There is strong evidence that liquid fuels have already peaked on a net energy basis since there is little help from ethanol or tar sands. That means developed countries are competing with India and China for dwindling oil supplies. There appears to be no way to avoid having to tighten our energy belts since alternatives are low yield and/or take a long time to develop. A mixed blessing is that it looks like all fossil fuels including coal will peak worldwide within 20 years so that alternatives will have to be found; that may also limit global warming but the world will still undergo dramatic changes.

I'm not sure nuclear waste is such a problem since the volumes are small but permanent burial should no longer be put off. The real anti-inheritance for today's children is remembering how their grandparents drove private cars, flew in planes and grew abundant food with irrigation and cheap fertiliser.

I’m not sure I buy the assertion that the real reason for the Iraq war “a direct response to knowledge of impending oil peak.”

“So it is very well for economists to sneer that Malthus has been continually proved wrong by human ingenuity. Ingenious we may be, but for the last century our single big idea has been petroleum, on which we now depend utterly for industrial materials, almost all our transport, and critically for food; every calorie you consume takes ten calories of fossil fuel to produce.”

We haven’t been ingenious at all! In fact we’ve been highly autistic; brilliant at some things and absolutely hopeless at the very basics in other ways. Obviously it is the complete antithesis of ingenuity to have allowed the population to hugely build up and become dependent on a finite resource that just simply cannot be replaced without a massive readjustment to economics, quality of life…and population size. And this has happened at the same time that we have been collectively congratulating ourselves on our great ingenuity. Hells bells!

“Russia, quite unexpectedly, turns out to have won the Cold War. It may have been forced to ditch its Soviet ideology, but of the three blocs, Russia alone has both the nuclear weapons and the oil and gas. China and the West, by contrast, are now competing supplicants for Russian resources, giving enormous power to Moscow.”

Yes. Very interesting.

“governments should ‘scrap all airport and road network expansion forthwith; there will be plenty of spare capacity soon enough’ ”.

YES!! And along with it the whole notion of expansionism.

‘The last oil shock – a survival guide to the imminent extinction of petroleum man’ sounds like a must read book.

Thanks Graham for this review.

Aaaaaaaarrrgh…that intractable missing word syndrome strikes again, this time in the first line of a post.

Man that is excruciatingly annoying!

I’m not sure I buy the assertion that the real reason for the Iraq war WAS “a direct response to knowledge of impending oil peak.”

Hi Ludwig,

Have you seen Cheney's 1999 speech to the London Institute of Petroleum where he basically outlines the problem of oil depletion and says that oil companies need greater access to the Middle East?:

http://www.energybulletin.net/559.html

This was when Cheney was chairman of Haliburton before he became vice-president. Remember that Cheney, Bush and even Condoleezza are all oil people. Condoleezza even had an oil tanker named after her at one stage!

“governments should ‘scrap all airport and road network expansion forthwith; there will be plenty of spare capacity soon enough’ ” - is Macquarie Bank listening?

Oooh this guy is a real hysterian. He is already living in his mud hut (ok yurt with grass on the roof) waiting for the end of civilisation. Surprise surprise the author doesn't like nuclear as an option. He prefers what he calls "power down" which translates to "lets all go live in a yurt". Lets not until we have to.

Alzo, we might be living in yurts sooner than you think. At the present rate of population growth, the world pop is set to double in the next 40 years and as well as that, energy consumption per capita is still increasing. Looks like we will all be riding bicycles before we get much older too.

What with both oil and water becoming scarcer, it looks like subsistence farming on the coastal fringe will be the way to go.

Enjoy it while it lasts.