GLOBAL WARMING, ENERGY, AND WORLD PEACE, written by retired engineer Wasfi Youssef PhD, contains six parts and fifty chapters. Youssef, who turned 88 in 2023, draws copiously from Wikipedia to discuss, in excruciating detail, topics ranging from sea level rise to prison reform to alternative energy to the minimum wage to healthcare to preventing World War III. In each case, Youssef gives a detailed background that is not always pertinent to the issue. Thus, he explains the technical details of the kerosene stove because he argues that giving 600 million of these stoves to poor households will save lives and reduce pollution. Similarly, he quotes a speech from China’s president Xi Jinping in which opium is mentioned, and so provides a history of the opium wars. This approach is used throughout the book, with pages of information given on each topic, followed by a paragraph or two of discussion.
Where Youssef does need to provide detail, he often fails to do so. For example, he claims to have a solution to rising sea levels: reduce the flow from rivers to sea by using the fresh water to irrigate crops and provide potable water. How this feat of engineering is supposed to happen, he does not say. Details are for other people to work out. To eradicate poverty, he recommends that “The United Nations should establish a global minimum wage of $2 per hour, to be effective immediately.” He apparently fails to realize that the UN has no such power, and is also unaware that the minimum wage does not help the unemployed but, according to economics literature, increases unemployment.
To eradicate violence, Youssef lays out forty-three items children should be taught in schools, most dealing with religion, to “counterbalance any prejudice the pupils learn from their parents, religious leaders, and school teachers.” In tandem with this, “research can find a medicine or cure that makes a person peaceful.” He argues that, since scientists were able to invent the atomic bomb, they can also find a “cure to human destructive behavior,” as though human psychology were less complicated than physics.
Overall, the author has no knowledge of economics, a faulty grasp of geopolitics, and assumes human beings can be easily manipulated or even brainwashed. His solutions to all the world’s problems thus fall short, as does his book.
As a reference book, Wasfi Youssef’s GLOBAL WARMING, ENERGY, AND WORLD PEACE has a lot of information on a plethora of topics. As a policy guide, however, it is quite limited.
~Kevin Baldeosingh for IndieReader