PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThis curious mix of certainty and confusion is a defining affect of the climate crisis, and it’s one of the main themes of William T. Vollmann’s new two-volume Carbon Ideologies ... combines a heavy dose of scientific instruction with Vollmann’s reporting from energy-producing regions around the world. The work’s stated goals are to help readers understand the costs and benefits of their own energy use and to explain to future generations the hopeless complexity of our reckless dash toward cataclysm.
William T. Vollmann
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksPersonal anecdotes and choice quotations from technical manuals and poets pepper a heavy stew of unit conversions and historical statistics ... the book is a performance of the vexations involved in trying to understand our energy reality. The human account of what happened at Fukushima, the interviews with refugees and the excursions through abandoned cities, demands scientific context. And so Vollmann annotates his reportage with monotonous radiation readings. These readings in turn require their own context, which is complicated by debates over the efficacy of various units and devices of measurement. No wonder we throw up our hands and dream of Mars ... Carbon Ideologies’s hybrid genre—oral history, scientific précis, journalism, essay—lends it an interesting place in recent writing on climate change. Its emphasis on ideology rather than impact provides a nice contrast to reporting like Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006) ... consciousness, Carbon Ideologies shows, is utterly dependent on conditions. The vicious circle of matter and idea continues. Vollmann doesn’t seek to break it. His talent is to make us see it, to follow its pattern of thought, and to locate its roots in the everyday striving of ordinary people.
