Under a White Sky
by Elizabeth Kolbert

When I saw an interview with Ms. Kolbert and PBS News Hour, she presented Under a White Sky as a book that documents solutions to global warming that go beyond electric vehicles and renewable energy sources.

The book does a bit of that, mostly describing fantastical ideas like spreading diamond crystals or other reflective material into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back to the heavens, in the last few chapters. But most of its presentation is of engineering solutions to environmental problems brought on by previous engineers. While a few of the stories were new to me, most of them, including the Asian Carp problem, the New Orleans levee problem, and the Mississippi river mess, and others were old news.

It is not as if these are not real problems requiring solutions, but we do have a massive global warming problem staring us down, and understanding real, new, innovative, solutions would help the world along quite a bit. There are such solutions under development, and I would certainly welcome information about the few realistic ones them.

This was a disappointing book.