|  |
| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review:
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
1 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 Excellent Primer, Narrowly Focused, Provokes Reflection Oct 16, 2009
I was tempted to limit this book to four stars because it fails to properly recognize, among many others, Buckminster Fuller, e.g. his Critical Path and it provides only passing reference to such foundation works as Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update and Human Scale, but place it at five stars for two reasons: 1) excessive negativity by other reviewers; and 2) a superb primer for the public ready to get past Al Gore's hyteria, the venom surrounding The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, and connect in a very easy to read and understanding elementary counterposte to The Resilient Earth: Science, Global Warming and the Fate of Humanity.
Another important reason for attending to this book and respecting its author, apart from him many prior works including the globally recognized The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, is the endorsements of two of the top ten (in my view) in this arena, Lester Brown (Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (Substantially Revised)), and Bill McKibben (Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future).
For the lay reader--the normal person not steeped in the environmental and catastrophic literature, this a first-rate overview book.
The author opens by pointing out that it is not just oil that has peaked, but also natural gas, coal, grain, uranium, fresh water, arable land, wild fish, and strategic minerals such as copper, platinum, silver, gold, and zinc.
In a light-hearted effort to offer some good news, the author points out that inequality goes down when excess goes down. As we wean ourselves from many petroleum, plastics, and chlorine-based additions, we will become more like the Amish, with a sufficiency of essentials for all.
The author provided a good discussion of the outrageous difference between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that measures evil production as well as good production (e.g. hospital waste and prison-slave labor) and the Genuine Progress Indicator. I will post his chart at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog (Amazon deleted over 350 of my images posted here, I no longer trust Amazon).
In the author's view the central task of this and the next generation is the transition from fossil fuels to more balanced energy sources. This section is almost poetic. He talked about an awakening that is occurring, a multi-dimensional emotional, political, and cultural catharsis, in which the definition of "normal" is about to change BIG TIME.
"Awakening is an on-going visceral as well as intellectual reassessment of every facet of life--food, work, entertainment, travel, politics, economics, and more."
The chapter on tools distinguishes among four classes in relation to their use of energy. The author discusses how the creation of tools, and powered tools especially, led to techno-politics and in now leading to a decline in innovation. I would point out, as Michael O'Hanlon does in Technological Change and the Future of Warfare, that the author is missing the ONE huge area where innovation is truly revolutionary, C4I (command and control, communications, computing, and intelligence). The author makes the connection between new forms of energy and technology and the destruction of old forms of society and family.
The chapter on 50 million farmers (we have 3-4 million now in the USA) is most fascinating, discussing the implications of the looming fuel shortage for mega-agriculture. He points out that US agriculture uses twice as much fuel as the US military. We have a shortage of farmers and a scarcity of fresh water, as global climate change creeps up on us. I am most impressed, Jeffersonian that I am, to read the author's views on how we must move back toward farming preserves, the de-industrialization of agriculture, to engage in permaculture (see Yeoman's Priority One: Together We Can Beat Global Warming, biointensive farming, re-ruralization, and LAND REFORM, which I take to mean the expropriation of mega farmlands from those we just bailed out at taxpayer expense, and a massive planned return to family and county farming.
The chapter on arts and crafts and on the five axioms of sustainability are of passing interest to me. The author does point out that there is no axiom for social equity--I would point him to Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.
Note: I am going to stop here as Amazon refuses to listen to reviewers demanding additional links and more space. You can read the rest of my review, with other important links, at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.
3 of 11 found the following review helpful:
 Wild Speculation Oct 25, 2008
This book starts with a completely reasonable premise. There is every reason to believe him when he states that the world will hit peak oil at some point in the next two decades and no one knows the exact date it will hit. It may have already hit in 2005. That however is where the rationality ends the rest of the book is wild speculation.
