Environment and Energy

Electrification in the US, Britain and Germany, 1880 to 1930, as a technical system.

How rival federal agencies dammed the American West's rivers for water projects.

How Chicago and its western hinterland grew together as city and frontier.

The history of oil from the first Pennsylvania well to the Gulf War.

How business harms the environment, and a plan to cut energy and resource use by 80%.

Why oil booms left Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria and others with unstable states.

How Haber and Bosch's ammonia synthesis transformed world food production.

Design products on nature's model, where waste becomes food for the next cycle.

A short primer on energy: its forms, units and role in nature and economies.

Four meals traced to their sources, from fast food and organic to hunted and grown.

A short technical primer on oil: geology, extraction, refining, uses and reserves.

Each shift from wood to coal to oil took 50 to 70 years; new ones will be slow too.

Energy from 1990 to 2011: Russian and Caspian oil, Iraq, climate policy, renewables.

Why oil-rich countries have less democracy, less stability and more civil war.

Meat in human evolution and modern farming, and the costs of heavy meat-eating.

The economics of climate change, and why a universal carbon price works best.

History told through energy, from muscle and fire to coal, oil and electricity.

Energy and geopolitics in 2020: US shale, Russia, China and the Middle East.

The physical basics of modern life: energy, food, materials and globalisation.

The economic criteria for setting regulated utility rates.

A computer model of world growth that overshoots its limits and then declines.

The big international oil companies and how the 1973 embargo took away their control.

Water control as the basis of power in the arid American West.

The triple bottom line: report on economic, environmental and social results.

How the 1990 US sulphur dioxide allowance trading programme worked in practice.

How coal built empires and economies, and the death and pollution it caused.

Why past societies from Easter Island to the Maya collapsed, and what that teaches.

The fight for Caspian Sea oil from the 19th century to the present.

A world history showing how control of water shaped political and economic power.

The wildcatters, from George Mitchell to Harold Hamm, who started the shale boom.

How Africa's oil and minerals are extracted in ways that leave its people poorer.

Saudi Arabia told through its oil business, from the 1930s concession to Aramco.

Flags of convenience, crew abuse and jurisdictional voids at sea.

What it would take to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero, sector by sector.

How land ownership shaped history: how people fight over, keep and share land.

A plan with measurable goals for reaching net-zero emissions.

Artisanal cobalt mining in Congo and its place in the battery supply chain.

Six materials the world runs on, sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium, traced.

The man who invented the regulated-return utility bargain, and the holding company that killed him.

The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and Exxon's response, reported from Alaska.

How oil revenue let rulers buy out the merchant families; the origin of the modern business elite.

The case against water privatisation and the companies buying up water supplies.

Groundwater pumping and the legal fiction of unlimited rights.

The current war: Edison against Westinghouse and Tesla.

The peak-oil case against Saudi reserve claims; wrong but influential.

How Norway designed its oil licensing system, told by the geologist behind it.

Field reporting on aquifer depletion and river closure worldwide.

Norway is the counterexample the whole volume is arranged around.

A sceptic's conversion to nuclear power, and how public fear of it formed.

How Abu Dhabi's oil wealth built the emirate and gave rise to its sovereign funds.

Petrodollar recycling and the boom-bust cycle Gulf investors keep repeating.

The rise and fall of the Texas oil fortunes, the Hunts among them.

Glennon's case for pricing and trading water rights.

Uranium: its mining, its boom towns and the geopolitics of its supply.

Environmentalist case for nuclear power, dense cities and genetic engineering

The Niger Delta oil economy reported at ground level.

How free tap water became bottled water, one of the most profitable products sold.

Why ownership structure, not oil itself, set post-Soviet states' fortunes.

How utility business models must change once regulated growth ends.

The economics of cheap water and what happens when it stops being cheap.

Why climate policy failed to cut emissions as coal use kept rising.

The rush to buy farmland across the developing world, and who loses from it.

Exxon from the 1973 oil shock to 2005, written with access to its own archive.

Mining and hydrocarbon conflict in the Andes; the social licence problem.

Nuclear accidents, what went wrong in each, and what each taught about the atom.

Kolbert spent years reporting alongside biologists watching species disappear in real time. The book's argument is that we are in the middle of a sixth mass extinction — and it makes that claim through fieldwork, not abstraction. The best entry point into climate science for readers who trust narrative over data.

The engineering and capital replacement cycle of urban water systems.

Water technology as an export industry built from a domestic constraint.

How minor metals are mined, traded and hoarded.

Forest ecology as a connected system; background for timberland owners

The global race to build a better lithium-ion battery for electric cars.

The mechanics of subsidised fuel, multiple exchange rates and arbitrage as a national industry.

Why the regulated grid's economics are breaking.

Argues price stability always required a swing producer or cartel.

Water projects worldwide that work with nature's rhythms rather than against them.

Canada's oil sands as a business: costs, capital and politics.

The Sweden-and-France case that nuclear is the fastest decarbonisation path.

How the Gulf monarchies' cheap domestic energy became their central fiscal problem.

Michael Skelly's bid to build a power line across America for wind power.

The author's own recall of the triple bottom line.

Soil loss, water and the financial fragility of American farmland.

The rare metals behind green tech and devices, and China's hold on their supply.

The demand side: what full electrification of homes and vehicles requires.

Insider account: Polman on the Sustainable Living Plan years.

Lithium, cobalt and nickel supply chains behind the EV build-out.

How ownership of American agriculture came to sit with a few families and firms.

Data-driven look at emissions and what actually reduces them

Ice cores, old shorelines and fossil pollen show how fast the climate now changes.

A novel, not nonfiction, but Powers does something none of the other books here accomplish: he makes the timescale of trees felt as an emotional experience. The result is that you finish it reading the other books differently — with a less human-centric sense of what time and loss mean.

Carson's 1962 account of pesticide contamination is the founding text of environmental science writing. It matters here not only as history but as methodology: a demonstration that making an invisible industrial threat visible and specific can, in fact, change policy. Every climate communicator is still working in her shadow.

The people trying to grow food in a hotter climate, from vertical farms to lab meat.

Rising seas as a present property and insurance crisis, from Miami to Lagos.

How weather forecasts are made, and how fragile the global monitoring behind them is.

The argument that climate change is a problem of capitalism, not one within it.

A computer model of exponential economic and population growth on finite resources.

A naturalist's mother dies of cancer as the rising Great Salt Lake threatens birds.

Population and consumption face physical limits that economics ignores.

Standard textbook on rotation-age valuation and forest finance.

Resource productivity framed as an unpriced balance-sheet asset.

The species the world is about to lose, and how conservation can pay economically.

Patagonia's founder on running a business against conventional growth logic

Why energy demand never falls, why 'waste' helps, and why quality power is scarce.

The career of Norman Borlaug, the plant scientist who won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Local water-extraction fights, several of them with Nestle Waters.

International business guide to allowances, offsets and registries.

A trader's technical primer on oil barrels, grades, refining and pricing.

The offset side: how voluntary credits are created and sold.

How business lobbies built emissions trading as the chosen instrument.

How people will get energy two centuries from now, once fossil carbon is gone.

The challenges of feeding the world by 2050 and the reasons for hope.

Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich's wager on metal prices, and their fight over scarcity.

Fixers, traders and middlemen in the oil trade.

Rare metals such as tantalum and rhodium, and why phones and weapons need them.

The century-long race among automakers to build the car of the future.

Institutional history of interconnection and who controls it.

Evidence that rich economies now grow while using fewer physical resources.

Deregulated wholesale markets and reliability risk.

Why family farms lose ground to consolidated ownership.

Data showing progress on environmental problems, enough to reach true sustainability.

The history and technology of the Integral Fast Reactor built at Argonne, 1984-94.