Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence by Robert Bryce
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Book Reviews of Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence
Book Review: A Powerful Indictment of US Energy Policy
Summary: 4 Stars
Robert Bryce does a great job of skewering various alternative energy special interest groups and the psuedo-science they use. A little more editorial restraint would have helped, however, as some of the positions he takes are so lopsided as to be unreasonable.
Also, some of his facts are dicey or plain wrong - "the electric power industry is a huge water consumer, using about 39 percent of all freshwater in the U.S." The next paragraph in the DOE report that this quote comes from makes it clear that the water is used to cool power plants and is returned back to the lake or river that it comes from.
Book Review: Some useful info, but hardly a neutral look at energy policy
Summary: 2 Stars
While there is some useful data and information to be mined from 'Gusher of Lies,' I think there are many other books that will provide a much more balanced look at energy issues. Still, if one keeps a critical eye open as one reads this book...
Let's look at the good and the not-so-good.
One indicator I use in determining the quality of a book is the quality of the notes; in this case, end notes. The author has certainly gone for quantity - 853 endnotes! Must be a good book. Allow me, at this point, to go off on a brief tangent.
Al Franken, in his book "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" tells a fun story about notes in the chapter entitled "Ann Coulter: Nutcase." Referring to Coulter's defense of the questionable factual basis for some of her remarks in her own books, Franken says, "Coulter's defense, heard in countless appearances on talk shows is 'I have footnotes' or 'there are 35 pages of footnotes' or 'I have 780 footnotes' or 'it's in the footnotes.' There's a big emphasis on footnotes. Which brings me to: How to lie with footnotes."
Now, I'm not suggesting that Bryce is lying in his footnotes. However, I do take issue with the quality of many of his references while simply pointing out that the source of some references does, in fact, indicate a general direction of his train of thought (i.e. positive references to works from the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation). I'm getting ahead of myself though. Other endnotes are simply impossible to follow to actually get at his source material; either I'm dumber than I thought or it's obfuscatory.
Back to the 'quality of endnotes' idea. Some examples:
1. On Page 8, Bryce says "The integration and interdependence of the $5-trillion-per-year global energy business can be seen by looking at Saudia Arabia, the biggest oil producer on the planet." Looking at his endnote for this factoid, it says he found this at www.infoplease.com which, if one follows the link states proudly on its masthead 'All the Knowldge You Need.' Not a critical bit of info, I admit, but couldn't he have come up with a source offering a little higher level of confidence?
2. On Page 189, talking about water requirements for ethanol production. "the Sandia scientists found that it nearly every step of the production cycle, ethanol requires more water than oil-based fuels.... The results of the Sandia report were corroborated by a June 2007 study (cited earlier) by Kan Kreider and Peter Curtiss." I have to say I agree with the general gist of his commentary on biofuels (i.e. it's over-hyped), but that's not my point here. Instead, let's follow that June 2007 study he mentions through the endnotes.
I could not find the leading reference to this paper after half an hour searching. The first reference to this work in the text, on page 166, states "their peer-reviewed paper, which was presented at a conference sponsored by the American society of mechanical engineers in June, 2007, concludes that during the entire lifecycle of ethanol, carbon dioxide emissions are "about 50% larger for methanol's than for traditional fossil fuels; such fuels are not the answer to global warming, they make it worse."" So there is no actual title given to the paper. There is no mention of what they can conference was. In short, aside from calling up the alleged authors, how does one follow this up? Interestingly, I did a search these names in academic databases and came across several other scholarly articles - the subject for all was HVAC - heating, ventilation and A/C.
The endnotes are, intentionally or not, really hard to follow consistently to get a the original source (and, as mentioned it is sometimes impossible). Compounding this -- and significant noting the quantity of endnotes -- is that the bibliography is very small, listing just 34 items. That is, most of the items referenced through endnotes are not listed in the bibliography.
