Books

This book is a frank, even stark investigation into the dwindling crude oil supply of “Peak Oil”, and its economics, societal implications and geopolitics. For many this book will be an eye-opener to begin to see the critical point that world civilization is coming to, when increasing scarcity of dwindling oil supplies will push oil prices to new highs, leading to not only oil shortage, but energy shortage across the board. According to “The Olduvai Theory” this will have dire implications for the quintessential energy of our modern economies – electricity. Actually without oil we will not have electricity and that critical link, realized only by a few, will become abundantly clear in the book.

In these dramatic developments there will be serious economic, political, societal and geopolitical ramifications. Our civilizations will become paralyzed leading to full scale military conflict. Out of this axial period of human civilization a new society – reorganized with enlightened human attitudes – will have to arise if humans are to avoid universal cataclysm. This book is vital reading to understand the portent of current trends associated with oil supply and demand. If we are right, we should all be prepared for the years ahead, with dramatic world events, to drastically change both our civilization and our own lives.

Available from: Mary-Martin Booksellers

We have spent the last two centuries building a civilization on coal and the last century building it bigger still on oil. Fossil fuels have been the wellspring of our complex, glorious modern world, but they are about to run out. By the end of the 21st century, our oil and natural gas supplies will be virtually nonexistent, and limited coal supplies will be restricted to only a handful of countries.

In Life without Oil, environmental scientist Steve Hallett and veteran journalist John Wright make abundantly clear that we are at the crest of a remarkable two-hundred-year glitch in the history of civilization and are about to embark on the decline. Experts may argue about whether peak oil production has already arrived or will come in a decade or two, but in any case, as Hallett and Wright show, we must plan for a future without reliance on oil.

But successful planning depends on a realistic assessment of the facts about our current situation. To that end, Hallett and Wright describe how the petroleum interval of the last century, on which our civilization is based, fits in to the larger history of civilization. They describe the fate of civilizations and empires of the past that have come and gone based on their vital connection with the environment.

Turning to an even longer timeframe, the authors make a compelling case that the key determinant of our global economy is not so much the invisible hand of the marketplace but the inexorable laws of ecology. When it comes to the long term, nature will impose limits beyond which our economy cannot go. Despite increased emphasis on renewable and environmentally
friendly energy sources, our current obsession with growth is ultimately unsustainable. The authors foresee the coming decades as a time of much disruption and change of lifestyle, but in the end we may learn a wiser, more sustainable stewardship of our natural resources.
This timely, sobering, yet constructive discussion of energy and ecology offers a realistic vision of the near future and many important lessons about the limits of our resources.

Published by: Prometheus Books, ISBN 978-1616144012, 375 pages.
Available from: Amazon

This book is divided into seven chapters, an annex and conclusions and they all aim towards the following objectives: to investigate how much conventional and non-conventional oil is left in the world in quantitative terms, then examine all the different alternate energy sources and find out their different development stages; inform economist so they too can help out, and then bring together the different economic growth scenarios to find out, by considering world demand; how much oil is left in the world in qualitative terms, that is to say, how much time can we economists/politicians can buy the scientists for their development of the transition paths towards renewable energy sources with a minimum of economic and social repercussion. In the last chapter multilateral negotiating insights is provided through game theory. In the conclusions a long standing economic equation is re-written in energy terms, a blue prints scenario is unveiled and a strategy is proposed to accomplish this all important objective.

Published by: Nova Science Publishers, 229 pages.
Available from: Amazon

James Leigh foresees the present fragmenting world to move towards continent-wide civilizational superpowers. In this shift in the world’s distribution of political, commercial and military power, Leigh predicts the implosion of the United States, as the world moves into a post-AngloSaxon era because globalization failed to bring the world together into a collection of pluralistic liberal democracies, operating on a level commerical playing field.
This looming world will be made up of: a German-led Catholic Europe, an Asian conglomerate centered around China and Russia, and a largely PanArab Islamist bloc under Iran. An explosive mix of rival nuclear powers, leading to full scale contention and military conflict, with mass-destruction weapons.
Civilization clash is not new, but this time in the post-globalization era, it will be a quantum leap different because of the numbers of peoples, and the economic and military power held in each civilizational superpower, guided by charismatic religious leaders.
In conclusion an answer is given for a solution to this impending world at war, as the author looks to the mystical. He argues for a change in the mind of mankind to one of benevolence, sharing and charity to replace competition, conflict and strife.

