likely to lose money.
Incidentally--or not so incidentally, depending on your perspective--our children and grandchildren, whether they like it or not, are subsidizing our use of fossil fuels. They will have to pay the environmental costs. Dumaine quotes Hermann Scheer, a member of Germany's parliament as expressing this view, and then explains: "…though it looks like we now enjoy cheap fossil fuels, the fact is that we are dumping the real costs--the droughts and floods caused by global warming, air pollution, and world conflicts--on our children and their children. It is not the legacy decent people should leave their offspring." (p. 171)
Dumaine estimates this de facto subsidy at about $500-billion worldwide per year. He estimates that the true price of gas to society is $3 to $4 more than we currently pay. (p. 172) If the real cost were added on in the form of a carbon tax, green alternatives would become cost effective and investors would not fear becoming suddenly priced out by an OPEC decision to pump a lot more oil.
In answer to those who think that green technologies need to stand on their own without government subsidies, Dumaine notes that "many twentieth-century American industries would not have developed as quickly as they did--if at all--without government largesse." He points to the auto industry which benefited from the billions of federal dollars that our government invested in the interstate highway system as an example. He could add the trucking industry as well.
One of the reasons for this head in the sand attitude so prevalent in the United States is the faith-based belief that the future will take care of itself or that something like the "rapture" will come and make all our good intentions moot. And then there are people who care only about themselves and the here and now. Not so strangely that is the way corporations, by their very nature, "think." It is these short-sighted and bottom-line directed entities that are largely making the decisions for us about how we will fuel our economies. We need to make those decisions ourselves.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
November 7, 2016
If you care about the environment, then The Plot to Save the Planet is the book for you. It talks about entrepreneurs and other people saving the planet.These entrepreneurs, investors, corporate mavericks and many more are attempting to fight global warming. They will do this by combining economic growth and environmental protection. It also shows a great opportunity for ingenuity and entrepreneurship. They are also creating new industries and making billions while plotting to save the planet. They are also trying to make green technology the Silicon Valley of the twenty-first century. Not literally green technology, they mean technology that is nature friendly. This would mean new technology that would save the earth instead of destroying it. If this works out like it should, then in the next 10-20 years there will be a major decrease in pollution, which will cause a major increase in the growth and survival rate of plants, animals, and even humans. Pollution has already killed many plants, animals, and even humans. So let's stop pollution and also help these entrepreneurs create different green technology to help the environment.
August 8, 2008
I only made it through about half the book, and thank God I borrowed it from the library instead of purchasing. This is not a book for people who know something/anything about energy and the environment. If you have read Natural Capitalism, this book will make dislocate your jaw yawning in comparison. Written by some Fortune buttmunch who has "devoted much of his editorial energies to environmental issues and the rapid rise of the green movement and its impact..." blah blah blah. Basically he has been reading the news for the past 5 years, so he felt so privileged as to grace us with a book so he could make money with some catchy cover. If you want to know the real plot to save the planet, pick up "Cradle to Cradle" or "Natural Capitalism". Those are authors who have dedicated their lives to this line of thinking.
September 25, 2008
I enjoyed chapters out of this book -and I would recommend the book be read that way, rather than feeling that you have to read it straight through & completely. As other reviews have stated, it isn't a technical book, more of a "getting to know the green tech community from a business standpoint" book. If you regularly listen to Science Friday - you'll have heard more detail about most of these companies than is given in this book!
Weakest point: The author, making known the contradictions and trade-offs that are necessary in any discussion of "being green," often seems to argue for and against his own points, which makes the intro & concluding chapters very boring.
Best point: Stand alone chapters on building green, the prospects for cellulosic ethanol, and why nuclear power might just be a necessary evil (Aaron's favorite chapter!).
Weakest point: The author, making known the contradictions and trade-offs that are necessary in any discussion of "being green," often seems to argue for and against his own points, which makes the intro & concluding chapters very boring.
Best point: Stand alone chapters on building green, the prospects for cellulosic ethanol, and why nuclear power might just be a necessary evil (Aaron's favorite chapter!).
May 15, 2011
Another one of my on the $1 shelf reads. This is a wide survey of things that are actually being done in this area from New Car design to ethanol. It certainly is nothing new and borrows heavily from industry magazines and case studies on companies environmental successes. Overall I did discover some new information and it is an inspiration for looking at doing things "greener". Certainly not a page turner but not a bad "bathroom" reader for those of us interested in environmental projects.
March 15, 2009
This is a wide survey of things that are actually being done in this area from New Car design to ethanol. The research here comes from other books and magazine articles (he is a Time Reporter)so the examples may sound familar to you. Alot of Factoids but not overly scientific. It drags at times but overall worth reading.
September 6, 2008
I really enjoyed learning about the little start-up companies that are trying to make a move to be the next big green corp. There are so many books out that are pure propaganda for existing semi-green companies, this one tells the story of the little guys trying to do something big.
February 2, 2010
This book gives some behind the scenes info on what people are doing to combat global warming. On the other hand, it is also preachy about how corporations and activist groups now have a common goal and can get along.
August 13, 2008
Not technical but still interesting.
February 22, 2009
A decent cash in on all the green and sustainable strategies that are out there. Nothing new here but a decent presentation of these ideas.
April 15, 2009
Further inspired me to continue to be a "Green Power" Activist - had another letter published in the newspaper the other day. Not a gripping page turner, but I liked it.
February 20, 2012
Some interesting ideas
New things to look into
The first half of the book was much more interesting than the second
There was some repetition throughout the book
New things to look into
The first half of the book was much more interesting than the second
There was some repetition throughout the book
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews