How Innovation Proves the Catastrophists Wrong
In the face of today’s environmental and economic challenges, doomsayers preach that the only way to stave off disaster is for humans to reverse course: to de-industrialize, re-localize, ban the use of modern energy sources, and forswear prosperity. But in this provocative and optimistic rebuke to the catastrophists, Robert Bryce shows how innovation and the inexorable human desire to make things Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper is providing consumers with Cheaper and more abundant energy, Faster computing, Lighter vehicles, and myriad other goods. That same desire is fostering unprecedented prosperity, greater liberty, and yes, better environmental protection.
Utilizing on-the-ground reporting from Ottawa to Panama City and Pittsburgh to Bakersfield, Bryce shows how we have, for centuries, been pushing for Smaller Faster solutions to our problems. From the vacuum tube, mass-produced fertilizer, and the printing press to mobile phones, nanotech, and advanced drill rigs, Bryce demonstrates how cutting-edge companies and breakthrough technologies have created a world in which people are living longer, freer, healthier, lives than at any time in human history.
Speaker
Robert Bryce is the author of Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron, named one of the best nonfiction books of 2002 by Publishers Weekly; Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate (2004); Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence (2008); Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green’ Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future (2010), which the Wall Street Journal called “precisely the kind of journalism we need to hold truth to power”; and Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong (2014), which the New York Times called a “book well worth reading” and the Wall Street Journal called an “engrossing survey.”
Bryce has delivered more than 200 invited and keynote lectures to groups of all kinds, ranging from the Marine Corps War College and University of Calgary, to the Sydney Institute and Melbourne’s Institute of Public Affairs. He appears regularly on major media outlets, including CNN, Fox News, PBS, NPR, and BBC. Bryce holds a B.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin.