The Answer

Reese Palley argues that wind, solar, and hydroelectric power-all of which have large CO2-emitting footprints-are not the answer needed to make meaningful changes in our disastrous warming trend. Nor, for both economic and political reasons, can large nuclear power plants be built in time. The usual response to looming disaster is to throw ever-larger bulwarks into the mix, but the central theme of this book argues that we can only respond fast enough by radically reducing the scale of nuclear plants. The only sensible answer, which the author backs up with exhaustive research, is the construction and deployment of container-sized nuclear generators distributed throughout the world, producing clean energy at the local level, getting us off the worst of our fossil-fuel gluttony within a decade.