The Bottomless Well, The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy, ,Huber & Mills

This book is the best example that I have found of the "Don't worry, technology will take care of it" approach to our coming energy problems. The book is crammed with facts, repeated explanations of the laws of thermodynamics, and dredged-up examples of ill-advised predictions of coming calamaties which never came true. "The virtue of waste" in the subtitle apparently refers both to the thermodynamic necessity of rejecting waste heat in a heat engine and to the necessarily wasteful steps in going from a lump of coal to, say, a laser beam or a stored bit. The "never run out of energy" apparently refers to the low-grade energy available in the incoming solar illumination and in low-grade ores which we will always have the energy to process to the necessary degree of utility for generating still more energy. Despite the emphasis on thermodynamics, the authors repeatedly use the term "purifying energy" to describe the processes that produce electricity or laser beams from fuels. The primary problem with the book is that the facts are not combined with any clear logic that I could discern. I found the book hard to read because of this but persevered because the facts were interesting and probably correct. Overall, a lot of "smoke and mirrors". Oddly enough, they never mentioned mirrors or lenses for "purifying" sunlight.

Added: April 4th 2005
Reviewer: Donald A. Cole
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