Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World Review

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Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World ReviewThis is Richard Heinberg's second book on the oil depletion problem, his first was THE PARTY'S OVER, you probably should read that book before this one, to get an overview of the enormous problem facing us in the near future. In this latest volume Heinberg writes much more about the underlying politics of the depletion scenario, and it is'nt a pretty one. At one time, when it was said that the war in Iraq was really about oil I did'nt believe it, or perhaps it was one of the minor side issues of the war. But Heinberg makes a case for it. After Bush declared "mission accomplished" (a laugh) his group only allowed primarily American companies, with a few allied companies, to work in Iraq. And it does'nt take much imagination to see that, as the Iraqi oil infrastructure is repaired (attempted), American oil companies will get most of the work. In a global free market economy the highest bidder would get Iraqi oil, but in a severe oil shortage Uncle Sam may declare: that since we "fixed" the system in Iraq the USA gets the oil...Iraqis are'nt stupid, they see this as a real possibility, that is perhaps one reason they sabotage oil pipelines continuously. As Heinberg writes, Bush and his followers are incompetent, with their belligerent foreign policy, but Heinberg does give Bush credit for recognizing the looming oil depletion problem on our horizon. Heinberg writes in detail of all of this, saying that instead of using the war to solve this problem we should instead be cooperating with other countries and spending the vast sums of money we are wasting on the war on alternate energy sources.
Although Heinberg believes we are already too late to prevent a collapse of our industrial way of life, he also writes that we should nevertheless begin the task of developing alternate energy sources, as they will be needed eventually, regardless of whether a collapse occurs and it's severity. Also, as Heinberg writes in detail, the neoconservatives that are now in power (the Bush administration) have informally connected to the 'religious right', making a powerful impediment to any progress to efforts to create a sustainable civilization, and that this coalition of neoconservatives with the religious right will lead us into endless resource wars and further ignite anti-American sentiments and additional terrorism against the USA and it's interests.
But the primary message here is resource depletion, especially oil. Also discussed by Heinberg is the idea of 'population overshoot', have we exceeded the carrying capacity of our planet via the production of vast amounts of food made possible by ferilizer manufactured with abundant and cheap natural gas? To me this is all very alarming, and we all should get our personal economic houses in order while we still are able to.
If the collapse of civilization as we know it is inevitable , perhaps, as Heinberg suggests, the best course for us is the preservation of books, the arts, etc., for use later in a post-collapse society. The sustainable energy program that Heinberg and many others suggest that we should pursue with utmost urgency seems unlikely to occur until the American people are faced with a severe oil shortage and massive price increases. Then the politicians will be forced to take real and responsible action. In the meantime we seem to be in a period of nearly endless resource wars with hundreds of billions of dollars each year diverted to this losing cause that indeed should be spent on alternate energy sources, better highways, and better health care, for all Americans. Considering the vast amounts we are spending in this overseas war effort, perhaps the terrorists have already won!
As a personal note, I have read a bit on the oil depletion problem, and the estimates of the date of the world oil production peak I have seen range from right now to the year 2020, a couple go out to 2034-2037, they can be dismissed rather easily, so it seems that around the year 2015 is a good average, in time we shall see. Of course, any large increase in world demand for oil could overwhelm the supply, making the peak date irrelevant.Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World Overview

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Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil Review

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Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil ReviewShaxson's introduction and preliminary chapters immediately prove that he is a bona fide Africa expert. Having extensively lived and worked there, getting closely acquainted with the politicians, industrialists and average joes, he knows his topic better than any ivory tower academic or think tank regional "expert." His anecdotes and insights are accurate, concise and reasonably centrist. His writing is excellent. And yet he failed to earn 5 stars because the book itself delves too far into specific biographies of pivotal politicos and activists. Shaxson is sharp and experienced enough to produce a country-by-country analytical handbook documenting oil's impact on 21st Century Africa but instead he chose to take the conversational, journalistic feature-article format. For professionals and novices seeking accurate and timely information on Africa, this is a good start. Lutz Kleveman's "New Great Game" was equally readable and informal but a far more informative example for Shaxson to follow in his next book.Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil Overview

