James Watt
The book one on fundamental level tells the story of capitalism. The story of capitalism is, according to the author, the story of fuel and energy. Natural resources and the exploitation of them for energy purposes charts a course of history through and since the Industrial Revolution that begins in 1776 not with the American Revolution, but the revolution in steam power James Watt’s coal-powered steam engine which one historian is quoted by Klein as designating the most significant invention in modern history.
Kevin Anderson
Anderson is a British climate expert working for Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research whom Klein credits with being producing the strongest evidence supporting the argument which is the controlling thesis of the text: “growth-based economic logic is now in fundamental conflict with atmospheric limits.”
Nathan Myhrvold
Myhrvold features the kind of resume that would likely make one think he is one of the heroic characters in Klein’s socio-political drama of capitalism versus the earth. He was a child prodigy who become chief of technology at Microsoft, hunts dinosaur fossils, and wrote a multi-volume book series on the topic of molecular gastronomy. Myhrvold has also, however, proposed in a very serious ways ideas that seek to extend the finite lifetime of dependence upon fossil fuels through implementation of various Solar Radiation Management (SRM) experiments. SRM experimentations essentially seek to do—on a lesser level and for purposes not quite as malevolent—what almost got Mr. Burns shot to death The Simpsons: block out the rays of the sun.
Francis Bacon
Overseeing the entire organic logic of the book like an evil hooded figure in the shadows is Francis Bacon, 17th century British philosopher and man often credited as the inventor of the “scientific method.” Klein also credits Bacon with the invention of a revolutionary idea, but one that is not nearly as benevolent to progress and civilization. Bacon is actually ripped from the shadows, his hood pulled back and his position exposed as the patron saint of ideological sea change which viewed the earth not as a protective mother figure, but as an inert machine to be exploited in any way that benefited the survival of mankind. Bacon’s philosophical texts on this subject are often considered the originating texts of the Industrial Revolution.
