Electrifying the Titanic – The Shipwreck of Industrialisation

William Ophuls adds a thought-provoking new book to our Environment category: Electrifying the Titanic – The Shipwreck of Industrialisation.
Ophuls warns, “we stand on the precipice of radical change, change that threatens to end both the modern way of life and the long period of relative peace since the end of World War II.”
“Innumerable warnings, growing increasingly dire as the years have rolled by, have failed to motivate peoples and nations to take the emerging ecological crisis as seriously as it warrants. What is worse, they have chosen exactly the wrong strategy for dealing with the crisis: instead of remodelling their societies and economies in accordance with ecological imperatives, they are trying to maintain business as usual by substituting solar electricity for fossil fuels. But refitting the Titanic with batteries, even if it were possible at this late date, will not avoid ecological shipwreck.”
Bite-Sized readers are given the opportunity to explore the limitations of the human mind that have prevented timely human action. Electrifying the Titanic reveals the bleak landscape of the future that our failure to act has now made all but inevitable. What is in prospect is a reversion to the historical mean. Scarcity will predominate; food will come from human toil, not fossil fuels; and societies will resume their former shape. “The liberal values, practices, and institutions of today will give way to the older, harder ethos found in the works of Machiavelli and Thucydides.”
While it may be too late, Ophuls has a hope that his book will be a stimulus for action to defeat what may be inevitable.