Oil Apocalypse!

[mushroom]

Just found this book today in a second hand bookshop: 'Oil Apolcalypse' by Vernon Coleman - self published in 2007... obviously about Peak Oil.
Has anybody read it?
It seems very 'the end is nigh' from the blurb on the back and the first couple of pages; but has very mixed reviews on Amazon... more good than bad (but there are only nine!)

Anyway - decided to try it for a couple of quid!

[Bad Wombat]

I bet it didn't predict $35 a barrel in 2015.

[mushroom]

No, it didn't!

It's interesting really, reading it with some hindsight! No mention of fracking yet either and I'm about 60 pages in!

I read something on the net that said the hype around Peak Oil, peaked itself around 2008... and now we are back in an era of cheap oil everyone has calmed down (bit like the millennium bug!)

Be interested to know what people think though... are we back in an era of new means of extraction / alternative fuels and have nothing to worry about... or is it still a real possibility that we'll go back to pre-industrial society within the next couple of hundred years as it's still a finite resource and extraction takes more energy than the fuel extracted emits!

Discuss!!!

[featherstick]

I've read it. It's an interesting imagining of a society in decline, and if you can get past the oil price thing, then it's thought-provoking.

As far as oil price is concerned, there are those who say it is being held artificially low by the OPEC cartel to scupper the US's fracking industry. Be that as it may, can anyone seriously debate that we are in an era of greater fragility and potential collapse since at least WWII? Worse things have happened to civilisation - the Black Death changed Europe fundamentally - but rarely have we been simultaneously so interconnected and so exposed.

So I'd give it a read, if the opportunity cost is not too high.

[mushroom]

That's it in a nutshell isn't it really... interdependence! One weak link in the very complex chain that underpins our daily life, be that oil or one of many other possibilities... and there would be a huge domino effect.

[Bad Wombat]

... the next couple of hundred years ...

I think things are going to be very different that far into the future. Technological changes occur exponentially. So in a couple of hundred years the sort of technology we have now is going to look like something out of the stone age. According to this:

An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense 'intuitive linear' view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate)

It's not even worth trying to predict what such times might be like. We simply have no way of imagining it.