What to read (and watch) to make sense of the energy crunch

IN A NORMAL summer, if energy is on anyone’s mind, it is probably because they are basking in a source of it (the sun’s rays), conserving it (by lazing in the shade), or nurturing its inner flows (by sitting still and meditating). But this is not a normal summer. From Texas to China heatwaves have sent air-conditioners into overdrive. Russia’s war on Ukraine has disrupted natural-gas supplies to Europe, raising fears of rationing and power cuts this winter. Like the 1970s oil shock, the crunch has demonstrated the risk of reliance on autocratic petrostates who wield energy as a weapon—this time, Russia. It is overlaid with the need to reduce reliance on fossil fuels in order to limit climate change. Yet despite the urgency of the task, clean-energy technologies are still not able to satisfy the world’s colossal thirst for energy.

No wonder that most people want to shy away from this reality. Few spend time considering how intrinsic energy use is to human lives, how it has started and ended wars and how it has provided some of the most exciting business upheavals of the past 200 years—and yet, in its modern form, remains scarce for billions of people. These works of non-fiction and fiction, plus a film, go a long way to removing these blind spots—and to explaining how big, exciting and even epochal is the challenge of reducing humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Energy and Civilisation: A History. By Vaclav Smil. MIT Press; 562 pages; $19.95 and £15.99

When reviewing this book, Bill Gates said that he waits for Mr Smil’s works the way some people wait for the next “Star Wars” film. To be sure, this is a book chiefly for energy nerds like Mr Gates. Yet like “Star Wars”, what makes it a classic are the special effects—namely Mr Smil’s extraordinary use of killer facts, charts, illustrations and data-packed boxes to provide nuggets you could never find on Google. It starts in prehistory, when people chased fatty beasts for their calorific content: Mr Smil calculates that mammoths yielded as much edible energy as 50 leaner reindeer. He explores the importance of harnessing draft animals to make farming more productive; crop cultivation in providing food surpluses to feed increasingly complex societies; wind in powering ocean-going conquests; and the more familiar use of carbon-based energy in industrialisation. It traverses the world, from ancient Egypt, to Han China to the Incas. “Energy is the only universal currency,” Mr Smil writes: “one of its many forms must be transformed to get anything done.” However, it takes as many as three generations for a new source of energy to transform the global market, and the transition to renewable energy may take just as long. The charts outlining the technologies behind these shifts, from throat-and-girth harnesses to electric generators, make you crave the next burst of human ingenuity.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power. By Daniel Yergin. Free Press; 928 pages; $19.99. Simon & Schuster; £16.99

Beautifully written, breathtakingly colourful, this book is as relevant now as it was when it won a Pulitzer prize in 1992. It starts with Churchill’s decision on the eve of the first world war to convert the British Navy from Welsh coal to less reliable sources of oil, requiring a quest for mastery of crude resources that has continued ever since. Oil runs through the veins of capitalism. It shapes geopolitics, from Japan’s insecurity before Pearl Harbour to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf war. It reconfigured 20th-century life via the motor car, the growth of suburbia and the proliferation of plastics. Mr Yergin recounts the age-old battles between consumers and oilmen, the end of oil imperialism and the rise of OPEC, a producers’ cartel. He shows how oil lubricates economic booms and busts, as well as causing global warming. It’s a prelude to understanding how Russia, which started pumping oil more or less at the same time as America in the 19th century, uses its vast oil wealth to fund Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. Oil causes as much conflict now as it ever has.

Oil! By Upton Sinclair. Penguin; 560 pages; $19. Frederick Ellis; £38

Most people will be familiar with the outlines of this story from Paul Thomas Anderson’s film of 2007, “There Will Be Blood”. But while you might miss the gruff Daniel Day-Lewis in the lead role, Upton Sinclair’s novel, written in 1927, so entertainingly describes the excitement of finding gushers, building derricks, greasing palms, dissimulating about oil finds and making fortunes that, for anyone interested in energy, this is a far richer tale. The relationship between “Dad”, the larger-than-life oilman in California and his gauche son, Bunny, never comfortable with the ill-gotten privileges bestowed upon him, reveals the corrosive side of an industry as it was beginning to transform life in America. Sinclair, predictably, does his best to show that it’s all at the expense of the little guy. As the next book illustrates, that hasn’t stopped American dreams of oil wealth provoking just as much of a frenzy in the 21st century.

The Frackers. By Gregory Zuckerman. Penguin; 448 pages; $18 and £14.99

Oil is a compelling narrative backdrop. We are familiar with its iconography, such as nodding donkeys and barren landscapes. TV series such as “Dallas” have given us a taste for the cut and thrust of the oil business. Nonetheless, the rise of the shale-oil bonanza in the early 2000s displayed a mixture of guts and technological ingenuity that was better than any dramatisation. Mr Zuckerman chronicles the rise of wildcatters like George Mitchell of Mitchell Energy, the late Aubrey McClendon of Chesapeake and Harold Hamm of Continental Resources, all trying to squeeze oil out of shale rock miles below ground. It caused one of the greatest energy revolutions in history, and caught the world by surprise. It turned the narrative that America was running out of oil and gas upside down. It offers a hint of the money and excitement that could be generated if and when the next new energy technology emerges—as well as the resistance from members of the fossil-fuel establishment as they face creative destruction.

The Boy who Harnessed the Wind. Written, directed by and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Netflix (2019)

This is the other side of the coin. More than just a feelgood flick, it dramatises the true story of William Kamkwamba, a young Malawian who, in the midst of a severe drought, sifts through rubbish dumps to find the bits and pieces necessary to create a wind turbine to help his village pump water to irrigate crops. It shows the frailty of life with sun, rain and human muscle as the main sources of energy. It provides an ominous warning about the impact of climate change and food scarcity on the world’s poor. And it movingly depicts the struggle to change old habits in the use of energy. A co-star of sorts in the film is a real-life library book that teaches Mr Kamkwamba the physics behind energy appliances. Arguably that book, “Using Energy”, published by Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, should be on this list too. But on Amazon it costs £1,244.99 ($1518). Time for a new edition, surely? ■
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