Vollmann’s many fans are drawn to his literary hoarder aesthetic, and they will not be disappointed. The first volume, “No Immediate Danger,” deals mostly with the nuclear disaster at Fukushima; the second, “No Good Alternative,” takes on coal, oil and natural gas. He has stacked his reporting high, giving us interview after interview with local people in places ravaged by our need for power and by our wastefulness: those living near the nuclear plant, occupants of West Virginia hollers whose communities have suffered environmental wreckage from coal mining, unhappy neighbors of fracking pads, coal workers in Bangladesh and oil workers in Abu Dhabi.

We hear them at great length, but with little interpretation or analysis. Vollmann also provides a lengthy primer on energy sources and calculations, discussing how much energy it takes to make, for example, concrete or nylon. This massive speed bump stretches from near the beginning of the first volume to Page 219. However, he allows, “since ‘Carbon Ideologies’ is primarily a record of people’s experiences, if you skip my tables and their numbers, my point will remain clear enough; better yet, any mathematical errors might then escape your censure.” (As for those mathematical errors, the writer Will Boisvert has pointed out that when Vollmann writes “in each two days of 2009, the world burned the entire oil output of 1990,” the figure is off by 289 days.)

The interviews show people who, as Vollmann says of his Japanese subjects, “tried to believe in the goodness of corporations and the sincerity of cabinet ministers, or else shut out of mind what could not be helped. They lacked comprehension of the various waves and particles that threatened them, not to mention the units of measurement used in media pronouncements. We all learned to live with what we could not see.” Similar themes of ignorance and resignation play out in interviews with those he meets in Nitro, W.Va.; Ruwais, Abu Dhabi; or Greeley, Colo. Climate change, like the residual radiation in Japan, is invisible to them. They’re all just trying to get by. Meanwhile, boosters of these industries explain that the jury on climate change is still out (it isn’t), and that, as a Colorado banker states, “science is the new religion.”

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The prose can be moving. Of an evacuated town near Fukushima, Vollmann writes, “By now the trees had already started to decompose, so that when they formed up the sides of houses, they infiltrated them like subtly woven rattan, perfectly fitted by the weaver-upholster called death.” It also shows some of his trademark bawdiness: Vollmann samples radiation levels around Japan using a dosimeter and a device he becomes very fond of, a “pancake frisker,” of which he wants us to know: “Three buttons decorated it. When I pressed the leftmost one, the machine uttered a three-tone chirp not unlike the sound one of my sweetest girlfriends used to make when she climaxed.”