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EDITORIAL INFORMATION

For Hermann Scheer the "key issues" identified at the Earth Summit in Rio as threats to the environment - climatic change, destruction of the ozone layer, soil, air and water pollution, desertification and deforestation, poverty and migration, etc - are all energy problems. The only approach that will allow these issues to be tackled effectively is to aim for a global solar energy economy: the complete replacement of fossil fuel and atomic power generation by renewable sources of energy.

(Extracted from the back cover).

GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS

-Preface.

-Introduction: Politics at the Turning Point.

-The industrial Revolution: Turning Away from the Sun.

-Technical and Natural Entrophy.

-Are there alternatives to a global solar strategy?

-The potential for and the keys to a solar strategy.

-Solar energy's economic and social benefits.

-The nonsense about an energy consensus: the resistance to solar energy.

-Return to the Sun: The humanization of the Industrial Revolution.

-The Entropy Tax.

-From a nuclear non-proliferation treaty to a solar proliferation treaty.

-The energy of the people.

OUR REVIEW

The author has done in this book a magnificient work of synthesis, summarizing everything that solar power is and represents, as well as analyzing every one of the implications that using or not using it means.

The work begins with a review of the utilization of energy since the Industrial Revolution. It contains an analysis of the international power treaties, the demands for power, the problems inherent to the utilization of conventional power sources, and the potential that solar power has to offer.

All these elements lead inexorably to the conclusion that the best path for humanity to prosper is to base our structure of production in solar power.

The author defends his ideas with powerful arguments, and presents many questions under focuses that often the people, immersed in the vortex of everyday life in the industrialized nations, do not ask themselves as a general rule. One of Scheer's virtues is then his explanation of the true situation we are in from a more global, clearer position. Humanity is now at a crossroads, and to bet for or against solar power will no doubt shape our destiny for the next decades.