GeoDestinies 2022

 

Walter Youngquist (1921-2018) was a petroleum geologist, a University of Oregon professor, and my friend.  His life’s masterpiece is a 600 page book that’s now available to everyone as a free PDF download [HERE].  

Geologists study Earth resources, many of which are being degraded and depleted — aquifers, topsoil, hydrocarbons, minerals, etc.  These resources have limits.  Every drinker learns that the glass starts full, ends empty, and the faster you drink it, the quicker it’s gone.  Consumers pay little attention to resource limits, but they’re beginning to comprehend the impact of carbon emissions on the climate.  Mainstream experts repeatedly tell us not to worry.  They preach a fervent blind faith in miracles — a smooth and easy transition to a clean, green, renewable utopia.  Geologists wince. 

Youngquist didn’t believe in miracles or techno utopias.  Today, we’re living dangerously fast by destroying astonishing amounts of nonrenewable resources — a onetime binge that can never again be repeated.  Nonrenewable energy is finite.  We have been soaring in a beautiful dream world, where the air is perfumed with the intoxicating aroma of a nonrenewable prosperity.  The era of cheap energy is fading away in the rear view mirror. 

In 1973, the Eugene newspaper wrote a story about one of his lectures, “Dark Picture Painted by Youngquist.”  He gave many talks to Chamber of Commerce groups, trying to introduce them to the concept of limits.  He was almost never invited back.  America worships perpetual growth at any cost.  Growth is our god word.

In the mid-1990s, a number of the world’s petroleum geologists became alarmed that the volume of new oil discovered was declining, while the volume of consumption continued soaring.  This inspired the dawn of the Peak Oil movement, a wakeup call.  In 1997, Youngquist published GeoDestinies, which quickly sold out.  Folks begged him to print more, but Walt was reluctant.  He wanted to update the info first, but the story was moving faster than he could type. 

Finally, in 2012, he finished the update.  Unfortunately, the process hit some curves.  The book did not get to a printer, Walt died, the publisher went extinct, and the manuscript gathered dust.  In 2022, a small group of fans was able to get a digital copy, and make it available to the world.  Most of the content is still timely and very important.  For most readers, this book is largely going to be a banquet of new information, important stuff that’s rarely taught in school, if ever.

Today, many snicker at the Peak Oil dimwits.  Dudes, we didn’t run out!  We’ll always find more!  In the ’90s, the industry was primarily producing cheap and easy conventional oil (insert a straw and suck).  It appears that the global production of this oil peaked around 2005.  Unfortunately, mad scientists developed new technology for extracting oil, like hydro-fracking and horizontal drilling.  This enabled a sharp increase in the production of unconventional oil from sources including tar sands, heavy oil, shale oil (tight oil), and deep water wells.  This oil was far more challenging and expensive to extract (and the mother of many bankruptcies).

In addition to declining discoveries, a new boogeyman is EROEI (energy returned on energy invested).  It takes energy to extract fossil energy.  For example, a hundred years ago, the EROEI for conventional oil was very high.  Ram a drill into a huge pool of Texas oil, and a geyser of black gold often shot high in the sky.  Today, with the shift toward unconventional oil, the EROEI is far lower and declining.  As the energy needed for extraction approaches the energy content of the output, the industry moves closer to its expiration date.  A lot of fossil energy will be left in the ground forever. 

It took more than 500 million years for geologic forces to transform plant and animal residue into fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas.  It will take less than 500 years for humans to extract it and burn it.  We live during a brief blip in Earth history, an ecological hurricane.  Walt’s core message was a blunt warning.  “The momentum of population growth and resource consumption is so great that a collision course with disaster is inevitable.  Large problems lie not very far ahead.  …In some respects, the twenty-first century will be like the twentieth century in reverse.”

The public believes that adequate “renewable” substitutes will be available when needed.  Alternative energy is not clean, green, and free.  The hardware components have limited working lifespans.  Scaling up to replace nonrenewable energy would require vast land area, roads, power lines, and backup for when adequate wind or sunbeams are unavailable.  Manufacturing solar panels requires critical minerals like cobalt, gallium, germanium, indium, manganese, tellu­rium, titanium, and zinc.  Each wind turbine requires tons of concrete, steel, and other resources.

Walt described the alternative energy options, and their many limitations.  He concluded that renewable energy will not come close to replacing fossil energy.  In 2021, Alice Friedemann presented a far more thorough discussion in her book Life After Fossil Fuels.  A renewable utopia seems impossible. 

Oil is just one of many Earth resource topics in Walt’s book.  Plants and animals don’t need it.  Less than 200 years ago, oil was of no great importance to anyone anywhere.  For many thousands of years, nomads wandered across the Arabian Peninsula, under which laid oceans of ancient oil.  It never occurred to them to extract it, burn it, blindside the climate, and race down crowded highways in powerful motorized wheelchairs.  Naturally, in those days, the planet was in far healthier condition.  Then, in the twentieth century, Arabia became very rich, very fast.

Other resources are genuinely essential for the survival of the family of life — soil, water, air, and sunlight.  Of all minerals, soil is the most precious by far.  Fertile soil is created so slowly that, from a human perspective, it’s essentially nonrenewable.  In his book Dirt, geologist David Montgomery wrote, “Continued for generations, till-based agriculture will strip soil right off the land as it did in ancient Europe and the Middle East.  With current agricultural technology though, we can do it a lot faster.”  Peter Salonius studied soil for 44 years.  He concluded that all extractive agriculture, from ancient times to the present, was unsustainable. 

The problems associated with soil destruction are widely understood, and widely disregarded.  Nobody became a billionaire by promoting soil conservation.  Globally, billions of tons are lost every year.  Overall, one-third of the soil on U.S. cropland has been lost over the past 200 years.  Half of the excellent topsoil of Iowa is already gone.  The highest quality soil is close to the surface, and the first to erode.  Walt wrote, “Worldwide, the con­tinuing loss of soil and depletion of groundwater is leading humanity directly over the cliff.”   

All life needs water.  Water allows mineral nutrients in the soil to be absorbed by plants.  Your body is about 60 percent water.  In some regions, farms receive adequate water from precipitation.  Other regions require irrigation.  About 17 percent of cropland is irrigated, but it produces 40 percent of the world’s crops. 