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Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving Into Liquid War Review

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Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving Into Liquid War ReviewTour de Force! That's the only way to describe Pepe Escobar's remarkable achievement with Globalistan: How the Globalized World Is Dissolving into Liquid War. In page after page, Mr. Escobar demonstrates his remarkable erudition gained in a peripatetic career, spanning the caves of Tora Bora to the slums of Sao Paolo and Mumbai; from the halls of venality to the palaces of the gluttonously wealthy; from conversations with forgotten Pentagon warlords to raps with Brazilian gang lords.
Our Neocon leaders seem to think the rest of the World is frozen in situ, waiting for them to hatch their nefarious schemes. Globalistan shows us the consequences of such a blindered [or should I say "blundered"] attitude.
Producers for the talking heads of "mainstream" media will have to have this book. It is the one volume necessary to make sense of our churning humanity in the 21st Century. A quick scan can provide the background on every crisis from Iran to "Chindia"; from Shiiteistan to the Gazprom Nation; from PetroEurostan to the Bush White House.
Escobar demonstrates why it is true that if we don't find ways to spread our prosperity around the World, the have-nots will come and take it away from us with guns and bombs and box cutters. All of the walls and fences cannot protect the United States, Europe, and Saudi Arabia from overwhelming illegal immigration. Weapons and fences doom us, like the Texans at the Alamo. Eventually they will be overrun by 3 billion human beings living in abject poverty, but with access to the latest episodes of "24" and "Sleeper Cell," unless we help the Mexicans achieve their dreams of Texas in Mexico.
A special ring of "Hell" is reserved for the mainstream media, who trumpet terrorist propaganda and minor successes around the World with lethal effect; providing Al Qaeda and other miscreants with the raw material for their recruiting campaigns. Jihad Inc. is a Neocon invention, designed to manipulate American ignorance with World class fear mongering.
I found Escobar's analysis of Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, most compelling. He points out that Chavez's position is that Venezuela can't develop nuclear energy or the United States will bomb it away, so he has decided to fight with pipelines. Indeed, pipelines are a major theme of Globalistan, criss crossing, as they do, some of the most formidable territory on the planet, both because of their location and the brigands that guard them [or not].
What came to my mind about Mr. Escobar, after reading his encyclopedic presentation of the dark under side of global venality, was Albert Einstein's quote once applied to another, "Men will scarce believe that such a one as this ever walked upon the earth." Pepe Escobar's Globalistan is an achievement without parallel!
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The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy Review

