The Burning Answer: The Solar Revolution: A Quest for Sustainable Power

In with renewables and out with everything else%E2%80%94especially nuclear power%E2%80%94is the message of this tendentious "manifesto" on energy policy. Barnham, a British physicist who developed a solar cell, QuantaSol, insists that "solar" power%E2%80%94which in his usage includes not just photovoltaics but wind power, hydro-power, bio-gas, and other sources that derive circuitously from the sun's energy%E2%80%94is the only sustainable energy that can save us from climate change. He begins with lengthy discussions of the physics of energy technologies, pitched at laymen but using maladroit metaphors that are simplistic yet difficult to follow. (Buzz Lightyear at a children's party is a favorite image.) He moves on to inadequate, rose-tinted treatments of the practical economics, performance, and reliability of renewable energy systems, glibly skating past their drawbacks; his analysis of the effect of photovoltaics on wholesale electricity prices is especially garbled and misleading. Much of the book is given over to anathemas against nuclear power that are similarly ill-considered and biased. (He numbers the element plutonium and the humble neutron among "the villains of our story.") Barnham's sloppiness with facts, murky explanations, dotty conceits ("We don't know if Stonehenge is saying nuclear waste is stored there"), and blatant propagandizing make this one of the worst accounts of energy policy to appear in recent years. (May)