41 pages • 1 hour read
Hope JahrenThe Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 3, Chapters 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Energy”
Part 3, Chapter 10 Summary: “Keeping the Lights On”
Around the globe, the process of producing electricity takes many forms, including burning coal, oil, or wood, sourcing energy from the sun or hydroelectric dams, and nuclear power. Our consumption of energy has quadrupled since 1970; not only are there more humans inhabiting the Earth each year, but individual people are using more energy than their ancestors ever did. Americans consume 15% of the globe’s energy supply, a story of excess that mirrors the country’s extreme consumption of grain, meat, and fish.
Jahren points out that almost all of our tools and technologies consume energy, from boiling water and watching baseball games to depending on streetlights: “The net effect is that now not only the tools of our labor but the general objects of our landscape consume energy” (84). She encourages her reader not to stop using electricity altogether but to start using less of it. Just as she argues for reduced meat consumption, she challenges individuals to turn the lights off, drive less, and unplug the appliances.
Part 3, Chapter 11 Summary: “Moving Around”
This chapter shifts from electricity consumption to the energy that powers transportation like cars and planes. Cars consume less resources than planes, although cars travel at a slower pace. Despite the better efficiency of cars, “Today, Americans take almost two million more flights per year than they did in 2003—and the majority of these flights are for business” (91). More people are flying more often. Flying provides the convenience of speed despite its significant environmental footprint.
High-speed rails use far less resources than either cars and airplanes, but access to railroads as a source of travel is decreasing across the world. In the past two decades, 17% of locomotives have been decommissioned around the globe. Additionally, one of every four jobs in the railroad industry has disappeared in the preceding two decades. For those seeking to reduce their carbon footprint while traveling, rail is decreasingly a viable option.
The author discusses her hatred of cars, which are exceptionally dangerous: “If cars were not useful, they would be regarded as great social ill: more people die from road traffic injuries each year, the world over, than from murder and suicide combined” (95). Americans in particular depend on their cars and drive them further than ever. Despite advancement in automobile technology, today’s cars are often heavier and burn more fuel than their predecessors.
Part 3, Chapters 10-11 Analysis
During her career as a university professor, Jahren worked for decades teaching college students. In this chapter, her experience relaying complicated information using interesting experiments begins to shine through. For instance, Jahren asks her students to spend a day writing down every time they use a source of energy. Overwhelmed by the task, most give up before dinner. Our dependence on energy and electricity, in other words, is part of every minute of our daily lives.
These chapters again provide evidence for a key theme implicit throughout Jahren’s book: Population growth does not necessarily equal more consumption. For example, the United States makes up 4% of the global population while it consumes 20% of the globe’s supply of electricity; it likewise burns a disproportionate amount of fossil fuels thanks to Americans’ overwhelming reliance on cars for transportation. Conversely, more highly populated nations such as India or Bangladesh consume less resources than Americans. Therefore, smaller populations can consume more resources than nations three times their size, a fact that comes down to individual lifestyles. Jahren refers to this gap as an “extreme balance” (88). What the book does not address, however, is how countries outside of the OECD are working to increase energy access to their populations. While some fear the demands of millions of more people gaining access to electricity and thus worsening the globe’s environmental footprint, others argue that other nations have a right to the same resources, tools, and electronics that OECD countries have enjoyed for decades. As a survey of patterns of resource and energy consumption, Jahren does not take the space to discuss or grapple with these questions.
Jahren’s discussion of transportation also leaves some questions unaddressed. Jahren provides a solid argument against cars: they are dangerous and consume great amounts of fossil fuel. What she does not provide, however, is a solution or suggestion for people dependent on cars to get them to work, the store, and school. For individuals living in countries like the United States where rail lines or other forms of public transportation are scarce, it is difficult to imagine that most families, rich or poor, could function without a car, especially in less urban areas where roads are the only transportation infrastructure. Jahren has had the social and economic ability to move to Norway, where she has more access to public transportation. Most people do not have such an option.