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The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy ReviewThis is very close to being a science book, but the topic keeps it from being strictly a science book. The topic is necessarily conjecture about how we will meet future energy needs. The authors, however, are honest about what is conjecture on their part and what is science, and point to the recent development of inexpensive LED lighting as an example of how long-term plans to save energy (by investing in flourescent lighting) end up being foiled by new technological developments. Their primary suggestion, with regard to energy policy over the next few years, is to see what new technology develops and adapt to it, rather than take our current technological knowledge and assume that it will apply 30 years from now. This is in stark contrast to similar books that attempt to use current scientific and technological knowledge to predict doom for the world with remarkable confidence.
The most engaging and scientific part of the book is the discussion of efficiency and energy and entropy. Most of the author's optimistic conclusions arise from their observations made here. Efficiency often ends up being misused, by their reasoning, to make two incorrect conclusions about energy policy. One such incorrect conclusion is that the US economy makes very, very inefficient use of its energy. To the contrary, such a conclusion assumes that somehow energy in coal form is equivalent to energy in electrical form is equivalent to energy running a laptop PC. The authors argue, convincingly, that energy in coal form is mostly useless, and part of it gets spent reversing entropy enough to generate electricity, and again in the PC, part of it is spent keeping the processor cool enough to actually work. The energy spent in the purification process is not "waste," hence their subtitle "the virtue of waste." That is not to say that figuring out how to spend less energy in the conversion process is undesirable, but it will always be there, and it will always be a fairly high percentage. (The most efficient process ever devised was a rocket engine, about 60% efficient.)
The second aspect of efficiency that the authors point out is that designing more efficient processes does not, overall, save energy. When processes become cheap and easy, they get used more, and demanded more, hence the PC explosion since 1980. Similarly, cars were made more efficient, and thus it became cheaper and easier to drive more often, so we all did. Energy use exploded with more efficiency, not less.
Where the authors enter the policy and philosophical realm, these ideas about efficiency and entropy and "ordered energy" are used to generate a general picture about how humanity has progressed from earlier times, giving reason for optimism into the future. The thesis is fairly simple: using energy enables us to gain more energy, and we don't run out of fuel because what we are really looking for isn't more fuel but more useful energy. Before electrical power became standard, the demise of our forests was the dire prediction, but they've been growing back since electricity became ubiquitous. In 1910, we spent 27% of farmland just to "fuel" our horses for transportation; now, our entire transportation grid, including roads, oil wells, refineries, and so on uses less land than that, while moving orders of magnitude more people and goods. Their philosophical analysis: we use far more dense, ordered energy, which enables us to preserve the environment more efficiently as well as do what we want more efficiently. There is no -objective- reason to predict that this trend would end in some fuel crisis, and every fuel crisis of doom prediction has proven false. Technology has always provided a new way of gaining energy efficiently. We can't predict how it will handle the next step, but there is no reason to believe that it won't do so beyond one's own natural pessimism.
The strength of this book is that it doesn't read like Michael Moore or Ann Coulter, but deals with issues from solid science and pragmatic principles. It definitely leans toward the right side of the political spectrum, mostly in a libertarian way. It takes environmental concerns seriously, though not as seriously as environmental activists would like. The issue of global warming is addressed tangentially; addressing it directly would be its own book. They do not dismiss the idea of anthropogenic CO2 causing global warming out of hand, but rather point out technological ways of eliminating CO2 from emissions while still using coal and oil as primary sources of fuel. They also point out that the amount of land needed to supply our energy needs with current wind/solar technologies would be prohibitive; a power plant plus coal mine takes up very much less space than fields of windmills or huge arrays of solar panels, greatly increasing humanity's "footprint" on the earth. The current technical state of fuel cells is discussed fairly thoroughly, along with reasonable speculation about the future of automobile technologies. Further, they point out that if less CO2 emissions is a primary goal, then we should seriously consider further development of safe nuclear power. They don't advocate it, per se, but rather point out that it is a technological option.
These technical discussions alone are worth the price of the book. I love it that they quote Richard Feynman and Sadi Carnot; more pretentious authors would quote Einstein or Newton in an attempt to sound respectable. Feynman had a remarkably keen and common-sense approach to science and physics, which the authors use to their advantage.
The authors write no particular prescription for our energy issues, except to point out that no predicted crisis has ever come to pass, and that we probably shouldn't write regulations based on current technology in an attempt to speed the development of future technology. Fuel cells are all well and good, but basing our current policy on them before the technology has become economical isn't practical, and might get in the way of other, more useful technologies that we don't even know about, yet.
Overall, I find this an honest expression of the optimistic side of the energy debate, and is therefore a good source of material for those interested, whether they agree or disagree with the conclusions.The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy Overview

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The Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change, Second Edition Review

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The Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change, Second Edition ReviewDo you know that the atmosphere remembers our past behavior? And there is a limit to the forgiveness of the air. Another popular question is whether we can say that people are changing the climate? The actual language on the December 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports is that "The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate." Another common question is that suppose human beings are warming the Earth, what should we do? Richard C.J. Somerville's "The Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change" suggests the following: (1) stabilizing and reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, (2) developing renewable forms of energy, and (3) protecting the atmosphere. The world population is another factor.

