Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives Hardcover – April 30, 2008

The content of this book is five stars. The poor editing is truly stunning.If climate change is the danger scientists say it is, the jury is out as to whether or not humans can respond meaningfully to the challenge. The stories in this book make me think not. Human greed is just too powerful.Jared Diamond tackles that issue on in his work "Collapse". Some societies do respond and save themselves from grave challenges while others do not. "Internal Combustion" is all about private gain over public needs. And as long as corporations control our world our demise is assured. The US Supreme Court just put another nail in the coffin with it's latest decision on giving corporations unlimited access to buying politicians."Internal Combustion" makes it plain that public policy issues are not shaped by the facts, the science or the best interests of the public. Money and power will corrupt the process unless reasonable limits are imposed on the process.I would say that the value of this work is that it presents case studies in the history of American energy and transportation development.As to was there an industrial conspiracy against Edison and Ford in the development of a cheap electrical automobile, this book does not provide answers to the question that it hints about. Did major US corporations conspire to eliminate public transit in American cities? The answer there is clearer.These questions are more important in the context of our world than when the events in question transpired. Electric or internal combustion was not as big an issue in 1914. However, an electric car was a more economical means of transportation if it could be made to be competitive with the gas engine. But corporations stood to make more money on internal combustion. Making more money is the recurrent theme in American corporate life. And "supersize" it. That will mean bigger tires, the use of more fuel and more parts? Oh yeah, find a PR angle to explain why this money making approach is in the interests of the customer.This book should provoke thought about all of these issues.

All in all, this was a most interesting and eye-opening book. It went into detail about how Edison & Ford started out with electric cars and were basically forced out of business by competitors and how the electric based trolleys and trains were forced out of business by GM and other self-serving companies. Mr. Black has definitely done his homework, with lots and lots of sources cited. However, be warned. He is a good writer and knows how to work things around to suit his own purposes. For instance, he extolls the virtues of electric-based cars and how much better off we would be now if all cars were electric. He goes on about how internal combustion engines were belching, loud, and non-green means of transportation and that we'd be so much better off with electrics. He describes how the big corporations like GM and others were monopolistic and the scams that the big companies devised to take away people's money with one grand goal initially and then later changed their plans until their corporations had morphed into something completely different than what they were initially. This was certainly true in many cases in that many of the early century stock offerings were conceived by crooks with no other intention than to take people's money (read about it some time; you'll be surprised). What he fails to concede is things are different now. The cars now are so much more efficient, so much cleaner, and so much quieter that the difference is so stark that the early inventors would hardly recognize them! The corporations of today are much more regulated and required to meet much more strict controls than early in the century as well. Which isn't to say that we have haven't had our fair share of Enron and TYCO and Bernie Madoff affairs. But these are the exceptions, not the rules. Selling a dry, unbiased history doesn't sell many books, however. I certainly plan on reading more of Mr. Black's books as they bring to light many topics that most people know very little about, but not without a critical eye.

There are usually reasons for every addiction , and our addict like demand for oil, has put us in the position to be controlled by countries who dispise us and our way of life.Mr . Black in this well researched book , illustrates why oil is our drug of choice, overtaking what at one time appeared to be much more regional friendly forms of energy , such as electric , and more recently hydrogen.The blatant destruction of the electric trains , and the buying - out ofany prospect of the wide-spread use of electric as the source for powering personal vehicles is outlined thoroughly, as part of the reason that we are " energy hostages " to unfriendly forces are laid out in a concise manner.The shame of the matter is that it is now apparent that those who concieved this plan , were aware of the limited nature of the resource that they had hooked us on.We are now paying the price, literally , for this near sighted,plan that looked more to fill the pockets of the creators, rather than to benefit the public.Read this book , and you will see how we are in a "fix" that was preventable , and could have easily not have occured.It is the frustration of finding out how close we were to not having it happen that is themost eye- opening and aggrevating piece of this little known sequenceof events .Once again Mr. Black discovers the truth , and leaves us to think how different our world would be if the greed for oil had been hamperedyears ago.

A REALLY fascinating read!New York streets FULL of horse poo n pee??electric cars in 1900??

Great purchase

The first half of this book covers the history of the development of energy for transport in the US from the late 1890s. The style is somewhat polemical (phrases like "robber baron" to describe entrepreneurs recur rather too frequently), but that aside, he does explain some baffling aspects of US society (e.g how come many big US cities have such lousy mass transit, and how come the richest nation on earth isn't criss-crossed with bullet train tracks?).The second part is an analysis of where we go from here and is both seriously dated already and even allowing for that poorly thought through. Bio-fuels are discussed including corn-based ethanol but the author does not make the connection with food prices: true Jean Ziegler of the UN had not yet come out with is famous comment about food based biofuels being a crime against humanity. The author is a man-made climate change enthusiast - since 2006 we have had Climategate and another 8 years of flat-lining of global average temperatures. There are strongly held views on this subject on both sides of the debate so I'd suggest that it is unwise simply to assume that it is a given.Black doesn't even mention the lithium ion battery and regards hydrogen as the fuel of the future, which in the age of the Tesla Model S looks seriously quaint (unless you are an oil major or Toyota). In the short term hydrogen would come mostly from natural gas (keeping the business model of fossil fuel companies pretty much unchanged). Sure, it is possible to extract hydrogen by electrolysis of water, but how daft is that? You take electricity, use it to create a gas that is difficult and dangerous to store, you truck it all over the nation, pump it into cars, then use the hydrogen to create electricity to drive the car. There are risks and losses all the way down the line. Er, why not just ship the original electricity direct to the car battery via the grid?I think he missed a trick with the sad story of Nickel Metal Hydride batteries used in the Gen 2 EV1 for example. There was a lot going on in that area including, reportedly, the purchase of patent rights by Texaco and the subsequent restrictions on the use of the battery in EVs.Lastly I wasn't always convinced by all the statements and statistics. They may be OK but I did wonder about some of them