“Please point me to a short overview of energy and climate, with numbers but not equations, and with a no-nonsense view of the politics.” This request has been put to me in one version or another dozens of times. At last, I am comfortable with my answer: Read Beyond Smoke and Mirrors. It is an unpretentious yet deeply insightful book by Burton Richter, a physicist at Stanford and Nobel Laureate.
Richter comes across as someone who enjoys nothing more than a conversation with a serious, intelligent nonspecialist. He shares his passions and his prejudices. He writes short sentences that cut to the chase. He provides a minimal number of stripped down tables and figures. He takes on climate change in 40 small pages, energy options in another 150, policies that link energy and climate in 20 more, and we are done. It’s a bit like the audiotour at a...
