Imagine your automobile earning money for you while it sits in your garage or in your parking spot at work. Imagine that it can provide heating and electricity for the nearby building, pure water for you to drink, and all the while, clean every bit of pollution from the air it sucks into its engine and blows out the tailpipe. And that it could do all this through the conversion to hydrogen or hydrogen boosted fuel. To convert the family automobile engine to do this would only require installation of a simple conversion kit that could be added in the time it takes to tune the engine. It could do all this work and still would last far longer than it would using gasoline. And if it had to do so, it could still operate on gasoline!
 

Roy McAlister not only imagines this type of thing, he has made it happen in demonstration projects at his Renewable Resources Revolution Laboratory. And this is only one small part of the vision he has of the future of energy in the United States and the world. In this book he builds an armor plated case that the waste, inefficiency, and just plain wrong-headed direction that our fossil fuel based economy has been heading is suicidal for the human race.
 

For example, a gallon of gasoline directly costs $2.00. Add another $5.50 per gallon that we pay in taxes for subsidies that support an infrastructure to deliver it and the military expenditures to insure that we have access to it from foreign lands. If, instead of burning it we were to separate the hydrogen and carbon components, we’d get two pounds of hydrogen that would do more work than the gallon of gasoline. Additionally we would have carbon to use in manufacturing of durable goods (lighter than aluminum, ten times stronger than steel, and not subject to rust and corrosion), in all, $35.00 worth of materials like used in computer chips, TVs, golf clubs, etc. The hydrogen would burn without pollutants, actually cleaning the air and twenty pounds of carbon dioxide would not be spewed into the environment.
 

There are books that point out some of the failings with our current system, but this one has one of the most optimistic outlooks of any I’ve seen. Not only does McAlister make the negative case against continuing to base our economy on fossil fuel depletion, he makes the positive case for solar types of energy (hydrogen, photovoltaic, solar concentrators, wind, wave, falling water, bio-mass, etc.) being the salvation of our race, and the only way our civilization can continue. He has blueprints (at both the concept level and many in detail) not only for a solar hydrogen civilization, but for a plethora of ways to get from here to there. There are chemical formulas that describe the materials conversions, tables of properties, input/output diagrams of processes, conversion plans, and there are business and financial plans of how to support and expand solar energy to any and every aspect of life with which modern human beings would be happy.
 

I learned much from this book (and I’m not a newcomer to solar energy, having been awarded a U.S. patent for an invention in the solar energy field during the 1980’s). It is an important source book as it contains much explicit information about all aspects of energy. I did have one complaint in reading it from beginning to end. There seems to be much redundancy. I think this is due to the “stand-alone” nature of each chapter, but I suppose that could be considered a plus, if one only wants to explore a few specific areas.
 

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn what our civilization is about and the imminent choices we face — the fork in the road ahead. One could even look at it as an ethics lesson — how depletion and burning of fossil fuels as a basis of our economy is such an immoral affront not only to us as thoughtful citizens, but most especially is to our helplessly victimized descendants. This book is a blueprint for how to improve our civilization’s ethics by orders of magnitude — a wholly worthwhile endeavor.
 

© 2004 R. Leland Waldrip