The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity: Clearing the Air Before Cleaning the Air Paperback – January 17, 2019

I have to confess the first few lines of this book were a put off. I almost stopped reading when yhe author didn’t know whether Rumi was the name of the poet or Sufi was. I thought it runied any credibility that he could have on any subject.Then I understood the author was trying to connect with people that may not necessarily know those things. It’s a book from a lay person (who knows about the energy industry) to the lay person who would want to know more.Another put off: he refers a lot of his sources to Wikipedia. Who in his right mind would do that? However, I truly believe there is method to the madness.The author warns us about gramatical and typographical errors. There are quite a few of those. As well as inconsistencies like “wetlands represent 6% of the world’s lands” only to say “wetlands reprent 5% of the world’s land” just a couple of sentences later.Having said all that, if you bring yourself down from the high horse, and think about it as real arguments to understand -and stop- the bickering between the energy industry and environmental groups, this is the best book to do so.It’s a fun read for sure.

It is difficult to write an analysis backed up by actual data. In today's world disinformation is created on the internet then referenced in other internet publishing's making the entire subject untrue. This book exposes the common tactic of the Left - to produce disinformation about global warming and the fecklessness of any argument to reduce the use of fossil fuels.

Terry Etam lays out a rational discussion of a topic that is often fraught with misleading arguments that don't apply. The enormity of the changes offered become clear and some suggestions become obvious, but a better way for thinking results from the reading.

This book reflects on how our product, social engineering and city planning is a joke. We have ACTIVISTS that think we can sign a regulation or executive order to get things to change immediately. The Clean Water Act of 1972 made major changes to the quality of streams and lakes. I t will be 50 years, next year. This books enlightens you to the fact that major changes needs to have strategic goals that obtainable with reasonable outcomes and realistic timeframes.

For anyone really wanting to understand the issues. GREAT BOOK! EASY TO READ AND MAKES COMPLEX ISSUES UNDERSTANDABLE!

Terry Etam gets it. Just the facts man. Great vehicle as a conduit for discussion from the left and right. The author doesn't invoke his opinion but rather provides the ammo to the reader to form theirs. Good humor as well.

