"The Last Days of Ancient Sunlight" Thomm Hartman
Covers basics of oil depletion and then heads off into some social implications.
Leanan wrote:
I recommend Jared Diamond's Collapse
That's pretty much my Unholy Trinity of Doomerism right there. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. _________________ "He who makes no mistakes isn't trying hard enough" Genghis Khan
"Everyone here is bribed not to kill each other." foodnotlawns
Coinflation.com
Posted: Tue Jun 05, 2007 12:50 pm Post subject: Re: [Top 5 Peak Oil Books?]
Of the most recent books, I must recommend 'The Last Oil Shock'. It covers fairly wide area: geo-strategy, oil pricing, upstream issues, geology, infrastructure, economical implications and of course, resource wars.
It is very well written, engaging and does not hold punches.
Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 4:55 pm Post subject: Re: [Top 5 Peak Oil Books?]
1. The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel -- Stephen Leeb
2. Black Gold: The New Frontier In Oil For Investors -- George Orwel
3. Twilight In The Desert -- Matthew Simmons
I'm looking forward to 4. Profit From The Peak: The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century by Brian Hicks and Chris Nelder which comes out in February.
Joined: Aug 03, 2006 Posts: 4074 Location: Graceland
Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 7:01 pm Post subject: Re: [Top 5 Peak Oil Books?]
The End of Oil by Paul Roberts treats the PO issue with balance and doesn't pour on the doom too thickly. It's also well written. You will take a lot away from the book.
The more time that passes after reading The Long Emergency, the more annoyed I get with Kunstler's whole act. I don't know what it is, but something about Kunstler just doesn't add up. I think that he is certain modern civilization is going to end, and PO is his way of expressing it. I think he wrote some similar things leading up to Y2K ("Y2K is gonna kill us all!!!"). There is a difference between approaching a subject like PO with an open mind and concluding that it's a big problem, as opposed to approaching every subject with the certainty that the sky is falling and PO just happens to be a real sky is falling scenario.
I hear good things about Deffeyes' books.
Last edited by BigTex on Sun Mar 30, 2008 4:02 pm; edited 1 time in total
Joined: Nov 25, 2006 Posts: 1373 Location: New York area
Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 7:02 pm Post subject: Re: [Top 5 Peak Oil Books?]
I liked "PowerDown" & "The Long Emergency" the best myself (more so than "The Party's Over" and "Crossing the Rubicon").
I compiled a list of people's recommendations (from a similar thread on this very forum). They are all listed in the link in my sig (you don't have to buy anything, you can simply review the list, if you do buy keep in mind you're helping me out a bit, it's just amazon.com but with different clothes). _________________ My PO Amazon store (shameless plug).
Posted: Sun Sep 02, 2007 4:15 am Post subject: Re: [Top 5 Peak Oil Books?]
Another behind the scenes book is "Addicted to Oil" by an energy economist Ian Rutledge. Really well researched, full of footnotes, goes behind the scenes, explains motives and systemic causes. Heavy reading at times though.
Joined: Oct 16, 2005 Posts: 227 Location: Australia
Posted: Sun Sep 02, 2007 7:31 am Post subject: Re: [Top 5 Peak Oil Books?]
Apart form the usual suspects.. Simmons, Kuntsler, Hienberg et al who write very sobering and oft dry accounts of the subject and its consequences (I have not read all of them by the way), my most recently read and highly recommended titles include ..
'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy.. a fictional post nuclear apocalyptic story about a man and his son. It is a devastating read and is beautifully written. A real story of the human condition and a stripped down raw look at the survival instinct.
'Last Light' by Alex Scarrow.. this one is a bit of a Ludlum-esk fictional conspiracy story about what could simply be described as the 'great culling of the human species' and peak oil is the primary tool. Whilst reading this one I found myself having mild panic attacks thinking I should go to the supermarket and start stocking up on non-perishable supplies.
Just today my wife gave me copy of 'The Upside of Down' by Thomas Homer-Dixon.. It was a father's day present. She thought I should have a look at the slightly more optimistic view of the collapse of civilization as we know it.. What are the upsides..?
I'll post a comment on it when I've had a chance to read it..
.
Joined: Dec 25, 2005 Posts: 567 Location: Hillsboro, West Virginia
Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 1:08 pm Post subject: Re: [Top 5 Peak Oil Books?]
I'm reading William Catton's OVERSHOOT: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change now. It's pretty good, except for the racial brotherhood squid ink he inserts in places. He makes up for part of it though, by hinting at the truth of the matter.
