I have a book review in the Wall Street Journal of
Robert Laughlin's book Powering the Future.
These are the first two paragraphs:
Many environmentalists believe that carbon
dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels will cause a climate
crisis toward the end of this century. Environmentalists also raise
the alarm that we have reached "peak oil" and that fossil fuels
will run out by the middle of the century. That both views cannot
be true rarely seems to bother those who hold them. Either
consequence, we're told, makes the world's conversion to a
low-carbon energy system an urgent matter.
Robert Laughlin, who won a Nobel Prize for
his work in quantum physics, takes a rather different view. He
thinks that "one can't find much actual global warming in
present-day weather observations" and that "the final demise of
carbon burning is so far away, perhaps ten generations, that it's
quite irrelevant to energy problems of today." And so in "Powering
the Future" he takes up the problem of energy use two centuries
from now, on the assumption that it will take that long for us to
run out of, or give up, fossil fuels.
