The Age of Energy

Understanding Growth, Prosperity, and Environmental Destruction

De: Rauli Partanen, Aki Suokko

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Science-book of the Year now available as an updated international English edition!
"The Age of Energy is analytical, carefully argued and realistic, but also innovative and inspiring book on the greatest challenges our planet is facing. Societies are forced to make difficult choices and compromises to solve the predicaments we are facing. The only sustainable basis for those decisions is diverse, evidence-based information and knowledge. This book has distilled an enormous amount of this information into a very readable form.

The importance of the subject matters cannot be overemphasised. Aki Suokko and Rauli Partanen show uncompromisingly what the prevailing understanding on the economic growth imperative means for energy production and consumption. As well-being is sought mainly through economic growth, it often leads to worsening environmental degradation. Especially in the rich countries, increasing human well-being doesn’t necessarily mean we also have to increase our energy consumption. Indeed, instead of seeking growth for its own sake, we should seek to increase our well-being in an ethically, socially and environmentally sustainable ways.

The key themes of the book – economic growth, human well-being and climate change – are strongly connected to each other. But as the name of the book suggests, energy is an essential theme behind all these. The impacts that fossil fuels are causing us are widely acknowledged, but the book also explains the myriad of problems alternative energy sources have. The authors call for a more arithmetic approach when we compare energy sources, but do not come out as advocating for one technology or the other. Every politician and policy maker would be well-advised to read this book by Suokko and Partanen. It makes the reader think big, but also offers her evidence and tools for that thinking." - Sciencebook of the Year Award Committee, 2018, Finland

From the back cover:
Behind modern society and constant economic growth are amazing improvements in our productivity. This progress started in mid-18th Century with the first Industrial Revolution. Today, one worker can accomplish what used to take hundreds of people. We just need technology and some energy to fuel it. And to get more productivity, more growth and more prosperity, we need more and more energy.

As climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental problems are getting harder and harder to ignore, we need to think again on this recipe. How can we grow our economies, give people prosperity and keep our societies stable if those same activities are destroying of the environment we also rely on?

The Age of Energy takes a deep dive into the complex interdependencies of energy, the economy and the environment. It offers food for thought from multiple angles, taking a critical look to all the "simple" solutions offered to us. Is it enough to just clean our energy supply, and how we should do that, or are we looking at a major overhaul of how our societies and economies operate?