Steve's Reviews > The West Texas Power Plant That Saved the World: Energy, Capitalism, and Climate Change, Revised and Expanded Edition

An interesting, and, no doubt, unique, but very much quirky, riff on the evolution and accelerating potential of solar power as a key component of the increasingly urgent need to address climate change.

On the one hand, this is an incredibly modest story of a relatively minor power plant in an admittedly quirky market, from which the author (more often than not) suggests compelling extrapolations and asserts that this (again, admittedly small) anecdote can and should serve as a model to expand and morph into something much greater, impactful, and, ultimately, inspirational.

Against that backdrop, it's easy to criticize the book (and its title) and categorize it as what should have been a discrete piece of long-form (largely autobiographical) investigative reporting that's been cobbled together with the author's (admittedly thoughtful and thought-provoking) lifetime of experiences and thinking on related topics. In this edition, by the time you've read the through the body of the book ... then the last chapter (the love letter to America, which very much should have been the US or USA) ... then the epilogue ... then the afterword (these last two which exceed 15 percent, and the last three which are basically a quarter, of the total text), well, it is what it is.

Having said all of that, the author has a lot of interesting experience, he's done plenty of reading and engaging with knowledgeable and relevant people, and he's clearly put a lot of thought and emotional capital into these issues. I found much to inform, plenty to agree with, and, alas, almost as much to disagree with (but only a little to scoff at), and that's probably a good thing. On the whole, I'm glad I read it, but it probably wouldn't be one of the first books I'd recommend to someone new to the climate change literature, but it might be a great entry for anyone interested in solar (or wind) power generation.

As climate change readers increasingly organize their bookshelves (or authors) to keep track of the doomer versus the hoper authors, approaches, advocacy, or orientation, it's pretty clear this one belongs on the hoper side of the ledger. Sure, that should be obvious to anyone already steeped in the literature simply because Katharine Hayhoe, arguably the most hopeful of the hopers, provides the forward. (She and the author apparently go way back, in Texas.) But, like most of the better hoper offerings, the book is sufficiently sober about where we're headed if we don't do all (and far more than just some) of the hard work that needs to be done.