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noipmahcnoraa's review against another edition
5.0
I hate this man for being so brutally honest; yet I’m extremely grateful for the experience. You’ve GOT to read the whole thing. I know—it’s a lot. It’s worth it. I’ve been an academic in this field and I feel like I’ve acquired an understanding that is simultaneously more nuanced yet clearer than before. He’s known for writing long works. They’re worth following.
ichirofakename's review against another edition
5.0
"...within the time granted by the laws of physics to delay, prevent and alleviate global warming, nothing could now be done." He's absolutely convinced me that the situation is completely hopeless.
Volume 1 was largely hard science, plus witnessing in the area ruined by nuclear disaster in Japan. Volume 2 is sociology, blending at the end into philosophy. It is more readable and engaging, shows more of Vollmann's delightful personality, and engages many, many others in interviews: West Virginia miners, Pakistani oil laborers in the U.A.E., fracking sufferers in Colorado, coal users in Bangladesh, etc. The most fascinating area is West Virginia, where residents uniformly take it as a cultural insult that outsiders want to reduce coal usage, aka The War On Coal.
Vollmann does his best to present the big business point of view of the oil companies, etc., but is nearly uniformly shut out with a wall of No Comment.
Anyone taking a stab at reading this book, please do yourself a favor and make sure you read the section entitled "What We Should Have Done" (pp.627-642), where he discusses impractical ideas about drastically reducing energy usage, the only thing close to being effective besides the truly horrific eternal solutions of worldwide epidemic and world war.
Those choosing to read Volume 2 without reading Volume 1: this entire project is presented (in vol.1) as a voice from the past (our present), trying to explain why, a hundred years from now, life has been rendered so ghastly due to our inability to do anything about global warming in the present.
Volume 1 was largely hard science, plus witnessing in the area ruined by nuclear disaster in Japan. Volume 2 is sociology, blending at the end into philosophy. It is more readable and engaging, shows more of Vollmann's delightful personality, and engages many, many others in interviews: West Virginia miners, Pakistani oil laborers in the U.A.E., fracking sufferers in Colorado, coal users in Bangladesh, etc. The most fascinating area is West Virginia, where residents uniformly take it as a cultural insult that outsiders want to reduce coal usage, aka The War On Coal.
Vollmann does his best to present the big business point of view of the oil companies, etc., but is nearly uniformly shut out with a wall of No Comment.
Anyone taking a stab at reading this book, please do yourself a favor and make sure you read the section entitled "What We Should Have Done" (pp.627-642), where he discusses impractical ideas about drastically reducing energy usage, the only thing close to being effective besides the truly horrific eternal solutions of worldwide epidemic and world war.
Those choosing to read Volume 2 without reading Volume 1: this entire project is presented (in vol.1) as a voice from the past (our present), trying to explain why, a hundred years from now, life has been rendered so ghastly due to our inability to do anything about global warming in the present.
robertrivasplata's review
4.0
Not sure if this is the stronger of Volmann's 2 Carbon Ideologies books, but I found No Good Alternative an easier read than No Immediate Danger. Volmann's self flagellating & male-gazing asides were less common & less jarring; perhaps I just got used to them? Full of interesting interviews & has many tidbits of information about worldwide energy use and generation. Does a good job of showing how thoroughly the coal industry has poisoned West Virginia's water while also drawing parallels with uninhabitable radioactive zones around the Fukushima Daiichi disaster site. Discusses the extreme contempt of oil, gas, & coal extractors for anything but their profits, and the the US's extreme lack of regulation of these industries. Still gives capitalism too much of a pass, conflating the nature of capitalism with the nature of humans, leading to the flawed conclusion that it would be easier to lower the population and reproduction than it would be to lower consumption. I would have thought Volmann would recognize telling people to have less sex would be harder than telling them to have less stuff. In the end, Volmann is still a carbon ideologue, unable see any alternative to capitalism, despite deploying examples from such alternative formulators as Ursula K Leguin. Perhaps the problem was that he never spoke to anyone presenting a real alternative to capitalism. He spoke to Solar experts, but they were still speaking in terms of simply meeting energy demand as it exists now, as if ordained by laws of nature. All in all a good read though. Good for book clubs, pandemics, etc.
partypete's review
5.0
extremely good, way better than the first installment. the structure of this book is kind of questionable as the first part is kind of trivial in comparison to what’s in this one
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