Fuel Free! Living Well Without Fossil Fuels

by Thomas Blakeslee

A vision of life without fossil fuels that is not a dream but an achievable plan for our future. The only breakthroughs required are political. The science is already here, but hard work is needed to develop it further and create our new reality. Powerful fossil fuel interests have been amazingly successful in blocking these efforts.

Nook

First published November 11, 2009

Reviews

[Sam]

This collection of short essays on the various means of finding energy not based on fossil fuels is interesting but rather on the biased side (basically geothermal is the way to go with wind and solar as a bit of a stop gap). While it does look at all of the various options it doesn't really take into account the full impacts of all of them, particularly those favoured by the author (there is a lot of talk about biomass and other biofuels forgetting the fact that land is required for that, land that nature might need a bit of). I see why Blakeslee has pulled this together and he does have a good point but sadly I think it ultimately gets lost in his own agenda and doesn't give enough credit to some of the other options and nowhere near enough on actually reducing our energy use, particularly changing behaviours so we don't need (want?) as much. Not bad but not brilliant either.

[Clarence]

This (at least the Kindle version I have) is not a book, but a collection of essays. Given that they all say pretty much exactly the same thing (really, one chapter is just a rewording of the next), it doesn't make a good book. The gist is: we need to use geothermal energy. We can do thus-and-such with solar, but geothermal! Wind, okay for somethings, but geothermal! Geothermal! GEOTHERMAL!

[Elizabeth Olson]

Thorough, well-researched and well-documented, this book exhaustively proves we have lots of non-fossil fuel energy options available to us right now. It's a bit dry, with some draggy spots, but eye-opening in its breadth.