Rating: 
Summary: Title should be: "The Hazards of Fossil Fuels"
Review: "The Hydrogen Economy" is an inaccurate title. Seven of the nine chapters discuss not hydrogen, but fossil fuel consumption and its consequences. Use of fossil fuels is a valid way to start the book as background information, and some of it I found thought-provoking, but I was frustrated with the material not getting to the point. Hydrogen isn't discussed in detail until chapter 8! Rifkin sparked my interest early on by discussing thermodynamics and how energy is never spent, just changed. He also describes entropy, a thermodynamic effect of energy changing from a useful form to a non-useful form. With these aspects of physics in mind, I was eager to see what hydrogen has to offer. But in chapter four, he goes back to discussing fossil fuels, and then a history of Islam, which he probably felt compelled to write after 9/11. I give the book three stars because the final two chapters had something to say on the future of hydrogen as an energy source. How hydrogen will be produced with "electrolysis" (extracting hydrogen from water with electricity) and discussion of the coming HEW (hydrogen energy web) were especially promising to me. More general thoughts on globalization and networks in the final chapter were also interesting. I'm still sceptical of the worst-case, and then best-case, scenarios given for fossil fuels and hydrogen, respectively. Perhaps the author could have focused more on who is developing hydrogen solutions.
Rating:
Summary: Addendum...
Review: As a followup to my other review here on Rifkin's "Hydrogen Economy," I have recently finished reading and highly recommend "Tomorrow's Energy: Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, and the Prospects for a Cleaner Planet" by Peter Hoffmann as a better book for explaining the nuts and bolts of a hydrogen economy. Think of Rifkin's book as the "why" and Hoffman's book as the "how." Read them both for a very complete picture. For a truly exciting read with more personal drama about some of the leaders who are making all of this happen, I highly recommend "Powering the Future: The Ballard Fuel Cell and the Race to Change the World" by Tom Koppel. Very objective and even-handed. After reading this book, you'll find yourself wanting to buy stock in Ballard (Nasdaq:BLDP).
Rating:
Summary: Addendum...
Review: As a followup to my other review here on Rifkin's "Hydrogen Economy," I have recently finished reading and highly recommend "Tomorrow's Energy: Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, and the Prospects for a Cleaner Planet" by Peter Hoffmann as a better book for explaining the nuts and bolts of a hydrogen economy. Think of Rifkin's book as the "why" and Hoffman's book as the "how." Read them both for a very complete picture. For a truly exciting read with more personal drama about some of the leaders who are making all of this happen, I highly recommend "Powering the Future: The Ballard Fuel Cell and the Race to Change the World" by Tom Koppel. Very objective and even-handed. After reading this book, you'll find yourself wanting to buy stock in Ballard (Nasdaq:BLDP).
Rating: 
Summary: I really wanted to like this book.
Review: As undeveloped societies throughout the world become industrialized, their energy needs, coupled with growing energy consumption in the West, will stress the capacity of energy providers, political and social systems, and the environment. The first part of the book traces the history of energy use in the Western world from the fourteenth century on. By 1700 the forests of Europe were becoming depleted of wood and people began burning coal. In the middle of the 1800s, oil began to replace coal. Each fuel in this progression has a smaller carbon to hydrogen ratio than the preceding one. Scientists call this evolution "decarbonization." Rifkin shows how each energy source in this progression uses more sophisticated methods for its exploitation, with the oil industry using the most complicated technology. Exploration, drilling, refining, brokering, delivery, all must all be coordinated, and each part of the process consumes as well as provides energy. Each step also further removes the end user from the manufacturing process. This, with a short detour into the causes of Islamic militancy, is basically the first 157 pages of the book. Rifkin's major source of information about patterns of future energy use is the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). In 1971, the US Senate wanted to create an agency to research the nation's energy needs, and the energy industry organized EPRI as an alternative. Presumably, the governmental organization would have been subject to congressional oversight, while the industry-organized EPRI is accountable only to the energy industry. In assuming the inevitable progression from oil to hydrogen, Rifkin quotes officials of the EPRI and their publications continually throughout the book, and he accepts their pronouncements uncritically. In my opinion, he hasn't made his case. Hydrogen is called a secondary energy source, because it can only be obtained by using some other source of energy. The source could be primary, such as coal, natural gas, oil, or wind, or it could be a process like electrolysis. But to become an independent energy supplier, the end user would have to somehow generate hydrogen. How would this be accomplished? Rifkin says individual consumers will generate hydrogen using fuel cells in automobiles. But the end user cannot obtain fuel cells independently of manufacturers or suppliers. Rifkin claims that there are already in place organizations that can help individual end users become autonomous energy producers. He claims that Common Interest Developments (such as Homeowners' Associations) can be major players in establishing distributed energy, thus contributing to the empowerment of the individual energy consumer. But the author of a book Rifkin cites to support this claim, Evan McKenzie, concludes that Common Interest Developments do not exist to empower individuals over whom they exercise authority. And the idea that such agencies "provide a bottom-up organizational structure" is nonsense. Despite their democratic structure, all powers, legislative, judiciary and administrative, are concentrated in the hands of their boards of directors. Rifkin also cites the Mondragon cooperative as an example of an agency that has empowered individuals, but doesn't mention any of the problems Mondragon has encountered. Does the author think readers won't notice things like this? I bought this book to learn about issues related to switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, but was disappointed. In fact, it was hard to finish reading this book. A better book is "GeoDestinies," by Walter Youngquist.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent introduction to this issue
Review: Even though Rifkin doesn't start talking about hydrogen until the seventh chapter, he lays out a convincing case for why we need to shift away from fossil fuels. Even though I disagreed with some of Rifkin's philosophical conclusions on why we need to switch, the facts (that we are nearing the peak production of oil, that the remaining oil is held by Islamic states that are politically unstable and global warming is increasing) are hard to dispute. I wouldn't suggest this as the only book to read on the hydrogen economy but it should be the first one you read.
