Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Full Disclosure: I'm a physicist well versed in these topics. I was looking for a quality modern overview of these important energy topics that is accessible to the layperson so I could hand it to friends and family of all backgrounds. While this book gets it right most of the time and is generally well written and accessible, it is fatally flawed in that it lacks the proper amount of research on some topics. Instead, on occasion he lazily (or worse, agenda orientated) replaces research with crude assumptions that lead him to incorrect numbers and conclusions. This is especially disappointing knowing that, as an PhD academically trained scientist, he is thoroughly trained in the merits of peer/expert review, but simply ignored such tools in favor of keeping a potentially controversial (and book selling) conclusion. The most obvious gaffe is on the topic of plug-in vehicles. He makes wildly inaccurate and oversimplified assumptions about battery life that just are not founded in reality. Lithium ion batteries in current plug-in vehicles are high quality, thermally managed, and state-of-charge limited, which all work to dramatically improve the life of the battery. But he ignores these facts (or doesn't know them) and assumes they are equivalent to the cheapest laptop batteries you can find on the market and says all batteries will only last 500 charges. This leads him to the laughable conclusion that the Chevy Volt battery will have to be replaced after 20,000 miles. It's obvious he did ZERO research on this and did not speak to a single expert on this topic. The Chevy Volt battery is warrantied to 100,000 miles, so if he were even close to correct, then GM is already doomed to go out of business as it spends billions of dollars replacing batteries over the next few years. Of course, this won't happen because GM actually tested the batteries. Even more insulting is that when this book was published, there were already Volt owners with well over 20,000 electric miles on the road without seeing any noticeable battery degradation (e.g. [...]). Then the final facepalm comes when he contradicts himself by assuming batteries in traditional hybrids (e.g. the Prius), which he supports, can be recharged an infinite number of times (maybe because he owns one, so he was "forced" into doing a tiny bit of research), thus he does not apply the same battery lifetime assumptions in his cost-per-mile calculations as he did to plug-ins. Now did he purposely misrepresent plug-in vehicles in order to sell books (or get it published)? Who knows. I'm guessing he did a "back of the envelope" calculation quite a few years ago about the viability of electric vehicles under some basic assumptions about batteries that he thought were true at the time. He then concluded, based off those assumptions, that the battery cost would outweigh the benefits. He then probably held on to that conclusion over the years until he threw it in this book with little further thought and absolutely zero research, perhaps because it already had a result he needed and/or wanted. In short, despite being a good and mostly correct review on a majority of the topics, I just cannot recommend this book knowing some of the shortcuts that were taken. While there are probably countless more egregious misrepresentations on energy in other books, I hold this author to a higher standard being an academic PhD physicist and I'm truly disappointed.