I read the soft cover version of the book. It contains 236 pages of text which consists of an Introduction, 24 named chapters and an Epilogue. A Reference section and an About the Author section follow the Epilogue. There are no figures, pictures or graphs. The font size of the text is about 10 or 11.The About the Author section describes the author, Terry Etam, as a “25 year veteran of the Canadian energy business.” Mr. Etam is described as having held occupations in the energy industry involving finance, accounting, communications and the trading of energy. However, this is a strangely vague representation of his background. Why weren’t his credentials listed? Does he have any college degrees? I ask this because many authors who write about the environment or climate change or subjects such as fossil fuels are not formally educated in these subjects. This affects their knowledge base and their ability to discuss the subjects of their concern. From what little information is presented about his background, I would guess that he has degrees in business administration and accounting. Also, given his extensive involvement with the energy industry, I would consider him to be an expert in the functioning and politics of this realm, with, maybe, some knowledge of the recovery, development and consumption of the various fossil fuels.If you are looking for a book which discusses or presents technical information regarding fossil fuels then this book IS NOT FOR YOU. Amazon sells at least several books that I know of which give technical descriptions regarding the exploration and development of fossil fuels. These books also discuss the evidence for or against the effect of the burning of fossil fuels on the climate. The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity is a long and drawn-out commentary on the status of the fossil fuel industry and fossil fuels themselves. The information held my interest initially while reading the early chapters, but my interest eventually waned because reading such a long commentary became tedious. I put the book down and then picked it up again many times over the course of four months. Ugh!!! What a chore to read! I didn’t become interested again in the book until I reached the latter chapters concerning spills, pipelines and the environment. This long commentary could have been reduced to maybe 40 pages and would have better held the reader’s interest.All this being said, Mr. Etam is a very good writer of non-technical prose. He is even funny at times at various points in the book. However, during some chapters, the narrative goes off-topic. In other words, he gets sidetracked. I found this to be very frustrating as I was looking forward to a discussion of the subject of the respective chapter. His sidetracked discussions detract from the pleasure of reading. Maybe he has an inflated ego and wants to see more of his own words in print?Mr. Etam explains that even though we should and will get away from consuming fossil fuels, we will still need them for the foreseeable future in order to have enough energy. He comments that the world has a “fossil fuel addiction.” However, there is no such thing. The world needs fossil fuels as reliable and cheap sources of energy. Wind and solar are expensive and intermittent and Mr. Etam seems to realize this. Also, he states that the Canadian oil sands are a pariah and that the deposits of oil have been picked over world-wide. However, neither statement is true. He also believes that the burning of fossil fuels is affecting climate change. This tells me that he hasn’t read even one book explaining how global climate functions and that carbon dioxide is not the driver of global warming. Just like the rest of the population in Europe and North America, Mr. Etam must be getting his understanding of the climate from the media, politicians and environmental activists.Chapter 22, Habitat destruction vs contamination vs pollution vs global warming, should not have been included in the book. It’s not that he is giving misinformation. It’s not that he is giving disinformation, but that he is GIVING NO INFORMATION! He writes stating such broad generalities about each subject that the reader would have encountered what little information there is contained in the chapter by simply watching television. It’s like listening to the speech of someone running for a political office. Their lips move, but there’s nothing of substance to hear. Though, strangely enough, on page 204, he writes that “CO2 is not pollution, per se; it is a naturally occurring substance required by plants.” He also writes that six percent of the earth is covered by wetlands which emit methane, another greenhouse gas. Additionally, he writes that “an excess of naturally occurring substances in not pollution.” So, if he believes all of the above, why does he believe that we need to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels? This makes no sense and tells the reader that he is a follower of the anthropogenic climate change movement, rather than a critical thinker about the issue.Chapter 24, titled “A way forward, for those who want it”, is another chapter where he goes off on a tangent. Specifically, I am referring to the section titled “BRING ON THE FIVE DOLLAR DRINKING STRAWS.” It’s about him buying lunch one day and realizing that it is contained in a lot of packaging. The gist of the section is that what is left after he eats the contents is mostly a lot of garbage. My attention drifted off to other subjects while I tried to finish this part of the book.Within Chapter 24, he discusses using hydrogen as a transition fuel. To actually believe this tells the reader that he doesn’t fully understand the serious issues regarding creating, transporting, storing and consuming hydrogen. This is not surprising, the text in this section reflects his very favorable (you might say enthralled mindset), and therefore biased ideas about hydrogen. In this section, he states that hydrogen can be obtained by splitting methane (CH4). Yes, this can be done, but the large amount of electricity needed to conduct the chemical separation in order to generate commercial quantities of hydrogen is enormous! The only way to do this would be to use electricity generated from burning high energy materials such as fossil fuels. You can’t build enough wind turbines or solar panels to meet the energy draw. Secondly, methane separation generates about 10 times the volume of carbon dioxide. Given this, does Mr. Etam really want to see hydrogen generation take place? Additionally, it takes very little energy to ignite hydrogen that is in the open air. According to literature I’ve reviewed, a cell phone or lightning can ignite this gas. A gallon of liquid hydrogen, at present prices, costs about $16 – as opposed to about $4.00 to $7.00 (California) per gallon for gasoline. In addition, due to the lower energy output per gallon, vehicles would need enormous fuel tanks in order to get the same range as with gasoline or diesel fuel. Another issue is that hydrogen has to be stored at very low temperatures in order to be in a liquid state. This is not even considering that the hydrogen fuel tank could rupture in a hard rear-end collision and there would be such a powerful explosion that anything within 50 feet would probably be destroyed. Who wants this risk? Finally, Mr. Etam states that the infrastructure is already present for transporting hydrogen by pipeline. It surprises me that he made this statement, especially since he has decades of knowledge regarding transporting liquid fossil fuels. Hydrogen is typically transported by first liquifying it. The very low temperature of hydrogen causes embrittlement of pipes and storage vessels. You need specially hardened pipes made of steel for transportation purposes. The same thing goes for storage vessels. Early designs of large hydrogen storage tanks installed in the first half of the twentieth century had a greater incidence of failure than those for natural gas.The section titled “Carbon Capture, One Way Or Another” concerns removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. From his writing about the subject, I sensed that Mr. Etam is excited about a company called Carbon Engineering. It’s headed by Bill Gates, Murray Edwards, owner of a very large independent Canadian oil company, and Harvard physicist David Keith. Together, they had a facility constructed that sucks air and separates out the carbon dioxide in order to make fuel. The facility is essentially an ultra-sized vacuum cleaner. Mr. Etam seems to admire these three individuals very much and considers Mr. Gates and Mr. Edwards “razor sharp” business men. However, if the idea behind the facility is to remove carbon dioxide in order to curtail global warming, then they are more akin to the Three Stooges! This is because the ocean holds 50 times more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere. So, for every cubic mile the facility removes, an equivalent cubic mile of carbon dioxide leaves the oceans and, thus, nothing changes. Additionally, the vacuum technology has not been proven to be a meaningful way to abate global warming, especially since the tremendous amount of electricity necessary to run this giant machine will have to come from burning fossil fuels. In hindsight, this section should not have been included in the book as it doesn’t contribute to our need to understand climate change mitigation.Towards the end of Chapter 24, Mr. Etam briefly discusses placing a carbon/consumption tax on fossil fuels. He likens this to a tax on soda straws and beverage cans and bottles. He states that use taxes are an efficient way to curtail waste. However, a carbon tax would have a serious impact on industry and citizens. Increasing taxes decreases industry and employment. Also, industry usually passes the cost down to consumers. So, the lower income consumer gets hit with a double “whammy” by having fewer entry level job opportunities and by paying much more for goods and services. However, I doubt Mr. Etam is concerned about this because it is not the focus of his climate agenda.Given the above, I was generally disappointed with this book and the author. Therefore, I direct the reader to consider more technical books available through Amazon – that is, unless, you are into political discourse regarding fossil fuels. I gave the book a rating of fair – two stars.Raphael KetaniSunnyside, NY