Some underground aquifers are unable to recharge as fast as pumps are extracting the water — like the vast Ogallala aquifer in the U.S. midlands.  They are unsustainable water mines.  Several communities in Colorado are (temporarily) drinking from reservoirs of 10,000 year old water.  Forty percent of humankind now lives in regions with chronic water shortages, especially Africans, with their rapidly growing populations. 

When ancient aquifers are depleted, subsidence can occur — the ground sinks, filling the empty space where the water once was.  This makes it impossible for the aquifer to ever refill again.  In some portions of Mexico City, subsidence has lowered the ground surface up to 28 feet (8.5 m), causing much damage.  Irrigation can also lead to the accumulation of salt in the soil, which eventually creates a permanent wasteland.  In the cradle of civilization, the once thriving Tigris Euphrates floodplain is now “a glistening desert of salt.”

Earth resources have played a starring role in world history.  They enable the rise of civilizations, and their limited eras of prosperity.  It’s no coincidence that the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, because they had abundant deposits of coal, iron, and limestone in convenient locations.  The U.S. skyrocketed into a global superpower by exploiting huge deposits of a wide variety of Earth resources.  In World War II, Japan was short on iron, coal, and oil.  Hitler invaded southern Russia in an effort to seize the huge Baku oilfields.

In coming years, as fossil fuel fades out, agriculture will once again be muscle powered and low tech (if the climate crisis allows crop production to continue).  Industrial scale food processing and distribution will fizzle.  Potent synthetic fertilizers and other agrichemicals will no longer be available.  As harvests decline, population growth will shift into reverse. 

Finally, a few footnotes.  GeoDestinies was written on a tiny digital typewriter that allowed files to be saved on a floppy disk.  As Walt typed, the display presented a single line of text.  He never owned a computer, and never had direct access to the internet or email.  He had no spare time.  Finishing this manuscript was job one.

I gave him prints of interesting online stuff, and copies of my book reviews, including Brian Fagan’s The Great Warming, and The Little Ice Age.  The Fagan reviews reinforced his belief that climate always changed.  Back in 2012, the notion that human-caused emissions were disrupting the climate was still controversial in the mainstream mindset.

In his 96 years, Walt witnessed remarkable changes in the American standard of living.  These were only possible because of our maniacal binge of energy guzzling.  Modernity’s high standard of living, and fabulous healthcare was awesome.  But the long term environmental impact of these short term benefits was huge.

He lacked some sympathy for environmentalists who opposed energy development projects in America, whilst they were enjoying a comfortable consumer lifestyle.  High impact projects were often diverted to poor nations that had few regulations, if any.  In 2012, Walt was not fully aware of the serious long term hazards of nuclear energy, and the lack of permanent storage for high level radioactive wastes.

Walt was especially horrified by exponential population growth.  In his lifetime, the human mob skyrocketed from 1.9 billion to 7.6 billion.  He was deeply disappointed that overpopulation was a taboo subject for secular and spiritual leaders.  Large numbers of immigrants to the U.S. came from cultures where large families are the norm.  Their dream was to live a maximum impact consumer lifestyle.

Youngquist’s book pulls away cultural blindfolds, and provides a mind-expanding full immersion baptism in the actual facts of life.  “The confluence of factors soon at hand may make this century the most turbulent in human history.  There will be adjustment of population size.  There will be a new energy paradigm.  There will be lifestyle change.  There will be great economic change.  There will be environmental change.  Although change has always been the order of life, the particular confluence of major factors in each of these areas will make the twenty-first century a fundamental turning point for mankind.”

Walt completed the manuscript of the second edition in 2012.  Since then, he wrote four papers for the Negative Population Growth Forum.  Our Plundered Planet (2014), A Geomoment of Affluence (2015), The Scale of Things (2016), Framework of the Future (2016). 

Joy Ride to Global Collapse



 

Note: I need to devote more time to my upcoming book, now known as Wild Free & Happy.  The following is Jim Minter’s review of James Howard Kunstler’s book, Home from Nowhere.  It was posted over 20 years ago (5 December 1996) on the e-design website.  This was back when the Peak Oil movement still lived in caves.  Oddly, most of the essay could have been written in 2018.  America’s fanatical addiction to motorized wheelchairs is stronger than ever.  Minter is an excellent writer.  Enjoy!

 

Joy Ride to Global Collapse:

Reflections on Kunstler’s Home from Nowhere

Here’s a prediction for you.  In the next two decades millions of Americans will begin a serious search for an alternative to the gasoline-powered automobile.  It is not going to be a happy search.  If you think trying to wean gun owners from their passion for firearms is a hornet’s nest, try talking to the great majority of us about reining in our passion for the automobile.  Lordy!  And yet, most of us agree there is a problem, vaguely phrased as, “There are too many other people out there clogging up the highways and slowing me down.”  Otherwise our attitude is similar to the rabid firearms bumper sticker: “You’ll get my car when you pry my cold, dead fingers from around the steering wheel.”

No one is talking to us about giving up cars today — even though there is hard scientific evidence that the freewheeling automotive world we know today will have totally vanished within the lifetime of most of us now living.  A few idealists are talking about maybe getting us to constrain our use a little bit.  None of them are running for any position of political influence in this country.  They would be lucky to get their family’s vote.  We don’t want to hear it.

Auto mania is not confined to Americans.  The love affair is international and now grows fastest in the nations of the Second and Third World.  Humanity burns 70 million barrels of oil a day.  At the present rate of increase, it is projected we’ll be burning 100 million in 20 years.  But we’ll never get there.  We are close to that peak of global production which was foreseen almost half a century ago by Dr. M. King Hubbert, the foremost petroleum geologist of his day.  The descent from that peak only takes a few decades.  We know that petroleum is a finite resource.  But even as gasoline prices begin to creep upward some time in the not-too-distant future we won’t curtail our driving until real supply shortages absolutely force the issue.

Take a look at an ugly future scenario: The sudden, agonizing death of the private automobile is a wall that global society will hit full speed, pedal to the metal when a global petroleum crisis finally catches up with us.  We will not accept any solutions that will soften the impact until the real shortage hits us at some time (early) in the next century.  If we continue to fail to take any reasonable steps to prepare for it, and it comes upon us thus, the constriction of the petroleum base of our global economy is quite likely to begin a plunging, bucking, gasping downward spiral towards a deep and lasting depression-with-inflation that could virtually end modern times as we now know them.