This must-read book gives the reader a geopolitical framework to make sense of world events. If James Leigh is right, we should be prepared for dramatic world events to drastically change our lives.

Available from: Pantepoptis

Ecological roots of our troubled time are deeper than its economic manifestations. Anguished posterity will look back on this 21st century as “the bottleneck century.” Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse was written to show how and why three converging trends have put humankind in much deeper peril than is generally acknowledged. First, there are many more of us inhabiting this planet than it can sustain. Second, technological advances of recent centuries have made gigantic and prodigal our per capita resource appetites and our per capita environmental impacts. Third, even though, as the symbol-using species, we humans conceivably could do better at anticipating future circumstances and planning ahead, our evolutionary heritage together with unanticipated dysfunctions of modern division of labor have kept us too preoccupied with short-term concerns. People today are dependent upon a fantastically intricate web of exchange relations (“the market”). Even when functioning normally—and not in a collapsed condition, as currently—this system of relations has a serious and pervasive dehumanizing effect not adequately discerned by economists nor sociologists. Recognition of and adequate adaptation to the deteriorating ecological context of human life has been impeded. Human societies (even our own) are almost certainly going to act in ways that will make an inevitably difficult future unnecessarily worse. Factors analyzed in this book have made people seriously averse to the kind and extent of cooperation our difficult future will require. Together with the basic trio of disturbing trends—humans having become so numerous, so ravenous, and so short-sighted—this has made the nature of today’s human prospect far more dire than most policymakers dare admit. It tempts even the wisest and most civic-minded to seek or promote “remedial” policies that will worsen the real predicament.

This book is a sequel to the Overshoot and continues the reasoning. A more comprehensive review can be found here

Available from: Amazon Online

What do subprime mortgages, Atlantic salmon dinners, SUVs and globalization have in common?

They all depend on cheap oil. And in a world of dwindling oil supplies and steadily mounting demand around the world, there is no such thing as cheap oil. Oil might be less expensive in the middle of a recession, but it will never be cheap again.

Take away cheap oil, and the global economy is getting the shock of its life.

From the ageing oilfields of Saudi Arabia and the United States to the Canadian tar sands, from the shopping malls of Dubai to the shuttered auto plants of North America and Europe, from the made-in-China products on the shelves of the Wal-Mart down the road to the collapse of Wall Street giants, everything is connected to the price of oil

Interest rates, carbon trading, inflation, farmers’ markets and the wave of trade protectionism washing up all over the world in the wake of various economic stimulus and bailout packages – they all hinge on the new realities of a world where demand for oil eventually outstrips supply.

According to maverick economist Jeff Rubin, there will be no energy bailout. The global economy has suffered oil crises in the past, but this time around the rules have changed. And that means the future is not going to be a continuation of the past. For generations we have built wealth by burning more and more oil. Our cars, our homes, our whole world has been getting bigger in the cheap-oil era. Now it is about to get smaller.

There will be winners as well as losers as the age of globalization comes to an end. The auto industry will never recover from this oil-induced recession, but other manufacturers will be opening up mothballed factories. Distance will soon cost money, and so will burning carbon – both will bring long-lost jobs back home. We may not see the kind of economic growth that globalization has brought, but local economies will be revitalized, as will our cities and neighborhoods.

Whether we like it or not, our world is about to get a whole lot smaller.

Published by: Random House Canada, 304 pages
Available from: Amazon Online

Excerpt from the book:
The Industrial Revolution made us precariously dependent on nature's dwindling legacy of non-renewable resources, even though we did not at first recognize this fact. Many major events of modern history were unforeseen results of actions taken with inadequate awareness of ecological mechanisms. Peoples and governments never intended some of the outcomes their actions would incur.

To see where we are now headed, when our destiny has departed so radically from our aspirations, we must examine some historic indices that point to the conclusion that even the concept of succession (as explored in previous chapters) understates the ultimate consequences of our own exuberance. We can begin by taking a fresh look at the Great Depression of the 1930s, an episode people saw largely in the shallower terms of economics and politics when they were living through it. [1] From an ecologically informed perspective, what else can we now see in it?