Some of the what is, in my opinion, useful:
1. Regarding electricity consumption - He makes useful mention of some apparent contradictions such as Google's enormous use of electricity -- to feed their server farms -- which has not been covered much in the media. Compare that to the publicity given Google when they installed PV panels on their HQ thereby generating a very small percentage of their overall consumption.
2. There are many useful statistics and there is no doubt of the excessive, narrow-minded, opportunistic and ultimately damaging hype regarding biofuels (and, at times, other renewables) which the mainstream press seems uninterested in investigating critically.
Countering this, however, is the observation that, after going into enormous detail about how bad biofuels are, the author provides just two written pages on pros/cons natural gas, and four and a half pages on nuclear energy. Nowhere does he mention anything about subsidies to either industry.
In the end this book comes across to me as simply a redirection of Exxon's efforts to discredit renewable energy (now that their climate change bashing effort has been derailed) and/or a libertarian "done wont no guv'ment interference" polemic.
The author does make several valid points in the book but the inclusion of references-of-dubious-quality and the subtext, particularly in some chapters, does lead me to think that the book's true objective lies beyond simply raising statistical arguments; there's an ideology hiding there of promoting the status quo of the fossil fuel civilization and a nuclear resurgence.
Book Review: Some interesting facts, but the reader must be wary indeed
Summary: 3 Stars
Had Robert Bryce confined himself to reciting and explaining indisputable facts about the fallacy of "energy independence", "Gusher Of Lies" could have been a valuable resource.
Instead Bryce takes a relatively few facts - many of which are well-researched and documented - and surrounds them with legions of distortions, selective information, omissions and the occasional outright falsehood, all to support his favored political solutions, which read like a script from the left-wing media.
Bryce begins with a declaration of his political neutrality, an assertion quickly belied by his own rhetoric.
His basic contention that the idea of the United States becoming "energy independent" is a fallacy is a distortion in itself to a large extent. He interprets the idea of "energy independence" as being totally independent of all forms of imported energy, an obviously impossible goal. But the left-wing, to advance its political agenda, twists the phrase in order to demean their opponents and make them appear ridiculous. In fact, the term "energy independence" means not being reliant on energy imports from unstable or hostile governments who might use their energy resources as a means to extort, blackmail or dominate. Energy independence also means fully developing energy resources available within the United States, even if it means displeasing so-called environmentalists. (I wish I had "Gusher Of Lies in electronic format so I could count how many times Bryce uses the word "neocon". Easily the count would be in the hundreds: neocon is Bryce's favored bogeyman - everything he objects to or finds wanting is the fault of neocons. Anyone who actually knows what neocon means will laugh the first few times he sees Bryce using the term.)
Bryce does provide some interesting factual information about the history of the oil industry, some of the political and economic factors. As long you have the ability to isolate these nuggets, the book is worthwhile.
The problem is that Bryce buries these nuggets under loads of disinformation. For example, Bryce cites the widely discredited Lancet "study" alleging massive Iraqi civilian casualties.
Seductively, Bryce tries simplified logic in an attempt to make imported oil seem different than, say, imported semiconductors. He points out that the US imports up to 100% of many other natural resources, compared to 7% of its oil. Why doesn't the US deploy its troops to protect our supplies of bauxite? Appealing logic, but false. Bauxite isn't oil. Bauxite in most cases doesn't come from political regimes that promote terrorism and a brand of religious fundamentalism that demands the destruction of a nation (Israel) and a people (Jews) as well as the submission of all infidels (the rest of us). A stoppage in the flow of bauxite would not, as would the interruption of oil flow, cause tremendous damage to the world's economies and billions of people.
In short, Bryce doesn't get it.
"Gusher Of Lies" is filled with falsehoods, distortions, omissions and logical fallacies. For example, Bryce gushes (pun intended) over China. China, he tells us, gets all the oil it wants without, in his term, "militarizing" the Middle East. Bryce also paints the First Iraq War as being exclusively an America effort, with no mention of the dozens of nations - including China - that authorized the use of military force. In other words, China didn't have to send its soldiers to into Iraq in order to free Kuwait: it instead allowed its surrogates, the United States and dozens of other nations, to do it for them.
