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Book Review: Robert Hefner's 'The Grand Energy Transition'

>> Society is transitioning from an unsustainable past based on solid and liquid energy sources (coal and oil) to a future of sustainable life based on energy gases (natural gas, wind, solar, hydrogen).

Yeah, wind is a concerted motion of a gas (or rather a mixture of gases). What's your point? Solar energy emanates from nuclear fission reactions in the hot gases (actually plasma) of the sun. So what? That does not imply that natural gas somehow is the solution to all our energy problems on planet earth. This whole thing that "gas is common to all our solutions" is very disingenuous and totally misleading.

This book and the review is as ill-informed as people who go around thinking that their weight problems are caused by "toxins" in their food, and that "cleansing their body" will fix it. Of course the problem is simply that they ate too much fat and other energy-rich foods (fat, by the way is the human body's form of long term energy storage).

Book Review: Robert Hefner's 'The Grand Energy Transition'

The book (and review) makes it sound we have a choice between burning solid/liquid or gasous fuel, and our problem is mostly that we made the wrong choice.

This is just hogwash. There are limited supplies of all fossile fuels and for the last 100 years we have generally been burning all we can get our hands on as soon as we have extracted it from underground.

Alex Filonov is completely right about hydrogen being only an energy carrier, and not a very good one at that. There are very limited sources of natural gas, just as oil, and there are NO natural direct sources of hydrogen. Separating water into hydrogen and oxygen using a green power source (electric wind power) is literally a waste of energy. One would be better off just sending the electricity directly out on the grid.

Controlled fusion of heavy hydrogen is nowhere near practical,
and has yet to break even in terms of energy in/out.

In summary, all this talk about "gases being better" is very unproductive. Sure it would be better, if only we had abundant or unlimited sources of the valuable gases. We don't.

There really is no substitute for understanding basic physics and chemistry, This book is a perfect example of how wrong the lay-person can be.