Book- "All Electric America" Says climate change response too slow

David Freeman, a celebrated eco-pioneer and former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, argues that the nation’s most electrified region needs an even higher dose of that magic juice that the New Dealers promised would make this impoverished seven-state region look like the rest of America and become a model of economic development for the world. Freeman’s vision this time is far broader and more likely to have enduring impact and global implications than TVA has had in its 83-year history.  This 90-year old visionary argues that environmentalists, utilities, and politicians are sailing in the same sinking ship in seeking solutions to climate change.  The solution, he asserts in a new book, is a total commitment to wind and solar as the sole sources of electric power generation. In “All-Electric America: A Climate Solution and the Hopeful Future,” Freeman and co-author, journalist Leah Parks, assert that wind, solar, and new developments in electric storage and distribution will permit the U.S. and the world to move aggressively to make renewable energy supply all energy needs by the year 2050.  This is an engaging and fact-filled book that takes on the critics of renewable energy and demonstrates that the piecemeal energy solutions being pursued by the Obama administration and most of the rest of the world’s governments are guaranteed to ensure that the goals of carbon reduction will not be met in time to prevent the most catastrophic consequences of climate change.  The book points out that the turn away from coal to natural gas by the nation’s utilities — a move favored by both politicians and environmental organizations — will actually accelerate global warming by increasing the release of the even more toxic methane gases. Freeman and Parks do a good job of outlining for the ordinary concerned citizen the counters to the arguments, for example, that wind, solar, and other renewables are too costly.  They correctly point out that the true costs of coal — stripmined mountains, crippled miners, and terminally polluted soil and water — are not factored into the cost of burning coal.  And they do the same for the hidden costs of nuclear and gas-fired generation.