William Catton, OVERSHOOT, p. 80 wrote:
Ecologically speaking, the American dream expressed in human terms an exuberance that characteristically follows invasion of a new habitat by any species that happens to have the traits required for prompt and effective adaptation to it. Human beings have exaggerated the apparent uniqueness of their own encounter with the felicitous circumstances of a New World. The "uniqueness of Homo sapiens" will be carefully reconsidered in a later chapter. For now, it is sufficient to note that few people have realized how frequently a similar experience has happened to other species whenever access was gained to a suitable but previously inaccessible habitat. As long as the members of an invading species remain far less numerous than the maximum population ultimately permitted by the carrying capacity of a new habitat, proliferation is easy, and competitive pressure upon the members of that species population will be low. Competition within the species may even be negligible when the small population is surfeited with unused resources waiting to be exploited.
Of course, if instead of one invading species there are two such species whose resource requirements are essentially the same, then the carrying capacity of the new habitat must be shared by them, and divided between them somehow. And before competition within either of those species will occur, resource constraints will trigger competition between the two species first, and the battle for resources between the them will rage until one or the other emerges victorious. There is a lesson here, perhaps?
Although it is not so much for Peak Oil as it is for Die Off Survival, I'd like to recommend the following books:
Edible Wild Plants: Eastern/Central North America, by Lee Allen Peterson (Peterson Field Guides), Houghton-Mifflin, 1977, ISBN 0-395-92622-X.
The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants, by Samuel Thayer, self-published, 2006, ISBN 0-976-62660-8.
Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants, by Bradford Angier, Stackpole Books, 1974, ISBN 0-811-72018-7.
Stalking the Wild Asparagus, by Euell Gibbons, Hood & Co., 1962, ISBN 0-911-46903-6.
The Encyclopedia of Edible Wild Plants: Nature's Green Forest, by Francois Couplan, Ph.D., Keats Publishing, 1998, ISBN 0-879-83821-3.
Joined: Sep 14, 2004 Posts: 6178 Location: Rural Virginia
Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 9:47 pm Post subject: Re: [Top 5 Peak Oil Books?]
To all these books must be added "The World Without Us," by Alan Weisman, which was recommended to me by another PO.com member.
It's a sort of "peak everything" book. Peak time, even.
It's a "thought experiment" about what would happen to an Earth from which all people suddenly disappeared---what would happen to what's left of the natural world (a rennaisance) and what would happen to our long deep footprint (slow erasure).
What I most took away from the book was a more devastatingly complete picture of the damage we've done, and how brief the human era is likely to be as a result.
Get this book. But be warned---it will change you, either into a doomer or into a more intense doomer. _________________ "Actually, humans died out long ago."
---Abused, abandoned hunting dog
"Things have entered a stage where the only change that is possible is for things to get worse."
---Me and my brother
Along with all these good suggestions, there's a new book out by a Pat Murphy called "Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change."
It has a good overview of PO and GW, then goes into the need for more realistic responses than "Sustainable Development." His favorite word (besides 'communitiy') is 'curtailment.'
A bit more realistic than the "Plan B" folks, but not totally doomerish.
We should all probably be writing books. Each person has a different perspective that might reach a different kind of audience. Is anyone planning anything in this direction?
Oh, another book I'd like to mention is "Ecological Debt: The Health of Planet and the Wealth of Nations" by Andrew Simms. More GW than PO oriented, but the proposals would address either. His favorite words are "contraction and convergence."
"The Common Good" by John Cobb and Herman Daly is good about the role of standard economic theories in creating a world depleted of resources and full of degraded environments.
Has anyone mentioned "Eating fossil Fuels" by Dale Allen Pfeffer?
Jenab, thank for the recs on books on wild edibles. I hadn't thought about Euel Gibbons in quite a while.
And don't let anyone come between you and your most cherished hatreds and prejudices, ever
I''m glad someone bumped this thread, as it provides a chance to look back over the years and to reassess.
My conclusion: Not much has happened literarily over the last three years of any note.
My top three are still:
1. "Beyond Oil," Deffeyes
2. "Twilight In the Desert," Simmons
3. "Blood and Oil," Klare.
I have completely become a turncoat as far as Ruppert and his 9/11 minions go. I read his tome, found it interesting, but in the interim have concluded that it is a mass of paranoia. I was misled by the chapter on peak oil, which was excellent. It led me to think the rest of his theorizing must be valid. Something tells me Dale Pfeiffer had a huge hand in making the oil chapter so good.
Thom Hartmann is an idiot. I hated his book. He's a believer in the Hundredth Monkey phenomenon and how that could save us.
As far as the other lay writers go, I've cooled on both Heinberg and Kunstler (especially Kunstler, the guy who uses his fame to defame the poor and the ignorant),
In their place, I opt for Dmitry Orlov. His "Reinventing Collapse" is a very compelling read. I've already read it twice. He's funny and intelligent, and his paralleling of the "US" and the (former) "SU" works wonders for my doomerocity. _________________ "By the time individuals discover that remaining resources will not be adequate for the next generation, the next generation has already been born. " David Price
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