Breakthrough is an absorbing and clever book with many surprising insights, but it is misguided and its recommendations unsatisfactory.  The subject is how to shift society away from fossil fuels, yet advance material abundance.  I wish the two authors had set out to build a better car or better house themselves rather than manipulate the public so others would do this. Had they spent more time at the front of the battle they promote they might have noticed odd goings-on. People already have invented and built equipment for low carbon easy living, but a strange spell distracts the public from using it. We are not ever to get along with what we have.  Breakthrough promotes massive taxes to finance solar energy research.  The spell has us fixed on more electricity, speed, and power, while neglecting shoes, bicycles, clothes-lines, and our greatest solar invention, plain glass. Notice how most new buildings need their electric lights on all day. The manipulation of mood and perception they recommend to enlist the public in their massive new Apollo project is merely warmongering, a war with nature. It is like the neocons longing for the New Pearl Harbor. Nordhaus and Shellenberger fit the pattern of behind-the-line instigators comfortable herding a public whose senses have been disabled by advertising and propaganda. They are not looking for truthful answers. We had 9-11, the New Pearl Harbor where three skyscrapers turned to powder because, the spellbinders tell us (and you better believe it) airplanes collided with two of them.  The parallel spell Breakthrough bets on is that we will continue forgetting old uses of the sun fast enough to justify massive transfers of wealth to our masters: the military, media and industrial complex. Steve Baer October 2007