Bryce also has nothing to say about China's rapidly increasing military expenditures over the past several decades. If China is so peaceful, why does it need to spend more on its military than any other nation aside from the United States? If China is spending only to defend its own shores, why does it feel it needs a "blue ocean" navy, including aircraft carriers?
As with the discredited Lancet study, his promiscuous use of neocon, Bryce uses other distortions. For example, he mentions the Three Mile Island incident as a reason why nuclear power development faces hard sledding without ever mentioning that Three Mile Island was mostly hype: no one was injured, no one killed and experts have said that the miniscule release of radioactive gas is unlikely to result in any increased incidence of cancer.
Bryce is of the "kumbiya" school of diplomacy. If only we talk, talk, talk, nations like North Korea and Iran will become tractable neighbors in the world community. Bryce tells us that we must "engage the Arab and Islamic worlds". Yet he says nothing of, for example, the Danish cartoon riots that killed innocents across the Muslim world, fed demands for the suppression of free speech and the threats of murder against those who exercised their right to free speech. Instead Bryce pokes fun at the idea of Western culture being endangered by a "dishdash-wearing jihadist" making bombs. Ignored are the thousands of incidents where jihadists and fundamentalists have murdered in the name of Islam in such places as Denmark. Bryce, in short, ignores reality.
Bryce argues that the world is now and will become more interdependent in the future. He is correct, though he seems unaware that in advancing this argument, he undoes his initial claim that the US seeks complete "energy independence". In short, Bryce says whatever he needs to at any given moment to advance his own argument, regardless of consistency.
I wish I had the time and the interest to classify every one of Bryce's logical fallacies. There are many, most of them gross and readily apparent to the thinking reader, but many quite subtle.
Ultimately Bryce undoes himself in his conclusion, the first line of which is "[e]nergy is the most important commodity in the global economy". In that one line, Bryce explains why the United States has been called upon to protect with its military strength the flow of oil from the Middle East to the rest of the world - but Bryce refuses to acknowledge the undoing of his own fallacious claims.
In all, if you read very carefully to screen out the distortions, omissions and falsehoods, "Gusher Of Lies" has a substantial quantity about the nature of the energy markets and the world's increasing need for energy. But, in reality, "Gusher Of Lies" accurately describes this book's contents. Approach it with great care.
Jerry
Book Review: Should have stuck to explaining energy use
Summary: 1 Stars
I was really hoping to read an unbiased account about energy and the factors that effect price, demand, etc. Two dozen pages into the book, Bryce is already claiming that President Bush went to war with Iraq because of oil. He states this as fact while disregarding other pertinent factors. Because of the author's willingness to interject his own simple liberal opinion as fact, there is no reason to believe that anything else he writes in the book is true or accurate. Book Review: Energy Independence Should Not be the Goal
Summary: 5 Stars
Gusher of Lies is dead on when it comes to the current state of not only the energy realities in the U.S. but the world as well. The global infrastructure was designed to run on fossil fuels and not on ethanol or alternative forms of energy. While the world's energy use could and must certainly become more efficient, it is a farce to believe that oil will become less important in the decades to come, especially with the enormous amounts of fossil fuels still available and being discovered each year. Not to mention the energy demands that China and other growing economies will require in the years to come as developing countries become more prosperous. Robert Bryce also debunks the idea that the U.S. can become energy independent. Not only is the world's energy industry one of the largest and most critical around the globe, it is also one of the most interconnected. Energy independence in the U.S. is no more a reality than is completely transitioning away from fossil fuels. That is not to say, however, that alternative energy should not be emphasized and increased. Alternative means of energy are essential and should be a focus. But with the current technology that we have, creating alternative energy platforms requires huge amounts of resources itself with the result being energy output that hardly begins to meet the growing energy needs of any country, let alone the U.S. or China. Well researched and written, this is an eye-opening book.