If I can read one book on peak oil, which one should I choose?

[funflower]

I'd like something really substantive and scientific but not so technical that I need an engineering degree to make sense of it.

[EVDebs]

1. The Party's Over by Richard Heinberg is a goodie

http://www.museletter.com/

is his website. He has a new one called Powerdown also.

[funflower]

4. Very interesting website. I'll have to take a look.

[acmejack]

2. Only one?

The End of Oil by Paul Roberts, would be my first choice. If you decide to do two, The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler is excellent.

[funflower]

3. I knew someone would say that. I'm a busy working mom, and it takes

me forever to get through a book. At the moment, one is the best I can do.

[DemInDistress]

5. can i suggest..

Crossing the Rubicon,by Michael C.Rupert

:thumbsup: :hi: :dem:

[pstans]

6. I am reading The Long Emergency right now

Kunstler is first and foremost a writer and I find his books to be easy reads. His books might not have the first hand expert advice that Heinberg and Roberts and the others have, but it is still full of information and is easy to follow.

You said that it takes you some time to get through a book. Instead of wading through a long technical book on Peak Oil, pick up the Long Emergency by Kunstler. Kunstler has a great wit about him and is able to provide humor to a rather dim situation. You will learn a lot and enjoy the writing.

[TheCentepedeShoes]

10. Excellent suggestion, pstans

Good and scary book. Trying to get Mr. 'pede to read it now.

[funflower]

17. Funny! Mr. Flower is starting to get interested in these issues also!

Maybe he can read one and I can read another. Then we'll cover two books between us!

[Coastie for Truth]

7. Either of Ken Deffeye's books

I read Kunstler (Long Emergency) - he has a political agenda, and is unrealistically Malthusian and depressing.

Deffeyes is a serious geologist who has a grasp of politics, technology, and economics. Either one:

1. Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert's Peak
2. Huberts's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage

Also, just borrow an introductory geology book. One that is pretty good is Andy Evans' "An Introduction to Economic Geology and It's Environmental Impact"

[hatrack]

8. I'd second "Hubbert's Peak" - also look for Walter Youngquist

His book called "Geodestinies", in particular chapter 27, "Myths and Realities of Mineral Resources" is a superb introduction to the pitfalls and promises of alternative/renewable energy sources.

This single chapter is, I believe, on the net - just Google for it.

[fedsron2us]

9. Deffeyes is the best starting point.

His books will give you a good understanding of how oil is formed, where it is located and why we are discovering less. He also gives a cogent explanation of Hubbert's ideas. Kunstler, Heinberg etc tend to look at Peak Oil more in relation to its likely impact on the wider world of politics, economics and the development of society. Their books are interesting but inevitably contain a good deal of speculation about how the future will unfold. Only time will tell how accurate they have been in their predictions.

[pstans]

11. Kunstler might have a political agenda

but it is neither Republican or Democrat, it is the fact that no one in the political spectrum is doing anything about Peak Oil.

[funflower]

13. Thanks, Coast ie and others.

Think I'll start w/ Deffeyes. Scary. Just read Jared Diamond's book Collapse.

After that, I think I'll need some comedy.

[Coastie for Truth]

14. If you neeed an antidote to Kunstler or Diamond, try

Amory Lovins' "Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution" --

[funflower]

15. I am going to have to start keeping a list of your great recommendations!

:bounce:

[IrateCitizen]

18. Kunstler's political agenda is simply being anti-suburbia, IMHO...

One of the strengths of Kunstler is that he is able to talk about a lot of converging factors in pretty straightforward terms. And while I know that you work in alternative energies, I have yet to see any evidence that alternative energy sources will be able to provide us with anything approaching the return that we get from oil, and furthermore, they are not anywhere near as transportable.

I've also read a good bit on agricultural issues over the past several years, and I find nothing to refute in Kunstler's arguments regarding agricultural decline. Our current system uses 10 calories of oil for every one calorie of food. That's simply unsustainable in the future, and in this regard, Kunstler is correct that our agriculture will have to become much more local and labor-intensive. All of this is bad, bad news for US cities, as they have sacrificed their best agricultural hinterlands to suburban sprawl. This is, in effect, the centrality of the Malthusian argument, and in many ways I find it to be completely accurate. The only reason that the meat of Malthus's theories have been avoided is due to the fossil fuel age that simply delayed his postulates. Now that that age is coming to an end, it is virtually unavoidable that we will see a kind of "die-off" due to starvation, disease, and lessened lifespans.

If Kunstler has a political agenda, then it is stopping the dead-end growth model that the United States has followed ever since the end of WWII. In that sense, I have to say that I agree wholeheartedly with him, even if I disagree with some of his geopolitical analysis as overly simplistic and naive.

[Coastie for Truth]

19. I don't argue with his anti-suburbia agenda

Our manic and compulsive building of ever more highways to ever more suburbs further out in the agricultural and woodlands (displacing wolves and bears and deer - they are NOT invading our habitat ---> we are invading their habitat), and building ever more and larger houses (more cubic feet to heat and air condition) with the merest lip service to insulation and energy management. This is problem number one. That's where I side with Amory Lovins and his works on housing and architecture.

Kunstler really raises two "core" hydrocarbon issues with agriculture--

1. Hydrocarbon ag chemicals
2. Hydrocarbon fuels.

The hydrocarbon ag chemicals are the nitrogen fertilizers that use "by-product" hydrogen from petroleum refineries. While easier said then done - petroleum refinery by-products and reformer gas will price themselves out of the market and be replaced with other hydrogen sources. Meanwhile, the pesticides and herbicides are complex products at the end of a long chain of synthetic organic chemistry from the petroleum refinery -- and given the creativity of synthetic organic chemists, these herbicides and pesticides could just as easily come from biomass feed stocks or coal (original source in the days of coke ovens for the steel industry).

