The revolutionary follow-up to Chris Turner's Governor General's Literary Award and National Business Book Award nominee, The Geography of Hope.

The most vital project of the twenty-first century is a shift from our unsustainable way of life to a sustainable one--a great lateral leap from a track headed for economic and ecological disaster to one bound for renewed prosperity. In The Leap, Chris Turner presents a field guide to making that jump, drawing on recent breakthroughs in state-of-the-art renewable energy, cleantech and urban design. From the solar towers of sunny Spain to the bike paths and pedestrianized avenues of the world's most livable city--Copenhagen, Denmark--to the nascent "green-collar" economies rejuvenating the former East Germany and the American Rust Belt, he paints a vivid portrait of a new, sustainable world order already up and running.

In his 2007 book, The Geography of Hope, Chris Turner wrote about an emerging world of cleantech possibility. This led to a two-year stint as sustainability columnist for the Globe and Mail, during which many of the fringe developments covered in his book became vital. By the time those two years were up his reporting tracks were being retraced by mainstream outlets like the New York Times. In The Leap, he once again charts the world's near-future course.


From the Hardcover edition.

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In 2000, after several years of sporadic, incremental change by half-measures and test runs, the German government passed a wholesale revision of its energy policy. It was a deceptively simple piece of legislation known as a "feed-in tariff," which obliged grid operators (the companies that transmit electricity from power plants to customers) to buy power from renewable sources at rates far above the standard rate for electricity. Disguised as an effort to introduce a little green power to the German grid, the feed-in tariff has fundamentally changed the way the entire nation approaches the energy and climate crises and laid the foundations for the second industrial revolution.
 
Germany now produces almost 20 percent of its electricity from renewables (up from 6 percent ten years ago), and it is on track to generate at least 35 percent of its power from renewable sources (wind, solar, biomass and some small-scale hydro) by 2020. Germany has exceeded its Kyoto targets for greenhouse-gas-emissions reductions. The feed-in tariff has created more than a quarter of a million German jobs in just a decade and given rise to a $50-billion renewable energy business in Germany alone.
 
Germany is not particularly windy or sunny, and it isn't blessed with an abundance of open space or coastline, but it is now the global production and research hub for solar power and both on and offshore wind energy production. By 2020, cleantech will likely be a bigger business than automobiles in the land of Volkswagen and BMW. Cleantech jobs have tamed the chronic unemployment crisis in the former East Germany, and the feed-in tariff has also inspired subsequent leaps in building design, energy efficiency and urban planning across the country. Hundreds of thousands of German households now sell power back to the grid at a premium, in certain ambitious cases transforming their homes into net power producers. And the feed-in tariff has done all this without any direct taxation, by imposing a surcharge of about 3 percent on every kilowatt-hour of energy consumed in the country - an added cost passed on to German energy users that amounts to less than €4 per month on the average household electricity bill.
 
“It's a cup of coffee per month for saving the climate, for creating jobs and all these other things which have happened" - this is how German solar energy executive David Wortmann put it to me. (Wortmann was on the parliamentary staff of one of the feed-in tariff's authors and now oversees German operations for the thin-film solar company First Solar.) And yet the feed-in tariff has endured consistent and strident opposition throughout its decade of success - not just from political opponents of the government that enacted it and entrenched interests in the conventional energy industry, but even from proponents of renewable energy outside Germany who continue to subscribe to the basic tenets of the old paradigm.


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“The Leap is a terrific book, and it filled me with excitement and hope for the future. Writing with a lucid, Gladwellian verve, Turner unpacks one of the most pressing issues of the day—the crucial transition to renewable energy—and demonstrates that this ‘leap’ is not only possible and affordable, it is happening right now—in a country, a company, a neighbourhood near you. Read it—and leap!”
—John Vaillant, award-winning author of The Golden Spruce and The Tiger
 
“This is a paradoxical book. It inspires, not only by showing where the future lies and how to get there, but also by taking the reader to favoured places in the world where that future is already well established. At the same time it can frustrate and even anger if you lift your eyes from the pages—as I did—and realize with discomfort that you are not yet in one of those places. Both are good reasons to read it.”
—Jay Ingram, science broadcaster and author


From the Hardcover edition.

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Click here for Source Notes from The Leap by Chris Turner

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CHRIS TURNER is one of Canada's leading writers on sustainability and the global cleantech industry. His previous book, The Geography of Hope, was a national bestseller and nominated for the National Business Book Award and the
Governor General's Literary Award. His reporting appears regularly in the Walrus, the Globe and Mail and Canadian Geographic, and has earned him seven Canadian National Magazine Awards, including the 2001 President's Medal for
General Excellence.


From the Hardcover edition.

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