Prior to 1979, China had a bifurcated and geographically-dispersed industrial structure made up of a relatively small number of large-scale, state-owned enterprises in various industries alongside numerous small-scale, energy-intensive and polluting enterprises. Economic reforms beginning in 1979 led to the rapid expansion of these small-scale manufacturing enterprises in numerous energy-intensive industries such as aluminum, cement, iron and steel, and pulp and paper. Subsequently, the go...

Twilight in the Desert reveals a Saudi oil and production industry that could soon approach a serious, irreversible decline. In this exhaustively researched book, veteran oil industry analyst Matthew Simmons draws on his three-plus decades of insider experience and more than 200 independently produced reports about Saudi petroleum resources and production operations. He uncovers a story about Saudi Arabias troubled oil industry, not to mention its political and societal instability, which ...

This New York Times best seller remains the most informative and objective account of the Taliban availableThis modern classic brings the shadowy world of the Taliban and its impact on Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Central Asia into sharp focus. Ahmed Rashid offers an authoritative account of the Taliban’s rise to power, the effects of changing American attitudes toward it, and the new faces of Islamic fundamentalism, and explains why Afghanistan has b...

Mix hundreds of millions of dollars in petroleum reserves; rapacious oil barons and crooked politicians; under-the-table payoffs; murder, suicide, and blackmail; White House cronyism; and the excesses of the Jazz Age. The result: the granddaddy of all American political scandals, Teapot Dome.In The Teapot Dome Scandal, acclaimed author Laton McCartney tells the amazing, complex, and at times ribald story of how Big Oil handpicked Warren G. Harding, an obscure Ohio senator,...

This work executes a unique transdisciplinary methodology building on the author’s previous book, A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save it (Pluto, 2010), which was the first peer-reviewed study to establish a social science framework for the integrated analysis of crises across climate, energy, food, economic, terror and the police state. Since the 2008 financial crash, the world has witnessed an unprecedented outbreak of social unrest in every major continent. Begi...

Succinct and understandable, this book is a step-by-step guide to the mathematics and construction of electrical load forecasting models. Written by one of the world's foremost experts on the subject, Electrical Load Forecasting provides a brief discussion of algorithms, their advantages and disadvantages and when they are best utilized. The book begins with a good description of the basic theory and models needed to truly understand how the models are prepared so that they are not just bl...

Throughout the world, the threat of climate change is pressing governments to accelerate the deployment of technologies to generate low carbon electricity or heat. But this is frequently leading to controversy, as energy and planning policies are revised to support new energy sources or technologies (e.g. offshore wind, tidal, bioenergy or hydrogen energy) and communities face the prospect of unfamiliar, often large-scale energy technologies being sited near to their homes. Policy makers i...

This is a history of the abuses suffered by Africa through colonial, imperial and capitalistic scrambles for oil that have plagued the continent for centuries. France, the US, Portugal, Spain and other western nations have continually plundered Africa’s resources, leading to political corruption and the annihilation of democracy that continues to this day.Extraordinary stories reach far into the depths of domination and control. Neo-colonialism in Gabon, Yankee Landlords of Cabinda...

To solve the climate crisis, the world must make a wholesale shift to renewable energy technologies. With surging growth in emerging markets, this transformation takes on even greater urgency. The challenges - and opportunities - are immense.Selling Solar considers how such a shift might happen. Focusing on the case of solar photovoltaics, it shows how, at the start of the 21st century, this promising technology began to diffuse rapidly in select emerging markets, after years of st...

The monograph addresses a problem of stochastic analysis based on the uncertainty assessment by simulation and application of this method in ecology and steel industry under uncertainty. The first chapter defines the Monte Carlo (MC) method and random variables in stochastic models. Chapter two deals with the contamination transport in porous media. Stochastic approach for Municipal Solid Waste transit time contaminants modeling using MC simulation has been worked out. The third chapter de...

Is there a chance that public or private research and development institutions can improve the efficiency of the R&D process? This book gives a positive answer by designing an integrated concept of the science technology cycle and the innovation system of each technology. The position of a new technology in the sciencetechnology cycle is identified by several indicators from patent analysis, citations and market information data. The innovation system supports the search for a comprehensiv...

Renewable energy systems are playing an important role in the current discourse on energy security and sustainability. Scientific, engineering and economic solutions are adopted, and their is a constant effort to understand mechanisms and options to allow a faster penetration of renewable systems in the current energy mix and energy market.Readers of this book will have access to information, engineering design and economic solutions for harvesting local and regional energy potenti...