I will explain the combination of hard science and human hard-headedness which backs the likelihood of this future.  But first, let’s examine where we are.  Even if we believe that we are joyriding toward the abyss, few of us will volunteer to be first to quit driving.  I’ve tried it twice.  Once in Tallahassee as Florida’s “Energy Czar,” and once as a freelance investigative reporter in Washington, D.C.  What a royal pain it was to be carless in Florida’s sprawled-out, little, old capital city.  What a joy it was not to have to fool with parking in our nation’s capital.  Cabs there were plentiful and cheap.  Walking was a pleasure.  The excellent subway and bus lines were just a hop from my little flat three blocks from the Library of Congress.  But that urban experience is the exception. 

For most Americans life without a car is unthinkable — even in Washington, D.C.  It is too late to talk about rational restraint.  As James Howard Kunstler’s new book Home from Nowhere makes clear, the entire complex of the American civilization and infrastructure that we have built since World War II is almost unworkable without our massive herd of private autos.  We can’t get along without them, although Kunstler would clearly like to tame them.

Kunstler’s first best seller, The Geography of Nowhere, was described by a Wall Street Journal reviewer as “a sharp polemic.”  The language of Home from Nowhere is just as crisp and creative as he continues his positive indictment of America’s post-World-War-II built environment.  I say “positive,” because in Home from Nowhere Kunstler tries to focus on curing the blight — what we are already beginning to do in a few places, and what more we can and must do.

I, however, turned immediately to the chapter entitled “Car Crazy.”  The book’s dust jacket says it “offers real hope to a nation yearning to live in authentic places worth caring about.”  Not only does the car chapter not deliver hope, Kunstler’s auto jeremiad is almost as bleak as my post-petroleum scenario.  After a splendidly concise and eloquent damning of what American car craziness is doing to our built environment, he concludes his chapter, “We have the knowledge to do the right thing; we lack only the will to do the right thing.  The inescapable conclusion is that our behavior is wicked, and that we are liable to pay a heavy price for our wickedness by losing the things we love, including our beautiful country and our democratic republic.”

Pretty appalling.  Hello!  Is anyone home, out there?  No.  We’re out joyriding.  “But,” you protest, “lose our country?  Our form of government?”  Perhaps that’s not impossible. 

The sudden death of the automobile in America would produce a major crunch that would dwarf the Great Depression.  Kunstler deplores the negative aspects of the car without understanding just how endangered the automobile truly is.  He even purports to see signs that we may be wandering away from the automobile.  Fat chance!  We Americans are not going to abandon our cars.  Especially because some guru is telling us they are immoral.  We don’t care if they are immoral.  We won’t abandon them even if they cause global warming and melt the polar ice caps putting Florida and New York City under water.  Even if we have to wear gas masks because of pollution and the whole nation grinds to gridlock we will still sit in our cars on the freeways, beeping our horns and idling our engines, praying we can creep just a few more yards.  We are not going to walk or ride bicycles except for exercise.  We are not going to ride buses, streetcars, subways, taxicabs or rickshaws except as entertainment.  A personal automobile is the right of every American.  It says so in the Constitution.

Ah, would that Kunstler’s prophesy of a gradual taming of the automobile were possible.  Nothing so gentle as that seems likely to me.  The Auto Age is going to hit a rapid deceleration.  But it will not be graceful, gradual or planned.  Disregard for a moment the thesis that the environment will run out of breathable air before we run out of petroleum.  What is unquestionable is that if we keep burning it, one way or another, the human species is eventually going to burn up the planet’s vast store of petroleum.  The only question is when.  Some very good scientists who study the globe’s petroleum supplies, but don’t work for oil companies, auto companies or nervous governments say that time is closer upon us than we suspect.

The Petroleum Age will begin sputtering into crisis as demand continues to rise and petroleum production peaks (within a decade, according to the best Hubbert projections to which I will link you at the end of this column).  We will not yet be at the bottom of the barrel, just turning towards it.  Vast windfall profits will be made by some, which will complicate the ability of leaders to explain the reality.  And the supply-side religion will tune-up its highly paid chorus.  In fits and starts prices will rise and then fall, spiraling upward because of real shortfalls in the distribution system, or in anticipation of shortage, then dropping as over-speculators take a bath, only to rise again and then fall again, but with prices always rising further and falling back slower as supply constricts.  And if an “artificial” shortage is politically created in anticipation of hoarding for the real shortage down the road, it could be a recipe for wars.  Either way, most of us will not be able to imagine curtailing our driving until the bitterest end.

What makes the decline of the Petroleum Age so relentlessly damaging is that there is no fuel that is going to substitute for it.  I know the technological optimists, with a lot of cynical hype from the auto/petroleum industrial axis and a lot of naive wishing by the Greens, vaguely promise a clean, beautiful, driving world on “a mixed fuel economy.”  It is this promise that keeps us tranquilly driving along burning it up for “a few more years” without feeling at all wicked.  Some cabal of scientists in white coats is going unmask the Second Law of Thermodynamics as an oldthink fraud.

NONE of the promised alternatives will replace petroleum.

It ain’t gonna happen.  None (let me get way out on the limb and repeat that: NONE) of the promised alternatives will replace petroleum — not even vast stores of natural gas, which is the closest potential substitute, but is also finite.  Nor will liquified and “scrubbed-up” coal juice.  Nor (again disregarding for the moment the environmental and safety questions) will the scores of new nuclear plants needed to charge up electric cars be economically supportable in a Post-Petroleum Age. 

Why?  That was explained to us by an almost forgotten scientist at the University of Florida over 20 years ago.  It is the concept of “net energy.”  If it takes one barrel of oil to produce every ten barrels of oil, you have nine barrels of oil left to run the rest of society.

As oil becomes more difficult to find and transport, the net yield decreases.  There is less to run society.  Oil costs rise.  All other costs that are touched by oil (everything) also rise.  Eventually, you creep into recession-with-inflation, which economists said wasn’t supposed to happen — until it did happen after the 1973 oil embargo.

This is where economists display their ignorance of physics.  Many economists, people who should know better, say at that point people go out and explore for more oil.  (We’re still finding new oil, but not at the rate we’re burning it.  And there are a steadily diminishing number of places on the planet where we haven’t poked holes.)  Or, economists chirp, we’ll find other energy sources and drive prices back down.  That is what happens for every other commodity, they say, and energy is no different from any other commodity.  Not so.

