Electrifying America
Title | Electrifying America PDF eBook |
Author | David E. Nye |
Publisher | MIT Press (MA) |
Pages | 504 |
Release | 1990 |
Genre | Electrification |
ISBN |
Explores how electricity seeped into and redefined American culture, becoming fundamental to modern life.
Electrify
Title | Electrify PDF eBook |
Author | Saul Griffith |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 288 |
Release | 2021-10-12 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 0262367270 |
An optimistic--but realistic and feasible--action plan for fighting climate change while creating new jobs and a healthier environment: electrify everything. Climate change is a planetary emergency. We have to do something now—but what? Saul Griffith has a plan. In Electrify, Griffith lays out a detailed blueprint—optimistic but feasible—for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment. Griffith’s plan can be summed up simply: electrify everything. He explains exactly what it would take to transform our infrastructure, update our grid, and adapt our households to make this possible. Billionaires may contemplate escaping our worn-out planet on a private rocket ship to Mars, but the rest of us, Griffith says, will stay and fight for the future. Griffith, an engineer and inventor, calls for grid neutrality, ensuring that households, businesses, and utilities operate as equals; we will have to rewrite regulations that were created for a fossil-fueled world, mobilize industry as we did in World War II, and offer low-interest “climate loans.” Griffith’s plan doesn’t rely on big, not-yet-invented innovations, but on thousands of little inventions and cost reductions. We can still have our cars and our houses—but the cars will be electric and solar panels will cover our roofs. For a world trying to bounce back from a pandemic and economic crisis, there is no other project that would create as many jobs—up to twenty-five million, according to one economic analysis. Is this politically possible? We can change politics along with everything else.
Solutionary Rail
Title | Solutionary Rail PDF eBook |
Author | Bill Moyer |
Publisher | |
Pages | 126 |
Release | 2016-11-04 |
Genre | Transportation |
ISBN | 9780998096308 |
The Solutionary Rail vision draws unlikely allies together. It provides common cause to workers, farmers, tribes, urban and rural communities via the tracks and corridors that connect them. Part action plan and part manifesto, this book launches a new people-powered campaign to transform the way we use trains and the corridors they travel through.
Electrifying the Rural American West
Title | Electrifying the Rural American West PDF eBook |
Author | Leah S. Glaser |
Publisher | U of Nebraska Press |
Pages | 318 |
Release | 2009-11-01 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 080322219X |
Most Americans consider electricity essential to their lives, but the historic disparity of its distribution and use challenges notions of a democratic lifestyle, economy, and culture. By the beginning of the twentieth century, substations, wires, towers, and poles had followed migrants westward as the industrial era?s most prominent symbols of progress and power. When private companies controlled power production, electrical transmission, and distribution without regulation, they argued that it was not ?economically feasible? for many ethnic and rural communities to access ?the grid.? Yet, government agents continued to advocate electrical living through federal programs that reached into and across farming communities and American Indian reservations to homogenize and assimilate them through urban technologies. In the end, however, rural electrification was a locally directed process, subject to local and regional issues, concerns, and parameters. ø Electrifying the Rural American West provides a social and cultural history of rural electrification in the West. Using three case studies in Arizona, Leah S. Glaser details how, when examined from the local level, the process of electrification illustrates the impact of technology on places, economies, and lifestyles in the diverse communities and landscapes of the American West. As today?s policy-makers advocate building more power lines as a tool to bring democracy to faraway places and ?smart grids? to deliver renewable energy, they would do well to review the historical relationship of Americans with electronic power production, distribution, and regulation.
American Technological Sublime
Title | American Technological Sublime PDF eBook |
Author | David E. Nye |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 388 |
Release | 1996-02-28 |
Genre | Technology & Engineering |
ISBN | 9780262640343 |
American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. Technology has long played a central role in the formation of Americans' sense of selfhood. From the first canal systems through the moon landing, Americans have, for better or worse, derived unity from the common feeling of awe inspired by large-scale applications of technological prowess. American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. American Technological Sublime is a study of the politics of perception in industrial society. Arranged chronologically, it suggests that the sublime itself has a history - that sublime experiences are emotional configurations that emerge from new social and technological conditions, and that each new configuration to some extent undermines and displaces the older versions. After giving a short history of the sublime as an aesthetic category, Nye describes the reemergence and democratization of the concept in the early nineteenth century as an expression of the American sense of specialness. What has filled the American public with wonder, awe, even terror? David Nye selects the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, Eads Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, the major international expositions, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, the Empire State Building, and Boulder Dam. He then looks at the atom bomb tests and the Apollo mission as examples of the increasing ambivalence of the technological sublime in the postwar world. The festivities surrounding the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 become a touchstone reflecting the transformation of the American experience of the sublime over two centuries. Nye concludes with a vision of the modern-day "consumer sublime" as manifested in the fantasy world of Las Vegas.
Electrify
Title | Electrify PDF eBook |
Author | Saul Griffith |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 285 |
Release | 2022-10-04 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 0262545047 |
An optimistic--but realistic and feasible--action plan for fighting climate change while creating new jobs and a healthier environment: electrify everything. Climate change is a planetary emergency. We have to do something now—but what? Saul Griffith has a plan. In Electrify, Griffith lays out a detailed blueprint—optimistic but feasible—for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment. Griffith’s plan can be summed up simply: electrify everything. He explains exactly what it would take to transform our infrastructure, update our grid, and adapt our households to make this possible. Billionaires may contemplate escaping our worn-out planet on a private rocket ship to Mars, but the rest of us, Griffith says, will stay and fight for the future. Griffith, an engineer and inventor, calls for grid neutrality, ensuring that households, businesses, and utilities operate as equals; we will have to rewrite regulations that were created for a fossil-fueled world, mobilize industry as we did in World War II, and offer low-interest “climate loans.” Griffith’s plan doesn’t rely on big, not-yet-invented innovations, but on thousands of little inventions and cost reductions. We can still have our cars and our houses—but the cars will be electric and solar panels will cover our roofs. For a world trying to bounce back from a pandemic and economic crisis, there is no other project that would create as many jobs—up to twenty-five million, according to one economic analysis. Is this politically possible? We can change politics along with everything else.
The Next Greatest Thing
Title | The Next Greatest Thing PDF eBook |
Author | Richard A. Pence |
Publisher | |
Pages | 264 |
Release | 1984 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN |
"50 years of rural electrification in America"--Jacket subtitle.