Daily Oil Blog

Recently I have a chance to go thru a book The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century by Mr Howard Kunstler regarding peak oil effects.This book is not for the timid folks out there as it deals with the energy descent questions square on.I’m hoping more readers will get their hands on this book here in Singapore given the lack of knowledge of peak oil of the general public.

The thesis of kunstler started off with the Malthus theory that cheap oil has created a century long “artificial bubble of plentitude” generating a hosts of problems related to this
prolonged energy spending spree.The problems are agricultural ,climate changes and relocation of living spaces into unsustainable suburbia.

This books sets it apart from other oil crisis books as it sweeps thru and integrated economics, science ,technology and international politics with a peek into the orb of a post oil age mirred with chaos.

Kunstler too touched on alternative energy with less enthusiam shared by techno hopefuls.He is critical about this resources and lay out the reasons why one should not based too much hope on those.This is a classic (ERoEI) Energy returned over energy invested problem

This book attempt to unravel how the use of energy by human beings got us where we are now.100 years of cheap oil have constructed a global trading and financial system that cannot be sustained by the eventual decline of fossil power.

I do not find much fault with this book but rather the author did not provide the readers more solutions but perhaps there is not really much he can provide us.Get your book at Amazon or head down to your local bookstore to get one.This book will be a serious read during weekend.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 2:02 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.