Energy is the great exception to conventional economic theory.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics is why.  Every time you “use” energy you lose some.  You can never get perfect efficiency.  So burning energy to get energy is a “losing” process.  Burn oil to get electricity and you end up with less energy in the electricity than you began with in the oil.  Transmit that electric energy over wires to a home or factory and you lose some.  You can’t “make” energy; and though you can sometimes “store” it in another form for a while (with loss each time) you only use energy once.  So the more complicated a process is.., the more “technologically involved”.., the more you lose in the processing.  That’s the problem with burning electricity which is a “highly refined” energy, to get hydrogen, a “lower” form, from water to then burn in cars.  That’s also why liquified coal will always be devilishly expensive to burn in autos and trucks.

The great shale oil fiasco of the late ’70s is a perfect example of what is wrong with all of the proposed “high-tech sources” of “new” energy.  Economists kept saying that when the price of oil rose high enough, extracting the oil from shale deposits would make it an economical commodity.  We burned billions of your tax dollars and billions more in private investment money trying to make it work.  There are those who still say it will work some day.  Don’t let them sell you any shale stock.

It doesn’t matter how high the price of shale oil rises

The problem with shale oil is that it has to be mined and crushed and heated to extract the oil that is there.  Mining machinery burns oil.  Crushing machinery burns oil.  Heating shale burns oil.  Hauling and dumping the spent shale burns more energy.  And of course, refining that oil into useable product takes more energy.  As does transporting it, and transporting all of the workers in the process, etc., etc.  In the ’70s we discovered that we burned about a barrel of oil to produce a barrel of shale oil.  (So-called in situ production methods shared a similar problem.)  In other words the “net energy” was zero.  So it didn’t matter what the price was.  If the price rose to a million dollars a barrel, it would still consume a million-dollar barrel of oil to produce a million-dollar barrel of shale oil and there would be no net gain to sell.

Energy is not just another commodity in our modern economic system.  Energy is the underlying power that carries the burden and makes our modern economic infrastructure “more productive” (less labor intensive).  Petroleum is the dominant energy source for the transportation network that undergirds the global economy, and the planet’s most plentiful, most versatile, most transportable and most efficient energy source.  In a very real and measurable sense the price of every other energy source we have floats on a “subsidy” of cheap petroleum.  In other words every other energy form we use, including all of the “solar” energies are as cheap and usable as they are because they are “underwritten” by cheap oil.  (Cheap petroleum and natural gas produce and transport those silicon PV cells.  When the oil is gone, the price of “solar” will skyrocket, along with every other “alternative energy source,” in direct proportion to the petroleum used in every step of its production and delivery.)

“Gasohol” is another ideal example of an “alternative fuel” that floats on a cheap petroleum subsidy.  It takes cheap oil for each step of planting, tending, fertilizing, spraying, harvesting, transporting and processing corn into alcohol.  It takes more cheap oil to blend that alcohol into something that will (still imperfectly, compared to gasoline) power your car.  Gasohol from corn, sugar, peat, beets, sawdust, tropical rain forest, or any other “biomass” is not going to run our present global auto world, let alone the expanding auto world glowingly predicted by the car industry for the future.  Ignore, for a second the fact that such massive use would quickly begin cannibalizing the biomass that supports all life and supplies such basics as food and oxygen.  “Biomass” is not a long-term massive source of global energy because many of our current agricultural and forestry practices “mine the soil,” and are, in the long run, neither “renewable,” nor “sustainable.”  Ignore the environmental concerns about CO2, ozone, etc.  Ignore the shrinking global biomass and arable land that will be needed in ever greater amounts to feed, clothe and house a swelling human population.  There isn’t enough biomass on earth to run our petroleum economy at its present level if we are insane enough to try it.  (And we are.)  We would quickly turn the planet into a desert trying to run our current automobile fleet on biomass.

And so the real “Catch 22” for alternative fuels is that when the petroleum economy begins to stumble over shortage, all of the “alternative fuels” that are supposed to be waiting in the wings, are going to rise in price dramatically.  It is going to be an ugly, cost-pushed, escalating thing that is going to cripple the global economy and impoverish global society.

Cleaned-up coal and natural gas and perhaps even some nuclear will provide our electricity for a period of time.  And some niche-market transportation, too.  Wind power can be a real electric winner for many places on the planet (not much wind here in Florida and cloud cover makes solar PV a marginally expensive source on much of the planet).  But none of these sources, along with their electric cars, will run our present automotive economy at the level of wealth and consumption we enjoy in this glorious sunset of our Petroleum Age.  Trans-continental economies that are most strung-out on automobiles and trucks (the United States, Canada, Australia, etc.) are likely to be hardest hit first. 

So just when we need to make the transition to other fuels we will discover that everything we do is much more expensive and we seem to have less than we anticipated.  It will puzzle economists.  The economy will slow down but the prices of everything will keep on rising.  We will then rediscover the age-old truth: money is not a real thing; it is only an accounting device.  Congress can’t print oil and they can’t repeal the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  So after we have ritually fired the then-current crop of politicians and the new ones haven’t changed anything, we won’t know who to blame.  What will be going on?

Now pay attention economists.  Here are three dicta that may sound heretical.  First is Minter’s Little Observation: Neither capital nor labor can create energy.  Growing out of this observation is Minter’s Little Law of Energy Subsidy: The shortage of a more efficient energy source in an economy will always make the remaining sources of less efficient energy more expensive and even less efficient.  Will humanity belatedly begin to use all energy more efficiently when we finally hear those sucking sounds in the petroleum barrel?  Of course.  We will have to.  But such efficiencies will not make us more prosperous (as they do today).  By that time they will only slow the rate at which we get poorer.  Why?  Heed Minter’s Little Maxim: A society’s transition from a more efficient energy source to a less efficient energy source will always and invariably decrease the wealth, flexibility and options available to that society.

In other words, just when we most need the wealth and flexibility of cheap petroleum energy to make the transition to a less energy-intensive infrastructure, everything is going to cost much, much more.  We will be poorer.

If this is all true, what should we be doing?  I do not have many answers.  We should at least take off the rose colored alternative fuel glasses that are blinding the Greens and providing a smoke screen for short-sighted governments and industries.  Until we do that we can’t accurately begin envisioning what a post-petroleum society is really going to look like.  Possibly we should stop sinking so much money into long-term expansions of infrastructure to support automobiles.  Maybe a few advanced thinkers will begin considering post-petroleum cities with electric-only cars, or without private-passenger cars altogether.  You tell me.