Rating: 
Summary: Thesis is wrong.
Review: I am not sure I am allowed to write a review without reading the book, but just on the basis of the back cover I know I don't need to read it. Rifkin seems to think hydrogen is an energy source. It isn't. There is no available supply of free hydrogen, so it needs to be seperated, for example from water. The energy needed to do this is equal to the energy subsequently released in a fuel cell. Hydrogen is therefore merely an energy storage device, like a battery. One might as well propose "wound-up springs" as an energy source.
Rating:
Summary: Criticizing what they haven't read
Review: I just want to correct one recurrent misunderstanding of Rifkin's thesis. I note that several one-star reviews of this book included a caveat to the effect that the reviewers had not even read the book. They go on to point out that since energy is required to free hydrogen in the first place, hydrogen is not an energy source but at best a form of stored energy, and not yet a terribly efficent form at that. (One reviewer from Florida even got his/her one-star review entered mulitple times! Were each of these identical entries counted against the over-all rating of this book??) Having heard Rifkin interviewed on the energy source/storage issue, I believe that these one-star reviewers have missed the point. Rifkin is advocating for hydrogen precisely as the future's medium of energy storage. Say the energy is initally gathered through solar panels. You need a way to store the surplus. Use the surplus photo-electricity to free some hydrogen from water, store the hydrogen. The energy sources of tomorrow are solar, wind, etc. The battery of tomorrow that makes these sources viable, in as much as civilization depends on the ability to accrue a surplus, is hydrogen.
Rating:
Summary: Criticizing what they haven't read
Review: I just want to correct one recurrent misunderstanding of Rifkin's thesis. I note that several one-star reviews of this book included a caveat to the effect that the reviewers had not even read the book. They go on to point out that since energy is required to free hydrogen in the first place, hydrogen is not an energy source but at best a form of stored energy, and not yet a terribly efficent form at that. (One reviewer from Florida even got his/her one-star review entered mulitple times! Were each of these identical entries counted against the over-all rating of this book??) Having heard Rifkin interviewed on the energy source/storage issue, I believe that these one-star reviewers have missed the point. Rifkin is advocating for hydrogen precisely as the future's medium of energy storage. Say the energy is initally gathered through solar panels. You need a way to store the surplus. Use the surplus photo-electricity to free some hydrogen from water, store the hydrogen. The energy sources of tomorrow are solar, wind, etc. The battery of tomorrow that makes these sources viable, in as much as civilization depends on the ability to accrue a surplus, is hydrogen.
Rating:
Summary: Skip it!
Review: I suggest you read the article in Scientific American about Hydrogen Automobiles. It is shorter and probably better in terms of content. I think it is the September or October 02 issue.
Rating:
Summary: Energy for Rifkin's hydrogen economy?
Review: I'm probably not qualified to write a review - I haven't read the book, nor do I intend to. But I have read the 30 reviews (8 of them identical?) on this Amazon web page (Everyone together: a big "bravo" for Amazon). I read those reviews looking for one phrase: nuclear energy. I don't expect to find it in Rifkin, but I am surprised that the absence of that phrase was not noted by even a single reviewer. Briefly, wind mills and solar cells will simply not suffice to provide the energy needed by our industrial civilization. Even with hydrogen as a storage medium, as accurately noted by many of the reviewers. Nuclear fission is the only source of energy comparable in quantity and availability to coal, oil and natural gas. It already provides 20% of the electricity used in the US. and 17% in the world; it is clean and competitive, it produces a very small volume of waste which can be more easily managed than the waste (CO2) of fossil fuels. Well designed, well managed and well maintained nuclear power is just a safe as fossil power, in terms of loss of life and public health, if not safer. Readers would be well advised to look for solutions to the energy problem in
Megawatts and Megatons, by Garwin and Charpak,
The Environmental Case for Nuclear Power by Robert C. Morris,
Nuclear Power, Villain or Victim? by Max W. Carbon,
Nuclear Energy by Walter Scheider. For anyone who reads French: L'Nucleaire Avenir de l'Ecologie? by Bruno Comby. Not recommended is Tomorrow's Energy by Peter Hoffmann; Hoffmann dismisses nuclear energy with a quotation which antedates the
Chernobyl disaster, which, by the way, was rather less disastrous than many would have us believe.
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