My primary interest on the book is weather computing. According to the author, computing weather is a calculus problem. To be specific, it is an initial value problem. Many problems involving calculus are too complicated to be solved exactly. Fortunately, there exists method to find an approximate solution.

We can predict weather for three days or up to a week now. The limit on weather prediction is about three weeks due to the system is sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Thunderstorms and hurricanes are still too small to be resolved by the weather model's grids. A weather service would reduce the grid size of its model for better predictions when a faster computer is available. But models are not yet realistic enough to reproduce droughts or monsoons.
Predicting climate is a new field. We don't even know what is predictable. Climate prediction may be a boundary-value problem. Anyway, temperature is the single most important indicator to represent all the complexity and severity of climate change. However, scientific research is time consuming. On the other hand, the second edition of the book is available. There may be good news on predicting climate.
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Straight Up: America's Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions Review

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Straight Up: America's Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions ReviewIn the footsteps of George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, about GOP language games and how to counter them, Jospeh Romm shows us how to use the Ancient Greek art of rhetoric to debunk the complete irrationality coming out of the GOP today, as regards the urgency of fixing climate change, which does not necessarily mean "hotter everywhere all the time", but certainly does mean new and dangerous extremes in weather. Don't tell me you haven't experienced some of it in the last few years.
Republicans have successfully sown a lot of uncertainty, recently, that the planet's warming is man-made. Here Romm debunks climate-change deniers like Bjorn Lomborg and Sarah Palin, and shows you how to do it, too; although mostly it is directed at scientists who know the evidence intimately, which to be fair is not all of us.
Joe is a trained climate physicist from MIT who served in the Clinton administration
as assistant deputy energy secretary and has also written many books. He spent some years showing companies how they could retrofit their companies(or, I think, build new ones) to be more energy efficient and in every case they took a profit in doing so! We do want to give credit to those in business, some among the GOP, who understand the need for clean energy.
In this book, Romm has married both arts of science and fine writing.
The intro refers back to George Orwell's Essays on Politics and the English Language,
particularly the chapter, "Why I Write". Joe calls his "Why I blog." Kudos to him for opening completely to readers about his motivations so you know exactly where he's coming from and that his not just a political axe to grind. Climate Change, as he says, is a bipartisan issue.
There's a good section on the science of the most energy efficient car(hybrid plug-ins), the feasibility of the different new, but not impossibly new, forms of energy, including a wild(but not new) one I'd never heard of, CSP, which involves using mirrors to catch the sun's light and direct it into energy creation.
Romm discusses most of the alternative forms out there as wedges of a pie that would get us to be much less dependent on oil. And it must be done yesterday
but there's still hope.
Romm also points out that the media did a terrible job of assessing the outcome of Copenhagen. They called that international summit on climate change underwhelming. In fact, a lot went on! "Read all about it."
It also goes without saying that media too often feels that it has to present both sides of every story- even when only one side is supported by the facts.
But Romm says it here with a vengeance.
This book comes out at an auspicious time when Kerry and Lieberman just presented a Bill last week.
Here's a quote from today, May 20, 2010, where Romm urges the Senate to act on it:
"WashPost: Senate needs to act now on climate bill
Quotes IEA: 'Every year the world fails to seriously deal with climate change raises the price tag by $500 billion -- a lot of which, no doubt, Americans will be on the hook for' May 20, 2010
Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) have provided Congress with an opportunity. Their climate bill, released last week, is imperfect. But it offers a start, very much in the right direction. Contrary to popular wisdom, acting on global warming is not going to get easier after this year's election. Legislators should seize this moment."Joseph Romm's a famous blogger now, and doesn't need me to tout this book.
If you would like to keep up with his blog, it's at climateprogress dot org or you can follow him on Twitter under the name "climateprogress"Straight Up: America's Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions Overview

