http://www.ncreview.com/ 1746-802 http://www.ncreview.com/sustainability/powering-the-future-how-we-will-eventually-solve-the-energy-crisis-and-fuel-the-civilization-of-tomorrow I am an applied physicist actively working in the energy sector and reading energy books for the past six years, and Powering the Future was well worth the money and time spent reading it. The book is highly educational and thought provoking, with many surprising perspectives I had never considered. Laughlin's writing is easy to understand, entertaining, and fun to read. I especially appreciate that he makes clear what is known fact and what is his or others' speculations. Lastly, I loved seeing how a Nobel Prize winning physicist uses facts, physics, and reason to dissect this extremely complicated, highly interrelated set of problems into a series of solvable pieces. Laughlin leaves political agenda behind to focus on the physics by resorting to a clever literary device: The book takes place 200 or so years in the future, after burning carbon based fossil fuels is no longer possible, either because they have been completely used up (his prediction) or because of carbon legislation. The technologies needed are the same in either case, but not necessarily what you might naively guess -- things get very different when carbon becomes expensive because it's no longer available in the concentrated underground deposits and we instead have to recover it from the air or ocean. Review by Nicholas C. ]]> Tue, 01 Nov 2011 01:19:31 -0700