Vigilant in his precision, open-mindedness, and candor, Vollmann takes on global warming, elucidating the science used to measure the impact of carbon-based fuels and nuclear energy on the atmosphere and Earth, and analyzing the 'ideologies,' or assertions, that keep the energy industries churning, no matter the consequences. Vollmann provides an extensive, richly sourced 'primer' of mind-seizing quantifications about greenhouse gases emitted by agriculture, transportation, power plants, and manufacturing, vividly conveyed information matched by arresting enumerations of negligence and malfeasance ... His poignant conversations with nuclear refugees, unnerving visits to contaminated towns, telling photographs, and stubborn attempts to measure radiation all attest to the terror, sorrow, and eerie normalization of this ongoing disaster. Vollmann’s careful descriptions, touching humility, molten irony, and rueful wit, combined with his addressing readers in 'the hot dark future,' make this compendium of statistics, oral history, and reportage elucidating, compelling, and profoundly disquieting.
It is a 600-page amalgam of scientific history, cultural criticism, mathematical experiments, risk-benefit analyses of energy production and consumption, and diaristic meanderings through radiation-festooned landscapes after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011. The effect is bewildering ... There are swifter, simpler, more efficient ways to learn about how human impact on the planet has set us striding into a 'hot, dark future.' But No Immediate Dange'—written as calculated denial becomes policy—takes a tack that feels appropriate. It is overwhelming. It drowns us in calculations, facts, images, stories. It embodies the confusion of our current moment, the insidiousness of disbelief, and the mania-inducing reality that our greatest threat is the hardest to act upon. It is a feverish, sprawling archive of who we are, and what we’ve wrought.
So is this the book on climate change we’ve all been waiting for? Maybe not. Carbon Ideologies, Vollmann’s two-volume exploration of the energy sources we use and the mess we are in, is prodigiously reported but sprawling and undisciplined ... Vollmann’s many fans are drawn to his literary hoarder aesthetic, and they will not be disappointed ... He has stacked his reporting high, giving us interview after interview with local people in places ravaged by our need for power and by our wastefulness ... We hear them at great length, but with little interpretation or analysis ... the biggest problem with this monumental work: not its length, or the way it might test your tolerance for sarcasm, but the author’s tendency to assume the absolute worst consequences of climate change ... Vollmann...gives short shrift to renewable energy sources like solar power that can help to provide a pathway to a less damaged future ... Reading these two books did have an effect on me ... I do feel worse about myself. Maybe that’s what the work was for.
The book insists that humans have already sealed their fate—the narrative speaks to a ruined world arising directly out of rampant global warming and unchecked disasters like Fukushima. Two hundred pages of this would ordinarily constitute a dire publishing gamble—1,200 pages of it should be completely unreadable ... And yet, weirdly, the brightness and intelligence of Vollmann's own prose, absorbingly readable as always, acts as a kind of ideological counterweight to the gloom of his tidings. With accounts such as this, the reader desperately wants to think, surely all is not lost? ... there are many people in the world—Vollmann talks to some of them—who are every bit as invested in finding solutions before it's too late. We can all join the author in grasping at such hopes.
Personal 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.
Famously loquacious, Vollmann writes, without apparent irony, that his 'little book' is full of questions and not solutions, true enough save that the little book stretches out over more than 600 pages and embraces a couple of dissertations’ worth of data and research notes ... every matter that the author raises leads onto many others, yielding a dense but—as always, with Vollmann—rewarding, impeccably researched narrative.
Vollmann’s critique doesn’t quite make a coherent case that Fukushima’s spew will have significant health effects (the scientific consensus says otherwise); instead he veers between sarcastic jibes—'unlike its three main rival fuels, nuclear could be fun!'—and alarmism about 'gamma rays stabbing through me.' Nuclear power and energy policy deserve a more thoughtful, less biased exploration than Vollmann gives them.