As to hydrocarbon fuels -- agriculture equipment will inevitably be modified to run on synthetic natural gas from, for example, anaerobic digestion of farm waste and sewage. See - and I Googled and Dialog'ed and ChemAbs'ed this -- this is moving very rapidly in our "Big Ten" schools -- and in the mid-west. It is real.

I agree with Kunstler that there will be dislocations and adjustments -- but I disagree that we will go back to a labor intensive, local agriculture.

As to the suburbs and land use issues generally, I have to go along with the Berkeley CA founded (credit to Stu Cohen, a real "San Francisco-Berkeley" activist) and based - mass transit, mass transit, mass transit, pedestrian friendly, pedestrian friendly, pedestrian friendly, transit friendly, transit friendly, transit friendly, high density housing, high density housing, high density housing. Stu advocates a return to the multi-use neighborhoods that existed before the highway building and suburb building boom of the 1940's (when most kids walked to school, most people walked to neighborhood shopping, most people took mass transit to work.... ).

[IrateCitizen]

20. Regarding agriculture and "bug waste energy"...

Look, I have no quibble with people working on alternative methods of providing energy -- ESPECIALLY those that can provide closed-loop systems, such as the one you've shown. However, I think that to expect such systems to provide ANYTHING close to the energy available through petroleum is off the mark.

As much as I like some of the stuff that Lovins and his ex-wife have put out there regarding sustainability, I actually agree with Kunstler's feud with him as well. Lovins' "hypercar" is a canard, IMHO -- one that lends itself to the belief that we can continue with an autocentric lifestyle many years into the future. Also, I think he's correct in criticizing Lovins' choice of siting his energy-friendly center in an area of Colorado that requires all of the employees to DRIVE to work. I mean, if you're going to advocate new growth models, don't be a hypocrite in the process!

Ecologically speaking, our agricultural models are unsustainable. We are rapidly polluting our watersheds through fertilizer and pesticide use (the dead zone in the Gulf comes to mind) along with ravaging our topsoil through commodities farming. We're setting ourselves up for another dust bowl scenario throughout the Midwest. Add into that the loss of cheap energy sources to power farm equipment, and I have to say that I tend much, much more toward Kunstler than the alternative, even if I don't completely agree with him. At best, I would think that we could go back to a semi-mechanized farm model based on much more localized production and a significant amount of human labor -- if not completely dependent upon it.

For some good overviews of agricultural issues, I would suggest Richard Manning's Against the Grain. He also wrote an excellent column a few months back -- I believe it was titled, "The Oil We Eat" -- and I'm sure you can find it with a quick internet search.

I don't claim to be an expert on any of these issues, and I certainly recognize that you could be considered one on the engineering and science side. However, I consider myself well-read enough on a broad number of interconnected subjects that I can recognize general trends and get a decent picture of where we're headed.

I guess the only thing that is certain is that we won't know for sure exactly where this is all going until we get there. And I'm not that confident that either the American people nor our policy makers will do a damned thing about it until it is too late, exacerbating the disruption and difficulty in the process.

[Coastie for Truth]

21. Shrinking family size

You posted:

Now that that age is coming to an end, it is virtually unavoidable that we will see a kind of "die-off" due to starvation, disease, and lessened lifespans.

We are seeing several demographic trends in the developed world-

1. The rise of the "DINK" class (dual income, no kids). And this is not just professionals or Manhattan and San Francisco. This crosses national boundaries.
2. Much smaller families. The sociologists are having a field day with this - "Why" - But the observation across continents, time zones, languages, and traditions (the only exception is that fundamentalists of all religious communities still have lots of kids) is that people are having fewer kids -- in many industrialized countries the birth rate of "locals" is "below replacement" and the population is only kept constant or increased by immigration. My take is the realization (with "social insurance") that a working person doesn't need lots of kids to provide for retirement income. And with "mobility" a farmer doesn't need extra hands on the family farm or business.

[IrateCitizen]

22. You're ignoring the developing world...

It could reasonably be argued that overpopulation in the "developing" world could be directly attributed to foreign aid from industrialized countries. In short, since their environments can not support the number of people currently residing on them, people who live in the developing world have only seen their numbers grow due to food aid and modern medicines used to combat diseases that previously kept human populations in check.

Should there be a significant disruption in economic activity due to an energy crunch, it is people in these regions who will be hardest hit as the foreign aid they have come to depend upon dries up as the industrialized world turns inward toward its own needs.

Furthermore, WRT "DINKs" (of which my wife and I are still among the ranks) -- a significant and relatively short food shortage will still have a disastrous effect among them, because most of them have absolutely no skills that rural people used to depend upon. I'm one of the lucky ones -- I grew up in a family where we raised huge gardens, canned and froze vegetables, raised and slaughtered chickens every year, and so on. I still remember a minimum of those skills. Where I live, in the NYC metro area, the overwhelming majority of people (approximately 98-99%, IMHO) would have absolutely no clue of how to survive if food suddenly became scarce. The DINKs would suffer the same as everyone else.

In short, the place in which I differ with you is that you seem to still depend on current socioeconomic trends and definitions to postulate what a post cheap oil life would be like. I tend to think that since all socioeconomic models that are currently used are built around the idea of limitless cheap energy, that you do much better if you don't take anything for granted.

[pstans]

12. Here is a good website with interviews and articles

http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/

[funflower]

16. Thanks. That looks good, too.