At least in terms of existential crisis of global warming, both approaches arrive in overall agreement at the same present situation. Rhodes, in my estimation, has more to offer in terms of possible futures from this point forward.

This book aims to help you achieve an individual well-being. It gives you advice on how to do it. It is written as a self-help book helping to bring balance and harmony to your body and mind. He definitely didn’t project that. He also didn’t project that mainstream commercial solar panels would become as efficient at collecting sunlight as they are today. He told us what the absolute maximum efficiency could be because that’s set by physics, but what he wasn’t able to do was to predict the way in which solar power would come down in price worldwide. He also didn’t want us to put large amounts of solar panels in fields. In a sense, he was an unashamed romantic and wanted the English countryside to stay as it was and thought it would be better to have fifty nuclear power stations dotted around the country rather than perhaps 10 to 15 percent of the country given over to renewable generation of one form or another. I think he was probably wrong but I understand his reluctance to change the landscape.By ‘geoengineering’ we mean alteration of the world’s physical systems in a way that changes the planet’s ecological balance. Most of Oliver Morton’s book is about reducing the amount of the sun’s energy that gets through to the earth’s surface as a way of counterbalancing the increase of the heat blanket in the earth’s atmosphere. This book aims to help people achieve an individual well-being. It gives clear advice on how to do it. It is written as a self-help book helping to bring balance and harmony to our body and mind. However, he also points out that the the invention of the Haber-Bosch process in the first decades of the twentieth century enabled the world to convert fossil fuels into nitrogen-based agricultural fertiliser and he calls this geoengineering as well. The application of artificial fertiliser to fields expanded the total amount of energy from food that’s available to the planet’s inhabitants. In turn, that loosened the Malthusian constraints on the world’s population. Smil has shown that before the use of fossil fuels for such things as fertiliser energy availability per person was only a few kilowatt hours a day. Improved physical and mental health: Tantra can help to improve your physical health by reducing stress, increasing flexibility, and improving your overall sense of well-being. It can also help to improve your mental health by reducing anxiety, depression, and stress. PV needs to be supplemented by other forms of energy conversion technologies such as wind turbines in less sunny parts of the world, but also with storage. In fact, the majority of the book is about the problems of dealing with the intermittency of solar, both intermittency on a minute by minute basis and more generally because the seasonal availability of sun varies hugely in high latitude locations such as the UK. We have a lot of sun in the summer and virtually none in the winter. But, remember, only ten percent of the world’s population lives north of London. For the vast bulk of the globe, solar is pretty reliable source of energy year round.

But the most important thing is batteries for short-term overnight storage. There, we have seen exactly the same phenomenon as we have seen with PV, with costs coming down in a way that nobody predicted, driven by the iron law of the learning curve. The mathematics behind the learning curve gives you a figure for the amount that the cost of something will fall that is derived from how much of it is produced. So, a learning or experience curve typically says that once the production of a commodity such as PV panels has cumulatively doubled, the cost will fall by a predictable amount.There are consequences to what we do, and there is no way for us to know what those consequences are yet. The Planet Remade is set against climate change but broadened to include bold and controversial proposals to manipulate the biosphere actively. I wanted to conclude by breaking the rules and talking briefly about a sixth text. This is not a book but a recent academic article. I’ve included it both because it is an absolutely superb piece of writing and also because it was written by a woman. All the rest of the works in this list are by men. That troubled me. Climate change already disproportionately affects women. In many places, for example, they have to travel further for water and for wood as a result of temperature and rainfall change. However the world of energy production and energy research, as well writing about energy, is wholly dominated by men. This has to change. Renewable Energy offers a comprehensive look at the renewable energy industry -while focussing on wind power, solar and tidal power.