Powerless: Our Children's Future

By James R. Owen

POWERLESS - the story of our dependence on low cost energy and what its impending limit means. Written for the Owen grandchildren to read later, it's for parents and grandparents to read NOW.* The world's population is 6.5 billion. There are 300 thousand more of us every day. There will be over nine billion of us by 2050.* Two billion people make less than $3 per day, economically they don't exist. By 2050 four billion of us won't exist.* We are blissfully unaware of the approaching limit that will deprive us of our most critical resource."Very well done - excellent conclusion. [Our] grandchildren will see a vastly different world than we are seeing." Walter Youngquist, GeoDestinies Professor of Geology ret."Truly excellent and nicely written about a difficult subject. Spot on." Colin J. Campbell, The Coming Oil Crisis, Ph.D. Oxford."Readable, convincing, and founded on solid documentation." Massimo Livi Bacci, World Population, Professor of Demography, University of Florence

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1419637436
• ISBN13: 9781419637438
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.8" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

"The environmental bottleneck challenges our grandchildren"

An intense and thought provoking read. This is an important book. Well written and researched, this other inconvenient truth emerges on the balancing side of Gore's climate change equation. "An Inconvenient Truth" is focused on carbon output. Jim Owen's book, "Powerless", is focused on the input to our carbon-based economic engine, and our dependence on it. It explains a world hooked on cheap energy that will next face a diminishing of these economically addictive resources. Challenging times are predicted ahead. Bottom line: between now and 2050-2080 mankind will pass through E.O. Wilson's "bottleneck" as the planet is maxed out from our demands on it. Will we survive? He doesn't say. Should we develop alternative energy? Absolutely. But this bottleneck between whale oil to petroleum to the next smart energy choice will be the chasm we must cross to thrive. Conclusions? Those are yours to make, though I have changed my investment strategy to include energy stocks. I am now convinced this change is coming and is inevitable. If you own books penned by Thomas Friedman, Jared Diamond, E.O. Wilson, Spencer Wells, Darwin, then this book is a must read. If you haven't read the above authors, then start with "Powerless", and pick through the 50+ books referenced in Owen's "favorites" in his bibliography included in this book. It is said that mankind migrated out of Africa based on climate change - one can only wonder where and what's next for us now after reading this book. Pat Cox Phoenix, AZ