One thing that seems obvious is that we need to begin an honest net energy analysis of all of the proposed alternative fuels, and just what their true net is after all of the present petroleum subsidies are worked out of the formula.  That is not going to be as easy as it sounds.  Petroleum subsidizes everything we make and do.  But it is vital if we are to make rational judgments not based upon the partisan polemics of vested interests or true believers.  Just what we will do with this knowledge once we get it is another matter.  The Western World is run by corporate leaders who think quarter-to-quarter, politicians who think election-to-election, and a public that is hostile to bad news about their lifestyle (especially our beloved cars).  The Pacific Rim countries are enslaved to automobile exports (and petroleum poor).  The oil exporters are already exaggerating their reserves to get loans and the global financial community is making those loans.  Is there anyone out there who isn’t heavily vested in a continuation of the existing myopia?

In an earlier column, I said that since we obviously are going to do nothing about transportation until it is way too late, America’s only energy policy option is to work for efficiency in our buildings and built environment.  Certainly that is the focus of Kunstler’s two books.  That is the focus of what we have been calling “Sustainable Design.”  What is crucial for the design professions to realize is that we probably don’t have as much time as we think before we will not be as rich as we once were.  To me that spells building for quality and endurance.  It means an end to “consumable” buildings.  It means building for ourselves and posterity.  It means the old-fashioned conservative virtues of thrift and investment, not burn-up and squander.  To be Biblical, it means using the remaining fat years to prepare for the coming lean years.

Without considering the decline of petroleum, Kunstler already thinks we are wicked to be trashing our lives, our cities, and our infrastructure in our mad romance with the automobile.  Would he think us diabolic if he understood we are really racing towards a post-petroleum economy that stands to impoverish our posterity?

If so, he would probably be right.  Morally what we are doing is very much akin to burning the children’s lifeboats on the Titanic to keep the partying adults warm for another half an hour.

In the very humane, final chapter of Kunstler’s book, he reflects on the fine life that the success of his previous book, The Geography of Nowhere, has given him in a small town in New York.  It’s an idyllic world of writing and painting in an almost car-free cocoon.  He should enjoy it with a clear conscience.  He, at least, has jousted with the beast and urged reform.

But we are unreformable, and it seems certain that any such modest reforms as humanity would swallow will only delay the inevitable by a few years.  And so, as I understand it, a global economic crunch of epic proportions, one that stands to debase much of our current wealth and render much of our current infrastructure valueless, lies just over the horizon sometime in the next century.  The economic tremor of the early ‘70s was but a mild hint of the times to come.  Once again humanity is going to demonstrate Voltaire’s little maxim: “History teaches us that history teaches us nothing.”

Jim Minter, Editor

 

Some notes. 

(1) Minter thought we’d never make it to 100 million barrels per day of global oil production.  In 2014, we were at 89 million barrels.  Nobody was fracking in 1996.  Fracking is an extremely expensive and low net energy process that has no long term future.

(2) He foresaw the Petroleum Age beginning to sputter in a decade or so (i.e., 2006).  A barrel of oil was $30 in 2004.  In 2008, it was $147 — at which point the global banking system suddenly melted down, and the sky was filled with fat cats leaping off tall buildings.

(3) He mentions that shale oil is resource that will never be used.  This is accurate, because he is referring to shale that contains carbon-rich kerogen, a precursor of petroleum, which cannot be profitably extracted and refined into oil.  Today, the fracking industry is working different shale beds, in other regions, that actually contain petroleum, which can be profitably extracted only if the market price of oil is very high.

(4) Minter’s essay has gone extinct on the current internet.  It can be accessed via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.  Use it to search for: http://fcn.state.fl.us/fdi/e-design/online/9612/joyride.htm

(5) His essay was produced by e-design, part of the Florida Sustainable Communities website, run by the Florida Design Initiative.  This endeavor went extinct around 2000, when Republicans gained control of Florida government, and declared that Sustainability was “a socialist plot.”

(6) Minter was a former Miami Herald reporter, a bureau chief, daily columnist, and editor at the Tallahassee Democrat, a freelance investigative reporter in Washington, D.C., and Florida’s “Energy Czar.”  He’s over 80 now.

And… Our Plundered Planet, by Walter Youngquist (1921-2018), is an excellent 8-page essay that updates the nonrenewable resource story as of 2014.  He was one of the grandfathers of the Peak Oil movement, a top level petroleum geologist, and a university professor.  See pages 4-5 to learn about the limits of fracking, and the daunting reality of sharply diminished Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI), which almost all joyriders are completely ignorant of.  Download the PDF [HERE]

Snake Oil: Fracking’s False Promise

When a dark and furious storm is racing in, and the tornado sirens are howling, smart folks stop staring at their cell phones, and head for shelter.  But what if the cell phones were streaming messages that the storm warnings were a hoax, and there was nothing to fear?  Twenty years ago, Peak Oil was a ridiculous absurdity conjured up by notorious idiots on the lunatic fringe.  Ten years ago, it had become an acceptable topic for polite conversation.  Today, an extremely effective disinformation campaign has inspired many to toss their energy concerns out the window.

This made Richard Heinberg hopping mad, so he wrote Snake Oil to set the record straight.  He’s been blasting the warning sirens for more than ten years, via a series of books.  Nobody sane disputes that fossil energy is finite and non-renewable.  Nobody sane disputes that our current path has an expiration date.  The argument is over when that date arrives.  For most folks, something that may become a problem 50 to 100 years from now is simply not worth thinking about.  Heinberg is getting strong whiffs of trouble right now.

The production of conventional oil and gas is close to peak, but new technology has enabled production of unconventional oil and gas.  We are now extracting oil and gas from shale.  We’re cooking oil out of tar sands bitumen.  We are drilling in deep waters offshore.  This energy is far more expensive to produce.

Today, for each barrel of new oil we discover, we consume four or five barrels pumped from elderly fields.  In 1930, oil was as cheap as four cents per barrel.  In 2002, a barrel of oil cost $25, and in 2012 it was $110 (with a $150 spike in 2008).  Deep water drilling is economically possible when the price is $90 or more.  Existing tar sands projects can continue production at $60, but new tar sands projects need at least $80.  Almost all drilling requires $70.  The era of cheap energy is over.