Terry presents the facts and figures as to where we are today wrt climate change. He agrees that something must be done but points out that it won't all be done by this weekend.

This is one of the best books I have ever read on the subject of Climate Change and our addiction to fossil fuels.This is a complicated subject and the book touches on most aspects of Climate Change, so it tends be be complicated as well. Some people may be annoyed at the author’s attempts at inserting humour into the subject matter. They feel it detracts from the gravity of the situation. We’ll maybe it does, but he is not making light of the seriousness of the problem. If these small humorous digressions were not in the book, it would be a tedious one to plow through.We all need to start reducing our reliance on hydrocarbons. I am going to buy a hard copy of the book and send it to my MP. Everyone in government, especially those on the extreme sides of the debate, needs to read this. Maybe we can finally find some common ground and work together towards solutions to this massive problem.Read the book. It will be an eye-opener.

An excellent read. Well written and in depth coverage of all aspects of fossil fuels. This book gives a true measure of the strength and depth of the very extensive problem of rep!acing fossil fuels with alternatives. The book explains very clearly why the world will take a lot longer to do this regardless of all the hype about impending cataclysm. The book explains why we must start now to begin the long haul of producing fossil fuel alternatives to keep pace with ever increasing energy demands. Fossil fuels will not last for ever.

Enjoyed reading this book which confirms to me what I have come to know for a while now. Fossil fuels are part of our society and we need to be clever about reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. It is a counterweight to the cultist catastrophist movement known as Extinction Rebellion - whose options seem to be foolhardy to say the least. There are actions described that we should take in order to prepare for when fossil fuels run out. It will surprise you to learn about the need for fossil fuels to meet that future.Please do read until the end.

Etam presents both sides of a very complex debate that has no simple answers. He even injects humour into the report. D

The author tells the story, using easy to understand language, of the insanity of the world desire to stop using carbon based fuels as described by the Paris accord and the UN. It is impossible to turn off the carbon dioxide tap without an available alternative and most are now aware that wind and solar are not a global solution.Today, February, 2022, I read in the newspapers the UN has finally recognized this issue and has identified natural gas and Nuclear power as green alternatives.I highly recommend the book.