ZOOM, The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future
john posted in politics & culture, rides, technologies on December 11th, 2007
| ZOOM The Global Race to Fuel the Car of The Future by Iain Carson and Vijay Vaitheesswaran October 2007 Twelve Books or from Powell’s |
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Overview
ZOOM covers the history of the oil business and its growth into a tangle of giant industrials and oil-rich governments, followed by an analysis of what will happen if we don’t stop using oil voluntarily. Then, the authors cover the gamut of alternative fuels and automotive technologies, and follow up with a conclusion of what’s required from government, business, and society to move to sustainable transportation.
The Authors
Carson and Vaitheeswaran are correspondents for The Economist. They take a journalistic viewpoint, based on many interviews with industrialists and oil ministers, scientists and environmentalists. They do not neglect the ripe influence of Washington politics, and they cover recent developments in India and China in particular.
The Audience
The book is written in a breezy journalistic style, without footnotes or pedantry, but it does have an extensive bibliography. It does not go into scientific or complex financial detail, so it makes for an easy read, while still covering one of the most important issues for the twenty-first century. It’s a must-read for people interested in the car, oil, and alternative transportation business. It is a good choice for lay people interested in green transportation.
The authors focus on the way things work now, how we got here, and how using the tools that seem to work in this world, we might get to a more sustainable transportation economy. This will seem overly free-market oriented to some environmentalists, and too scientific and regulatory to an industrialist. But the authors’ point of view seems moderate and thoughtful to me. Note that in line with overwhelming scientific consensus, the authors have no doubt that man-made Global Warming is upon us. Their sense of the harm it is causing is more financial and political than environmental, as fits their role at a financial magazine.