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Seems pretty up the middle as he tends to attack all sides who spout off bullshit numbers. However, there's going to be a lot of political hate for this book. Oh well, that's the world we live in. Truth and pure data analysis is very under appreciated in todays hyper partisan political environment.
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Also, shower shorter. 5 minutes is way more than enough.
Your average guy maybe, but I doubt you'll get too many women or teenage girls to shower inside of 5 minutes, especially if they have long hair. However a shower longer than 10 minutes might as well be a bath as your average tub only needs 60 gals to fill and your average shower pumps out 50 gals in 10 minutes. So if you take your time showering, you might as well take even longer and have a good bath instead. After…
When I was young though, I would close the drain, shower, and then take a bath once the bathtub was full.
what a lot of you seem to miss is that we need to start cutting on wasted energy at the same time as we build more solar/wind/nuclear/tidal/etc. it's not just about replacing hydrocarbons by equal amount of alternatives!
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Perhaps "like" is too strong a word, but it's rather bracing to get an idea of how long high-energy civilization can last; barring some miracle like practical, cheap fusion power appearing in the next decade. If I were to make a comparison to a work of fiction, it wouldn't be to Mad Max or The Day After Tomorrow ; but to The Cold Equations , by Tom Godwin.
Nuclear can prolong us for a long time, uranium would basically be a stop gap to full on conversion to thorium reactors, as it's 3 times more abundant than uranium, but 550 times more abundant than U-235. Basically nuclear would only be a stopgap to Fusion. Once fusion becomes available, you can begin replacing fission with fusion. Existing nuclear power plants have so much land reserved around them as a buffer zone…
2. It's been a while, but IIRC we're looking at at least 50 more years of U-235 and maybe two centuries of plutonium and thorium (lowballing). I have a hard time believing that there won't be even one revolutionary breakthrough in how we use or generate energy in the next 150-250 years.