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In 1988-9 I joined a team making a
documentary series for Channel 4. I persuaded them that it should
be called not 'Alternative Energy' but 'The Energy Alternative' -
a new way to think about energy. My book The Energy
Alternative: Changing The Way The World Works (Boxtree 1990)
became the basis for the series. In 1991 the paperback edition
was chosen one of the 'Green Books of the year'.
In 2017 I have just reread it for the first time in over a decade. I initially wanted only to correct typos; but I was
both delighted and dismayed to find that 27 years after it first appeared it is still all too relevant. The story it tells still works.
Much has changed; coal has outlived its usefulness, as has the expression ´the Third World´. But too many influential people still
think ´energy´ is about supplying fuels and eĺectricity, when it is really about doing what we want to do,
as effectively and elegantly as possible.
For those who think we ought to change the way
the world works, here for free download, now typo-free (I hope), is The
Energy Alternative.
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Walt
Patterson On Energy