A hundred years ago, drilling in ideal locations led to mighty gushers of black gold.  It only took one unit of energy to extract 100 units of energy.  So, the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) was 100:1.  By 1990, the EROEI of U.S. oil production had fallen to 40:1.  In 2013, it was about 10:1.  Tar sands, oil shale, and biofuels are all less than 5:1, and at this level, the economy gets dizzy, wobbly, and sweaty.

Every gold rush produces a few winners and legions of losers.  In order to drum up the necessary investment funding, it is customary to make highly exaggerated estimates of the immense wealth just waiting to be reeled in by wise guys (like you).  I recall industry hucksters once proclaimed that the Caspian Sea province contained up to 400 billion barrels of oil.  By 2001, after ten years of intensive work on prime sites, far less than 20 billion barrels were produced, according to petroleum geologist Colin Campbell.

Everyone agrees that the production of unconventional oil and gas has delayed our blind date with disaster a bit.  Is this delay years, decades, or centuries?  Heinberg introduces us to petroleum geologists who believe that U.S. gas and oil production will begin its decline by 2020.  “Production from shale gas wells typically declines 80 to 95 percent in the first 36 months of operation.  Given steep shale gas well decline rates and low recovery efficiency, the United States may actually have fewer than 10 years of shale gas supply at the current rate of consumption.”  In the North Dakota oil fields, 1,400 new wells have to be drilled every year, just to maintain current production, according to a story in Financial Times (27 Aug 2014).

Today, everyone has spent their entire lives in an era of rising energy production and economic growth, just like our parents did.  But economic growth is getting dodgy.  It’s being kept on life support by skyrocketing levels of debt.  As energy production approaches its decline phase, prices are sure to rise.  There will come a day when economic growth goes extinct.  Without economic growth, our way of life will eventually become a hilarious story told by the campfires of our descendants.

Should we be making serious plans for the coming challenges?  “Heck no,” says the energy industry.  Our treasure of unconventional energy is the equivalent of two Saudi Arabias!  We now have a 100-year supply of gas, according Daniel Yergin.  T. Boone Pickens says 160 years.  Aubrey McClendon says 200 years.  Even 100 years is daffy.  How was it calculated?  “Simply by taking the highest imaginable resource estimate for each play, then taking the very best imaginable recovery rate, then adding up the numbers.”  This results in projections that have no relationship to reality.

The Bakken and Eagle Ford deposits produce more than 80 percent of U.S. tight oil.  David Hughes, author of Drill, Baby, Drill, estimated that the combined production of both deposits will end up being the equivalent of ten months of U.S. consumption.  The U.S. Geological Service (USGS) estimated that Bakken contains 3.65 billion barrels of recoverable oil — about six weeks of current global consumption.  The U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) predicted that Bakken oil will peak in 2017.

Tim Morgan is a consultant who does a lot of work for investment bankers.  In his eye-opening 2013 report, Perfect Storm, he concluded, “the economy as we have known it for more than two centuries, will cease to be viable at some point within the next ten or so years unless, of course, some way is found to reverse the trend.”

Heinberg recommends that we shift to renewable energy with utmost speed.  Hmmm.  Solar panels and wind turbines have a limited lifespan.  Using them, repairing them, and replacing them requires the existence of an extremely unsustainable industrial civilization.  This civilization is unlikely to last long as it gets strangled by energy shortages and hammered by social unrest.  We’ll be forced to make a painful transition to muscle-powered agriculture, which cannot feed seven billion.  Somewhere along the line, televisions, laptops, and refrigerators will become useless ballast.  Even if scientists invented a way to extract affordable energy for another 200 years, it would be a foolish thing to do.  We’ve burned far too much carbon already.

I wonder if it might be more useful to voyage into the realm of unconventional thinking, on a sacred mission to explore a lot of big questions.  Over and over, we are told that cool people work really hard, become really prosperous, and buy lots of really cool stuff.  To me, that sounds like a tragic waste of the precious gift of life.  It’s causing lots of irreparable damage for no good reason.  We weren’t born to live like this.  We were born for a life of freedom, to enjoy a normal and natural standard of living.  Imagine that.

The book is short, full of helpful charts and graphs, well documented, and delightfully easy to read and understand.  The book’s Introduction can be read HERE.

Heinberg, Richard, Snake Oil — Fracking’s False Promise, Post Carbon Institute, Santa Rosa, California, 2013.

The Dominant Animal

Paul and Anne Ehrlich are respected thinkers in the modern environmental movement.  Paul achieved infamy in 1968, following the publication of his book, The Population Bomb.  It made dire predictions, warning of mass starvation in the 1970s and 1980s, and won him the intense and enduring hatred of every fiend suffering from a loony obsession with perpetual growth. 

The predictions probably would have come true, but Ehrlich’s timing could not possibly have been more unlucky.  He was blindsided by the unfortunately lucky efforts of Norman Borlaug, who tried to eliminate world hunger.  His Green Revolution dramatically increased grain yields, leading to a dramatic surge in population, making the original problem far worse — progress!  Catastrophe was postponed for a few decades.

In 2008, on the fortieth anniversary of The Population Bomb, Paul and Anne published The Dominant Animal.  They admitted that the original book had a serious defect — it was too optimistic.  The new book presents an extremely intimate “birds and bees” discussion of the facts of life regarding the immense challenges of the twenty-first century, including overpopulation, overconsumption, peak energy, global heating, toxic pollution, mass extinctions, and on and on.  It neatly describes the hominid journey, millions of years long, which led to what we have become today.

This book is special because of its expanded discussion of cultural evolution.  Genetic evolution is a slow motion process that modifies genes over the passage of many generations.  Cultural evolution modifies and accumulates information, and it can happen with dizzying speed.  Other animals learn behaviors by imitating their elders.  Humans learn behaviors and ideas, via imitation and complex communication.  Alas, cultural evolution enabled us to become the dominant animal on Earth, a backhanded honor, sodden with appalling consequences.

It’s not a book to read for pleasure, but it should be read by everyone on the planet, two or three times.  It fills many of the huge empty gaps in our education, and in the media coverage of our era.  You don’t have to be a propeller-head to understand it.  Hopefully, it will make enormous throbbing consumer fantasies go flaccid, and reorient minds to life in actual reality.

On the bright side, we’re not 100% committed to mass suicide.  There are people all over who think that self-destruction is totally unhip.  Most of them are far more interested in moving toward a survivable future.  The Internet enables ordinary people to make their ideas available to billions of others, and everyone now has access to a much broader range of ideas.  Sometimes the efforts of individuals succeed in sending cultural evolution off in a new direction — all that’s needed is a healthy imagination and good timing.

