Cian reviewed The Age of Low Tech by Philippe Bihouix
An engineer's analysis of how screwed our societies really are.
5 stars
Too many books on the environmental crisis treat it as a problem to do with CO2 emissions. But this is just one of many crises. The ecosystems are dying, we're losing the ability to grow food and we are beginning to rely upon key resources that we need for our material intensive societies.
Philippe takes an engineer's perspective on where we are, what it requires to sustain us and how long we can keep going. Along the way he points out many problems with our assumptions about renewable energy (they use decidedly non-renewable resources, that require destructive mining), energy supplies (it is impossible to supply sufficient energy for our current needs from renewable energy). And then as someone who is familiar with the full process of production and maintenance, he points out that many of our complex systems will not survive if our outsourced supply/industrial chains breakdown, and that we …
Too many books on the environmental crisis treat it as a problem to do with CO2 emissions. But this is just one of many crises. The ecosystems are dying, we're losing the ability to grow food and we are beginning to rely upon key resources that we need for our material intensive societies.
Philippe takes an engineer's perspective on where we are, what it requires to sustain us and how long we can keep going. Along the way he points out many problems with our assumptions about renewable energy (they use decidedly non-renewable resources, that require destructive mining), energy supplies (it is impossible to supply sufficient energy for our current needs from renewable energy). And then as someone who is familiar with the full process of production and maintenance, he points out that many of our complex systems will not survive if our outsourced supply/industrial chains breakdown, and that we may not be able to sustain the skills required to keep complex technologies such as chips, or nuclear power, going.
Unusually for books of this type he also makes many recommendations for how we can escape our predicament - and he does so with considerable self-deprecation. His point is not that we need to follow him, but we need to take seriously limits, and reorientate our societies to think about true sustainability (all inputs, not just energy) and efficiency (energy and resource efficiency, rather than economic efficiency).