For one thing he is completely biased towards his way of fixing the problem. A book on energy depletion should at least mention the two most abundant fuels on earth: Thorium, which can run enough nuclear reactors for our entire society to survive for hundreds of years, and Deuterium, which could power enough fusion reactors to keep our society running for billions of years. Anyone who is seriously worried about resource depletion should be promoting more research and development into these technologies, rather than wallowing in pity for the human race. Even worse, he doesn't mention one of the best sources of renewable energy, geothermal power. Perhaps he covers these issues in one of his other books, but if so it is safe to say you can safely read that book and ignore this one.
Instead of focusing on how we can avoid our society from facing real issues he focuses on the bad things that could potentially happen. It really seems from his tone that he actually wants our society to collapse. In the end the book is little more than wishful thinking on his part. If you want to read a rational book on the subject of peak oil I would avoid this book, and read anything by Kenneth S. Duffeyes.
8 of 9 found the following review helpful:
 Don't judge by its title Oct 06, 2008
It's a good book and a great title, but the title does not match the content.
Richard Heinberg is an excellent author, and I HIGHLY recommend that everyone read his (other) book "Party's Over" for a riveting & sobering understanding of peak oil! With that under our belts, many of us are now coming to recognize peak population, peak food, peak pollution, peak global temperature, peak fresh water, peak arable land, peak mineral resources, peak ocean fisheries, peak species diversity, peak uranium, peak weaponry, peak resource wars, peak wealth disparity, peak waste, peak life expectancy, etc. Peak Everything! That's what I THOUGHT this book would address.
Instead, he has cobbled together a collection of essays on aesthetics, psychology, language, and other aspects of peaking. Oh, it's okay stuff, but it's not at all what I expected nor hoped to read--and he warns of that in the first page of the introduction. The intro is sprinkled with charts showing peaks, but they're not really discussed in much detail.
This book is for those who already know a lot about peak everything and just can't stop reading about it. Discussions of Art Nouveau, Freud, and wild parrots were just too tangentially abstract for my expectations. I wanted hard facts and numbers for forceful arguments, proposed plans of action, and glimpses of hope in promising new breakthroughs.
It's hard to rate this fairly because it was so disappointing due to the misleading title. Chapters 8, 9, & 10 won me over to the fourth star. Chapter 8, "Bridging Peak Oil and Climate Change Action," was my long sought acknowledgement of the 800 pound gorilla: discussion of the two topics from a single perspective.
Please, Mr. Heinberg, now write the book on Peak Everything!
4 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 OK Aug 08, 2008
I have read several of the author's previous books on peak energy, but was a little dissapointed in this book. I was expecting a discussion on potential shortages on other commodies with facts projections etc. The book goes int such things as post hydrocarbon aesthetics and thoughts about life in the future.
8 of 11 found the following review helpful:
Great read, but off topic, and unbalanced Jul 08, 2008
I got a lot from this book. Its entertaining and well written, but also presents a refreshing look at the often ignored connections between climate change, peak oil, and other topics.
The title is misleading though. The majority of the book's pages do not explicitly discuss the peaking in production of oil, steel, and other commodities. In fact, a few pages in the author mentions how many things are not peaking (e.g. community, craftsmanship, etc.).
The author devotes the lion share of the book to what societies will have to do to get by given the impending peaking of everything production or energy related. In short, economies will become more local, production more manual, and society will de-urbanize. The last chapter is a speculation in broad strokes that this will be accompanied by a fair bit of discomfort, if not outright pain, and gnashing of teeth.
I suspect the author is largely correct in his assessment. But he only briefly discusses why this will be so. To me this is a major flaw in the book, and left me feeling the argument presented is unbalanced.
For example, only a few pages explain why adoption of coal, nuclear and natural gas can't delay these trends any further out than a decade or two, and there is almost no discussion of why wind, solar, and/or geothermal cannot post-pone them forever.
Although I tend to agree with the author, other books credibly argue that we won't be running out of fossil fuel soon, and that the downward slope of the oil peak will be long, drawn out, and replete with technology intensive schemes such as the conversion of coal to gasoline or natural gas, collection of frozen natural gas, and extraction of petroleum from shale and tar sands. While such treaties usually ignore environmental concerns, they do make a point that should at least be addressed.
|
| | |