Ecological history has thoroughly compiled our major mistakes.  In theory, we could study this history, change our habits, and break out of the centuries-long cycle of repeated mistakes.  That might be fun.  When luck is in the air, large societies can make huge changes with dazzling speed — like the collapse of the Soviet Union.  We don’t need more technology; we need social change that’s inspired by clear thinking.

The authors recommend a number of rational things we could do, but make no effort to mesmerize us with magical thinking.  The Ehrlichs are not betting heavily on a future of endless “sustainable” growth.  They are sharing two lifetimes of learning with the younger generations, and that’s very thoughtful of them. 

Daniel Quinn’s work taught me that a segment of humankind went sideways with the transition to agriculture.  Everyone agrees that our problems grew explosively from that time.  In their 1987 book, Earth, the Ehrlichs wrote, “In retrospect, the agricultural revolution may prove to be the greatest mistake that ever occurred in the biosphere — a mistake not just for Homo sapiens, but for the integrity of all ecosystems.” 

Other writers, like Paul Shepard, John Livingston, and Alfred Crosby, understood that the roots of our problems were older.  They point to the Great Leap Forward, about 40,000 years ago, the cave painting craze.  The Ehrlichs agree that the Great Leap “greatly accelerated our rise to dominance,” but they also look even farther back.  Our ancestors began making chipped-stone tools about 2.5 million years ago.  “It was the start on the road to dominance that has produced technological ‘descendants’ as varied as books, blenders, SUVs, antibiotics, and nuclear weapons.” 

Other animals sometimes use tools, like chimps fishing for termites with a stick.  Hominids became increasingly innovative at making tools.  Without stone tools, life would have been a struggle for Homo habilis.  Modern consumers cannot survive without tools, but chimps without termite sticks would be just fine.

Further population growth, at any rate, is insane.  In Earth, the Ehrlichs discussed China’s one child policy, an impressive success that prevented 350 million births, and the corresponding environmental harm and social misery.  The Ehrlichs recommended that all governments implement fertility control programs — especially in over-developed consumer societies like ours — because it was the moral and responsible thing to do.  This notion was not repeated in the new book.  The authors deeply lament the fact that overpopulation remains a taboo subject among world leaders — inexcusable stupidity.

Just as destructive as overpopulation is overconsumption.  Billions of people, both rich and poor, have been programmed to believe that nothing is better than shopping.  I never watch horror movies.  Whenever I have an urge to get really grossed out, I go to a mall and observe the super-trendy shopping zombies.  Eeeeek!  The Ehrlichs recommended creating an organization similar to Planned Parenthood to help us plan our acts of consumption with utmost wisdom and responsibility.  Abstinence is usually the most mature option.

George Basalla now steps into the spotlight.  He pointed out that technological innovation was almost never motivated by fundamental human needs.  Everyone agrees that we were healthier and happier before agriculture.  Cars were not invented because people had lost the ability to walk.  What “need” is being met by cell phones, TVs, and computers?  Phooey on frivolous stuff.

This book devotes loads of attention to the many serious problems that have resulted from our experiment in cultural evolution.  One sentence hit me like a large stone hammer.  The authors are celebrating our glorious achievements.  Human brains have evolved capabilities “far beyond those of other animals, allowing us to become the dominant animal and (we hope) to remain so.” 

We hope so?  Dominant is cool?  Isn’t “dominant animal” essentially the one and only reason why we’re racing toward catastrophe?  Play with the notion of the “formerly dominant animal.”  What might that look like?  Could we live without tools once again, running around naked in the jungle?  Could we shut down the asylum and go back home, to the family of life, and live happily ever after?  That would be fun.  Have a nice day!

Ehrlich, Paul R. and Ehrlich, Anne H., The Dominant Animal - Human Evolution and the Environment, Island Press, Washington, 2008.

Too Much Magic

Far, far away, on the misty frontiers of knowledge, dwells a small and widely scattered clan of clear thinkers who live with their eyes wide open, their minds always set to the “on” position, and their powers of reasoning cranked up to 10.  They have an acute ability to instantly recognize the presence of balderdash and poppycock, even in parts per billion quantities.  Even if the source is a slick-talking president, a gray-haired instructor, an industry expert, or a famous sexy celebrity, they know with without a doubt when claptrap and twaddle are shamelessly being ejaculated.  They can keep their eyes on the ball, even in the thick fog of a never-ending propaganda blitzkrieg. 

These isolated wizards refuse to drink the Kool-Aid and dream away their lives in the colorful cartoon fantasy world of consumer society.  They aren’t giddy with childlike excitement about the latest new cars, shoes, cell phones, and hairdos.  They have no throbbing hunger for RVs, McMansions, or jet skis.  They don’t rot and soak into the couch cushions while sitting in front of flashing screaming TVs.  Their minds are capable of voyaging to realms far beyond the dreary two-step death march of working and shopping.

They often dwell on mountaintops, sitting beside a fire, horrified at the spectacular stupidity of the industrial civilization spread out below them — killing the oceans, killing the forests, killing the prairies, killing their children, killing everything they touch — all for no good reason!  Nothing could be more befuddling and painful to watch!  What could they be thinking?  Why can’t they see what’s happening?

James Howard Kunstler is one of those clear thinkers, and the twenty-first century is just driving him bonkers!  It’s ridiculously easy for clear thinkers to comprehend the glaring, obvious truth, and they can’t understand why most of humankind seems to be incapable of doing this, too.  He can see that consumer society remains on the worst possible path, and at every fork in the path, they choose the bigger mistake.  It’s immensely pathetic, to the degree that the tragedy develops a ticklish aroma of comedy, and Kunstler uses wit like a sharp whip.

Consumers behave as if they are completely disconnected from almost every aspect of reality, spending their lives in an artificial world of pure whimsy.  They are like excited children waiting for piles of fun presents from Santa Claus.  They have a profound blind faith that science and technology will protect everyone with its boundless magic.  Kunstler calls this the Jiminy Cricket Syndrome: “When you wish upon a star your dreams come true.”

In his book, Too Much Magic, Kunstler hurls a super-sized bucket of ice water in a heroic attempt to rouse sleeping zombies into a state of consciousness.  “By the time you read this, the empire in question may be a smoldering ruin.”  He rips down the curtains and reveals the stinking, burning, fever-crazed world outside.  Wake up!  We’re speeding toward multiple catastrophes!  “This entire book is about the manifold failures of all kinds of people to anticipate the changes we face.”