The Great Depression, looked at ecologically, was a preview of the fate toward which mankind has been drawn by the kinds of progress that have depended on consuming exhaustible resources. We need to see why it was not recognized for the preview it was; this will help us to grasp at last the meaning missed earlier.

We did not know we were watching a preview because, when the world economy fell apart in 1929-32, it was not from exhaustion of essential fuels or materials. From the very definition of carrying capacity—the maximum indefinitely supportable ecological load—we can now see that non-renewable resources provide no real carrying capacity; they provide only phantom carrying capacity. If coming to depend on phantom carrying capacity is a Faustian bargain that mortgages the future of Homo colossus as the price of an exuberant present, that mortgage was not yet being foreclosed in the Great Depression. Even so, much of the suffering that befell so much of mankind in the 1930s does need to be seen as the result of a carrying capacity deficit. The fact that the deficit did not stem from resource exhaustion in that instance makes it no less indicative of the kinds of grief entailed by resource depletion. Accordingly, we need to understand what did bring on a carrying capacity deficit in the 1930s.

A interview with the author can be found here: Google Video

Published by: University of Illinois Press, June 1, 1982
Available from: Amazon Online

A critical exposé of the open-pit mines that have made Canada one of the worst environmental offenders on earth.

While the world goes green, Canada has elected to go black into the tar. The frenzied development ($100 billion and counting) of the tar sands in Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the last six years has made Canada the world’s fifth greatest global exporter of oil and turned the country into “an emerging energy superpower.”

Combining extensive scientific research and compelling writing,

Andrew Nikiforuk takes the reader to Fort McMurray, home to some of the world’s largest open-pit mines, and explores this twenty-first-century pioneer town from the exorbitant cost of housing to its more serious social ills. He uncovers a global Deadwood, complete with rapturous engineers, cut-throat cocaine dealers, aimless bush workers, American evangelicals, and the largest population of homeless people in northern Canada. He also explains that this micro-economy supplies gasoline for 50 percent of Canadian vehicles and 16 percent of U.S. demand. Readers will learn that tar sands:

• burn more carbon than conventional oil,
• destroy forests and displace woodland caribou,
• poison the water supply and communities downstream,
• drain the Athabasca, the river that feeds Canada’s largest watershed, and
• contribute to climate change.

The book does provide hope, however, and ends with an exploration of possible solutions to the problem.

Available from: Amazon Online

If we could sum up the social and economic development of the last two centuries in a single piece of objective data, it would be our increased consumption of energy. This precious resource is the basis of each and every aspect of our daily lives. A civilization without energy would be impossible and unthinkable to us.

And yet, energy is finite and far from easy to obtain. What about the traditional main sources? Coal, oil, gas...? We have limited reserves of there and there is growing evidence to suggest that their extraction and consumption are speeding up global warming. With the world economy in the throes of an unprecedented growth cycle, new areas of the world are demaning their energy quota., which intensifying environmental problems and supply difficulties. All of this is reading us to ask the vital question that neither society nor the ruling classes seem prepared to answer: will there be enough energy for us all?

Book written by: Juan Rosell, Lastortras 2007
NOT FOR SALE
ISBN: 978-84-234-2589-1

In The Energy of Nature, E. C. Pielou explores energy's role in nature—how and where it originates, what it does, and what becomes of it. Drawing on a wide range of scientific disciplines, from physics, chemistry, and biology to all the earth sciences, as well as on her own lifelong experience as a naturalist, Pielou opens our eyes to the myriad ways energy and its transfer affect the earth and its inhabitants. Along the way we learn how energy is delivered to the earth from the sun; how it causes weather, winds, and tides; how it shapes the earth through mountain building and erosion; how it is captured and used by living things; how it is stored in chemical bonds; how nuclear energy is released; how it heats the unseen depths of the planet and is explosively revealed in the turmoil of earthquakes and volcanoes; how energy manifests itself in magnetism and electromagnetic waves; how we harness it to fuel human societies; and much more.