This book presents essential information for the development of a comprehensive sustainable energy policy. It examines the diverse types of energy, their resource abundance and the material needs to develop and use them, and how communities and cities can better control their own destinies by locally managing energy use and generation. This approach does not suggest the undoing of existing infrastructures and energy providers, but rather a cooperative transition from national-regional energy management to a more local-centered system. The information is the foundation for eight specific legislative initiatives necessary for a national comprehensive sustainable policy that can both facilitate and drive the process of evolution from a carbon-energy economy to a sustainable renewable energy future.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the chemical nature of the Earth's early surface environment and how that led to the origin of life. This includes a detailed discussion of the likely process by which life emerged using as much quantitative information as possible. The emergence of life and the prior surface conditions of the Earth have implications for the evolution of Earth's surface environment over the following 2-2.5 billion years. The last part of the book discusses how these changes took place and the evidence from the geologic record that supports this particular version of early and evolving conditions.

This book presents essential information for the development of a comprehensive sustainable energy policy. It examines the diverse types of energy, their resource abundance and the material needs to develop and use them, and how communities and cities can better control their own destinies by locally managing energy use and generation. This approach does not suggest the undoing of existing infrastructures and energy providers, but rather a cooperative transition from national-regional energy management to a more local-centered system. The information is the foundation for eight specific legislative initiatives necessary for a national comprehensive sustainable policy that can both facilitate and drive the process of evolution from a carbon-energy economy to a sustainable renewable energy future.

A non-technical (but serious) treatment of those parts of Earth history leading up to human history, as well as some pre-historical aspects of humanity. Many "events" in Earth's history necessarily preceded the emergence of human beings (and intelligence). Geology has provided us with a great deal of information about these various steps on the way to intelligent life, and how and why they were important. Some of these events were on a cosmic scale (no universe - no life!), some were planetological/astronomical (no Earth - no life), some were essentially chemical (how did life emerge in the primordial ocean and why do we have oxygen in the atmosphere?), and some were details of evolutionary history (how did life colonize the land and how did mammals develop?). In this book an enthusiastic professor of geosciences presents a broad introduction from the Big Bang to the present and into the future, lucidly explaining aspects from various disciplines to interested, non-specialist readers.