Fossil energy is the foundation of our world economy.  The global production of conventional oil peaked in 2006.  By 2008, the price of oil had skyrocketed to $147 — big trouble.  With regard to the miraculous new shale oil and shale gas fields, he’s convinced that most of the hope is based on industry hype, intended to attract dreamy investors and half-smart high-risk gamblers.  All the magic in the world cannot replace fossil energy with alternative energy, or even come close.

The end of the 90-year era of “Happy Motoring” is approaching, and we’re not far from the peak of suburban sprawl.  American style suburbia was “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.”  Suburbia has no future, but Americans haven’t grasped this yet.  “I expect many suburbs will become slums, ruins, and salvage yards.”  Southern California will turn into a ghost town.

Shortly after oil hit $147, the housing bubble popped, the financial system collapsed, and trillions of dollars vaporized.  The collapse is far from over, since banks still hold a huge number of worthless mortgages, pretending that they are assets — pretending that they are not the living dead.  A shortage of capital means that perpetual economic growth is close to finished.  This means that trillions of dollars of debt are never going to be repaid. 

This means that the party is over.  This means that we’re moving into an age of contraction.  Economic life is going to get much smaller, more local, and will use far less energy.  Much of the labor force will be shifted toward the production of food.  If we choose to acknowledge this, then we could make efforts to contract in an orderly manner.  If we choose to bet everything on magic, the trip down will be more brutal, painful, and dumb.  This is the core message of the book.

Kunstler takes us on a tour of a number of problems that are major threats to our future, and a few lesser issues that he just enjoys kvetching about (like infantile young bozos who wear their baggie pants way too low).  He laments that the overpopulation problem has been assigned to Mother Nature to fix, since we’re not capable of giving it serious thought.  He grieves over our unwillingness to do anything to slow the advance of climate change.  (Well, we’re totally eager to help in any way that doesn’t involve changing our lifestyle to the slightest degree.)  He spews extra large doses of venom on the political system and the finance industry.

George W. Bush was a memorable president.  He involved us in two expensive wars for no good reason.  He nearly succeeded in obliterating our economy.  He made conservatives look like a clown act.  Many believed that his shenanigans would drive the Republican Party into extinction.  Nobody imagined that Barack Obama would grab the baton and simply maintain the same policies (his #1 campaign contributor was Goldman Sachs).

Obama approved borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars for stimulus spending, mostly for highway projects and runway improvements, updating a transportation system that has no future.  Tens of thousands of finance industry fraudsters are never going to wait in line at the guillotine, because the president completely refused to enforce existing laws.  Obama will be remembered for “botched health care reform, a dumb energy policy, keeping two of the longest wars in our history going, and not reestablishing the rule of law in banking in the face of arrant misconduct.”

He gives us Reality for Dummies, but not Solutions for Dummies.  No amount of magic can undo climate change, painlessly shrink our population, make coal burning clean, or fix our economy.  But today is an excellent day to open our eyes, and make an effort to comprehend our dire predicament.  Today is an excellent day to take a good look, to see if there are less catastrophic places to crash land our airborne Titanic.  At this point, it’s all about damage control, and trying very hard to learn as much as possible from our mistakes.  It’s about clear thinking.

Kunstler, James Howard, Too Much Magic, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2012.  www.kunstler.com

The Long Emergency

James Howard Kunstler wrote The Long Emergency, which describes the fossil fuel tsunami, and how it is likely to shape our way of life in the coming decades.  Kunstler’s perspective is based on serious amounts of research.  He describes the future that he expects to happen, not the kinder, gentler, more enlightened future that he wishes would happen.  He lays the cards on the table, and predicts a tomorrow that is going to be more than a little challenging and unpleasant.

I’ve been reading promo material for Amory Lovins’ new book, Reinventing Fire, in which brilliant scientists and engineers design an amazing high tech future, and transform America into a super-green paradise on Earth.  The turbo-charged magical thinking envisions that the Industrial Revolution and endless growth will never end — hopes, wishes, dreams, and fantasies scampering and yapping giddily around the yard, released from reality’s leash.

But the daily news is dancing to Kunstler’s beat.  He has provided us with a stage upon which the unfolding dramas and tragedies of the 21st century can be performed.  The book was published before the 2008 crash, but it very clearly indicated that a crash was coming — maybe even before the book hit the shelves at Borders (R.I.P.).  It was interesting to read the book in 2011, when the world economic system is teetering on the brink of the abyss, the Middle East is going sideways, and resource shortages are stirring up conflicts in many regions — and we’re just days away from the herd reaching seven billion.  The Long Emergency is much less theoretical today.

In Kunstler’s story, our problems largely started with the steam engine and Colonel Drake’s oil well.  He doesn’t zoom farther out, to a 10,000 year view range.  ‘Twas a dirty sweaty ancient farmer who kicked loose the stones that set off the avalanche that’s about to sweep away the world as we know it.  We were already beyond the point of no return when the steam engines began hissing.  But the whole process shifted explosively into high gear 200 years ago.

Kunstler would be satisfied if we could just turn back the clock to 1800, and live in a happy Currier & Ives world of horse powered farms and villages, with laughing children playing in the dirt roads.  That would be an important first step for the healing process.  It would prepare us for the more challenging transitions that follow — abandoning the mining of soils, water, fish, forests, and so on.

I was excited to read his analysis of Malthus, whom he concluded was completely correct!  I’ve always worried that my understanding of Malthus was missing some vital pieces, because nearly everyone in the world says, over and over and over, that he was absolutely and totally wrong.  I have tried so hard to find serious defects in his ideas, and I have repeatedly failed.  I worried that my mental faculties were fading.  It’s not easy thinking at odds with the herd.  A basic misunderstanding has gone viral, put down strong roots, and nothing can kill it.

Kunstler serves us a level-headed reality-based image of tomorrow, and it is sobering.  Despite its gloominess, the book has managed to sell quite well.  The book’s subtitle is: “Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century.”  But the contents don’t focus on revealing effective survival strategies.  The core of the book describes that huge change is on the way, and explains why.  Wake up, take off the blinders, throw your conventional thinking overboard, and prepare for interesting times. 

Kunstler, James Howard, The Long Emergency — Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2005.