Book review: Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper
by Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute.
WSJ review:
Mr. Bryce’s engrossing survey has two purposes. The first is to refute pessimists who claim that technology-driven economic growth will burn through the planet’s resources and lead to catastrophe. “We are living in a world equipped with physical-science capabilities that stagger the imagination,” he writes. “If we want to bring more people out of poverty, we must embrace [technological innovation], not reject it.”
The book’s other purpose is to persuade climate-change fundamentalists that they are standing on the wrong side of history. Instead of saving the planet by going backward to Don Quixote’s windmills, they need to take a progressive approach to technology itself, he says, striving to make nuclear power safer, for instance, and using the hydrocarbon revolution sparked by fracking and deep-offshore exploration to bridge the way to the future.
There are a lot of splendid passages in the book, but right now my favorite is Robert’s brutal smackdown of Bill McKibben’s infantile energy lunacy starting on page 55.
At Amazon
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