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The Powers That Be: Global Energy for the Twenty-first Century and Beyond Review

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The Powers That Be: Global Energy for the Twenty-first Century and Beyond ReviewThis is the essential thinking person's guide to global energy, hands down. It covers more material than any energy book I've ever seen, and does so in a truly thoughtful and informed way. I came away feeling it was comprehensive, intelligible, and eloquent, a book I very much wanted to recommend to others.
"Powers that Be" is factual, even densely so in some places, but it's really a book about how both science and ideas rule the energy universe. By "ideas," I mean things like attitudes toward progress and the environment, beliefs about society, philosophies related to nature and the economy, government policies, and the like. Montgomery makes clear how these sorts of realities play a powerful role in determining energy choices, no matter how scientifically naïve they might be. I never appreciated this before; it changed my view on our national, or global, conversations about energy.
There are chapters on every major energy source (their nature, abundance, advantages, limitations, environmental impacts, status, possible futures), including some not yet in use but probably on the way later in the century (hydrogen, fusion). Montgomery also devotes entire chapters to the big issues like energy history; world trends in production, demand, and consumption; geopolitics; climate change; peak oil; and the role of technology. I don't think you'll find this many subjects handled in any other single volume.
The author doesn't preach any one set of solutions. In fact, this wouldn't really make sense. His subject is global, not the U.S. or North America. He wants to inform us to the level where we can judge different versions of a better future on their own merits. He does have his own views, for sure. He believes government must play a part in the energy future, since it can take a long-term view, support research at a high level, and its outlook is not geared to profits but public welfare. This may seem naïve in some ways, but by the end I found it fairly convincing because of the examples discussed.
To me, the author (who has spent many years in the energy industry) is level headed. There's no doomsday stuff and no overriding pessimism. He also doesn't feel that everything can be made green in just a few short years. I'd call the tone of the book an example of sober optimism. After reading his chapters on renewables and technology, I feel I am in a much better position to evaluate some of the claims I see made in the media about these sources, positive and negative.
I also appreciated the style of the writing. It has some literary qualities and a fair amount of humor, too. This made the book enjoyable to read, something I never expected. If you want one volume on energy to tell you about where the world really is today, as a world, this is the one to get.
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Barbarians of Oil: How the World's Oil Addiction Threatens Global Prosperity and Four Investments to Protect Your Wealth (Agora Series) Review

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Barbarians of Oil: How the World's Oil Addiction Threatens Global Prosperity and Four Investments to Protect Your Wealth (Agora Series) ReviewHere's a copy of letter I emailed the author:
I just picked up this book on the weekend. I have read ten pages and decided that it's a poorly written, shabbily produced book replete with grammatical and contextual errors. It's going back to the bookshop today.
To say that it is sensationalist is an understatement.
I am not a friend of the oil industry but the arguments made in first 10 pages alone are so poorly constructed that only someone feasting on cheaply made TV shows can react positively to this type of sensationalism.
Barbarians of Oil can be said to be written and published by Barbarians of Publishing.
The sad thing is that there some great books about the oil industry out there, and I have read a good many of them, this book adds nothing, if anything it detracts. Rather than serve to increase the awareness of our destructive addiction to oil, it just lists a compendium of well known facts that can be found anywhere else.
You would do well to read books like Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald, or The Tyranny of Oil by Antonia Juhasz to learn about the craft of investigation, compiling information and creating a readable and engaging book out of it.
Your book reads more like a cheap tabloid that is found at the checkout in the supermarkets a la "News of the World'.
On a score of 1 out of 10, I wouldn't award your book more than a 1/2 a star.Barbarians of Oil: How the World's Oil Addiction Threatens Global Prosperity and Four Investments to Protect Your Wealth (Agora Series) Overview

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