The Conundrum by David Owen

The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse

The Conundrum is a mind-changing manifesto from The New Yorker writer David Owen about the environment, efficiency and the real path to sustainability.

Hybrid cars, fast trains, compact florescent light bulbs, solar panels, carbon offsets: Everything you've been told about living green is wrong. The quest for a breakthrough battery or a 100 mpg car are dangerous fantasies. We are consumers, and we like to consume green and efficiently. But David Owen argues that our best intentions are still at cross purposes to our true goal -- living sustainably and caring for our environment and the future of the planet. Efficiency, once considered the holy grail of our environmental problems, turns out to be part of the problem. Efforts to improve efficiency and increase sustainable development only exacerbate the problems they are meant to solve, more than negating the environmental gains. We have little trouble turning increases in efficiency into increases in consumption.

David Owen's The Conundrum is an elegant nonfiction narrative filled with fascinating information and anecdotes takes you through the history of energy and the quest for efficiency. This is a book about the environment that will change how you look at the world. We should not be waiting for some geniuses to invent our way out of the energy and economic crisis we're in. We already have the technology and knowledge we need to live sustainably. But will we do it?

That is the conundrum.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Juan Jaramillo]

I really want to read your book, but... will it not contribute to the problem?... Of course it will! that is the conundrum!. Put online for FREE do not publish it on paper.

[Colin Carver]

ENVS 160 wassup

[zeera10]

Great stuff!

[Tim Skoglund]

I am living in a streetcar suburb that was built-out 100 years ago. I have not owned a motor-vehicle for over 5 years, vegan diet, and I subsidize green power, (dubious tactic).

[Ernest Benjamin]

What did you mean we know how to reverse population growth? 3:08 ty

[danboarder]

This topic is referred to in economics as "opportunity cost".

[zgrmuffin]

I completely agree. For once somebody who gets the problem right and has a working solution



[MultiRickb]

I think this is common sense. There is no silver bullet in solving our environmental problems. No technologies are perfect. Good intentions might cause some problems, but it doesn't mean that it won't achieve something greater in the future.

[THOMAS CARNACKI]

I think we can 'safely' say that the transition to a less oil-based world won't be an easy one and it won't be our choice to make, it'll be made for us, by reality. There will be wars for the remaining oil regardless of what we do. The change won't be managed by governments -it's not in their self-preserving interest- as they are incapable of organising any great changes, history has told us that if anything. The world will become fragmented and re-localised by motivated citizens not politicians