Internal Combustion

Edwin Black, award-winning author of IBM and the Holocaust, has mined scores of corporate and governmental archives to assemble thousands of previously uncovered and long-forgotten documents and studies into this dramatic story. Black traces a continuum of rapacious energy cartels and special interests dating back nearly 5,000 years, from wood to coal to oil, and then to the bicycle and electric battery cartels of the 1890s, which created thousands of electric vehicles that plied American streets a century ago. But those noiseless and clean cars were scuttled by petroleum interests, despite the little-known efforts of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford to mass-produce electric cars powered by personal backyard energy stations. Black also documents how General Motors criminally conspired to undermine mass transit in dozens of cities and how Big Oil, Big Corn, and Big Coal have subverted synthetic fuels and other alternatives. 

He then brings the story full-circle to the present day oil crises, global warming and beyond. Black showcases overlooked compressed-gas, electric and hydrogen cars on the market today, as well as inexpensive all-function home energy units that could eliminate much oil usage. His eye-opening call for a Manhattan Project for immediate energy independence will help energize society to finally take action.

The IC 50–city book tour began at Nova Southeastern University on September 10, 2006, and ran through January 2007. Tour stops included Florida International University, La Quinta, California, the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UC Irvine, Seattle, NYC, CMU and other Pittsburgh locations, DC, Fort Worth, Detroit, Las Vegas, Long Beach, California, South Florida, Ohio State University Hillel, Los Angeles, and the University of Alberta.

IC won the American Jewish Press Association’s 2007 Rockower Award for Best Investigation, the 2007 Harmony Green Globe Award for Best Book of the Year to Rescue the Environ­ment, and the American Jewish Congress’s 2007 Thomas Edison Award for Best Book on Getting off Oil, and received an Honorable Mention from American Society of Journalists and Authors for Best Non-Fiction Book of 2006.