Before you start reading this review, turn on all the lights. Then, don’t just read it – speed read it! When finished, run downstairs, charge into your SUV, and race off to share it with someone. If you don’t have an SUV, go buy one. Most important, drive fast!

That at least seems to be the advice Peter Huber and Mark Mills would offer, based on their new book “The Bottomless Well,” a boisterous paean to limitless energy that delights in turning conventional wisdom upside-down. Conservation doesn’t save energy; our energy supply isn’t limited; and we should be trying to come up with new ways of burning energy, not saving it. “Humanity is destined to find and consume more energy, and still more, forever,” they write.

Their argument starts with entropy and the scientific law that disorder never begets order without something else acting on it. A lump of coal provides energy, and your computer needs energy. But the energy that your computer needs is much purer (or more ordered) than the energy in that lump of coal, and it takes a lot of work – and a lot of waste – to get from the coal to the computer.

Thus, finding energy begets finding more energy. When we discover a new oil well, we aren’t extracting resources from the earth; we’re finding something that will help us make and use the tools to find even more resources. It’s as expensive for us to drill into “2 miles of water and 4 miles of vertical rock” as it was for our forebears a century ago to drill straight down 60 feet.

The authors next argue that efficiency just creates incentives to burn more energy. We’ll soon be able to put light electric-drive trains in cars, which will save energy by reducing the vehicles’ weight. But the technology making that possible will also create a need and desire for us to stick more neat gadgets in there, like computers for shock absorbers that can read what’s coming in the road, and to invent other things outside of the engine. Counter intuitively, more energy use will result.

Deep down, this book is much more than an attempt to throw a few punches at the conventional wisdom. Messrs. Huber and Mills are arguing that consuming energy is the essence of humanity. They state this point explicitly at the end, but it comes across most clearly in a section in which the authors criticize compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Compact fluorescent bulbs, such as the long skinny ones on many office ceilings, became popular in the 1990s as a replacement for incandescent bulbs, the round 60-watt bulbs you can buy at the hardware store. Compact fluorescent bulbs are much more efficient, and environmentalists have long argued that companies should install them both to save money and to save energy. This enrages the authors and – after a brief section extolling LED (light-emitting diode) technology – they blast anyone who listened to the environmentalists. “Those who invested heavily in the ‘efficient’ technologies of the 1990s wasted their money,” they write.

The problem is that the authors hardly back up their assertion and provide no data. Why not? Because their argument is based on religion. They really, really dislike anyone who believes that things need to go more slowly and that humans need to be wary of their impact on their earth. They don’t want you to run the heat and the AC at the same time, but they do assume that anything pushed primarily because of conservation must have flaws. If it were good, the market would create demand.

Many people have derided Dick Cheney for his statement that conservation might merely be a “sign of personal virtue.” Messrs. Huber and Mills would go even further and actually call it a flaw.

This zeal explains much of the book’s tone, with its constant dismissal of people who aren’t drinking the same nuclear-powered fruit punch. Europeans are “overwhelmed by lethargy”; Gandhi was “dismally wrong about ba sic economics”; and people who ride bicycles instead of driving are fools. “Drilling for oil and building an SUV grade highway system uses 10 times less land, per mile and per useful pound moved, than growing food to fuel a bicyclist.”

Though often exasperating, this desire to overhaul our core assumptions makes for an entertaining read. There are three core problems with this book.

First, the authors ignore the external costs of our massive energy consumption. Environmentalists aren’t primarily concerned that coal will run out. They’re worried that burning it makes air pollution that makes people sick. These fears may be exaggerated, and technology will solve many problems, but the authors seem to think that the environmentalists’ primary concern is to use less energy as an end in itself, rather than a means to achieving other ends.

Second, both authors are directors of Digital Power Capital, a company that invests in new energy technologies. Both stand to make money off the technologies that this book promotes. Mr. Mills discloses his involvement; Mr. Huber does not.

Lastly, their writing unfortunately resembles the entropy they describe so well. Just as huge amounts of energy are wasted in transforming coal into the electricity pulsing into this computer, it often takes far too much effort to make sense of the authors’ prose. “We ourselves, in our own tiny corner of eternity, now strive ceaselessly to capture fragments of that once infinite logic,” they write in one purple passage.

For all that, this book is a fun and worthwhile antidote to the gloom often found in reports and articles about energy and electricity. Read it – and then start those engines.