The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Paul Roberts has put together a piece of reporting to do his profession proud. This is not just a book about oil, it covers energy as a whole. You can quibble with this or that detail (and I will), but this is an excellent introduction, the best single book on energy now available for ordinary citizens.

Roberts synthesizes the information he gathers superbly. The viewpoint he conveys is more optimistic than Heinberg's excellent The Party's Over (see my review) but more urgent and pessimistic than Economist reporter Vaitheeswaran's Power to the People (see my review). Roberts has no utopian libertarian illusions about business, but realizes that business is inevitably going to be part of the solutions that emerge, and so he gives careful thought to the role of corporations and industries.

Roberts does not explain how oil geologists use Hubbert's Curve to estimate oil reserves, and this is a weakness compared to Heinberg, Goodstein (Out of Gas -- see my review), or the oil geologists themselves, Deffeyes (Hubbert's Peak) or Campbell (The Coming Oil Crisis). But he doesn't base his analysis on the over-optimistic estimates of the U.S.G.S. or Exxon Mobil, so this is not a major shortcoming. A bigger problem is that he doesn't mention or apply EROEI analysis (energy return on energy invested). If he did, he might be more pessimistic, and for this crucial physics application, Heinberg and Goodstein are quite valuable.

Based on everything he learned in his reporting, Roberts concludes THE END OF OIL with recommendations for U.S. energy policy. Here are his three major proposals:

1) The government should move immediately and aggressively to boost natural gas supplies. Gas will only serve as a bridging fuel, and might last two or three decades.

2) The government should implement a "carbon penalty," not in the form of a carbon tax, but rather a carbon trading system, a cap-and-trade regime. He suggests a delayed start and low starting costs that would rise over time, giving industry a clear timeline so it can plan to make the needed transition to non-carbon energy sources. Along with the carbon penalty, a well-funded R&D program would be needed to develop coal gasification and carbon sequestration. Roberts sees this as politically necessary in order to coopt the powerful coal industry, which could otherwise block the needed changes.

3) Finally, the government needs to launch an all-out drive to reduce Americans' high consumption of oil and energy. Raising auto fuel efficiency is the obvious place to start, and does not have to be based on radical new designs, at least not at first. The details of Roberts's proposal takes into account the fierce resistance of the automobile industry, and is based on incentives, just as with the coal industry.

All of these steps are just part of a bridging strategy to a renewable energy economy. Roberts doesn't do justice to all of these possibilities, but presents fascinating glimpses into research on hydrogen, fuel cells, and solar energy, particularly the advances in solar that have been made in Germany. It is true that he neglects the promise of biofuels -- he mentions the category, but doesn't devote any space to it.

Fossil fuels are on the way out, whether we like it or not -- they are not renewable, and so once extracted in a frighteningly short few years, that's it. For more on renewable energy, including solar, wind and biomass fuels, see Hermann Scheer's The Solar Economy: Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Global Future (see my review), Howard Geller's Energy Revolution: Policies For A Sustainable Future (see my review), and Joseph Romm's The Hype About Hydrogen.

My THE CLEAN/RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION list has many more books on this subject.

While the professional reviewers have given Robert's book only the highest of praise, (The New York Review of Books calls it "the best single book ever produced about our energy economy and its environmental implications") several reader-reviewers have faulted Roberts for not being an economist. As someone who had to endure a good deal of economics while earning my MBA, I can assure you, these unnamed, un-credentialed "reviewers" aren't economists either.
They all seem to have the same complaint: that Roberts doesn't understand economics because he doesn't believe the law of supply and demand will deliver us smoothly from our energy dilemma. Well, no one else who's taken more than freshman Economics 101 thinks supply/demand functions in that simplistic way either. Sure, the supply/demand dynamic is at work, but markets left to their own devices are quite capable of dragging us through shortages, depressions, environmental disasters, and even wars on their way to new equilibrium. Roberts doesn't fail to understand supply and demand. On the contrary, he sees it quite clearly, with all its real world complexity and danger, and helps the lay reader to see it as well. I have to wonder if these "reviewers" even finished the book.
The End Of Oil is written not by an economist (thank heavens!) but by a respected journalist who spent years interviewing economists and a myriad other energy experts and players. Roberts has done what few economists could have; written an accessible, readable, but comprehensive book that could get the American public thinking constructively about our energy strategy (or lack thereof).
In this country, we like to think the real power lies with the people, and I believe it does, but only when we can be bothered to exercise it. We must first recognize and understand an issue before we've any chance of voting wisely, whether with ballots or our wallets. Reading this book is an enjoyable, interesting first step.

Let me be as concise as Roberts is comprehensive: this is best book on the looming energy crisis that I have read, and I have read half a dozen.

It's the best because it is the most thorough and the most readable. It is also very well researched and demonstrates the kind of understanding of a large and complex subject that inspires confidence.

So why do we have some negative reviews? It's hard to say since most of them are as vacuous as Roberts is detailed, but my guess is that some reviewers are offended because Roberts lays the blame for our energy problems on the politicians, in particular on the politicians currently in power, and he minces no words. To wit: "If American energy politics has always been dysfunctional, a new standard may have been set with the election of George W. Bush. The Texas Republican floated into office on a wave of campaign contributions from the energy and auto industries ($2.4 million from carmakers alone), and proceeded to assemble a White House that was closely aligned with both industries." (p. 298)

I also noticed that one reviewer thinks that Roberts doesn't realize that hydrogen is essentially a storage medium. One has only to read the book to see that Roberts has a commanding understanding of the so-called hydrogen economy based on the fuel cell, and a firm grasp of the problems involved in getting there.

Roberts touts renewables and anything that limits the amount of carbon that goes into the atmosphere. This does not set well with the fossil fuel industry, especially with the powers that be in Vice-President Cheney's home state of Wyoming where the coal reserves are enormous. He also touts conservation and shows how following the administration of Jimmy Carter it became something of a dirty word, so much so that now it is better to speak of energy efficiency than to actually tell people they ought to conserve, or heaven forbid, put on cardigan sweaters as Carter did. To me the most remarkable chapter in the book is the one on conservation and energy efficiency, Chapter 9 "Less is More." Can you imagine how such a statement as "Less is More" would appear to a conference of Texas oil men? You might as well be a vegan at the barbeque.

Roberts estimates that "if efficiency were approached not simply as an afterthought but as a core element in industrial design" the total savings would be enormous. "[R]eengineering the entire car concept around fuel efficiency...could yield gasoline-powered cars that get not just forty miles per gallon but sixty miles per gallon or even eighty miles per gallon... Introducing vehicles like this on a global scale would save as much oil as is produced by all the members of OPEC combined..." (pp. 227-228)

Why hasn't that been done? The reason is complex, and a good way to appreciate the forces working against conservation and efficiency is to read this book. Roberts spent a lot of time and energy finding out why we are in the fix we're in, and he does an outstanding job of explaining it to the general reader.

But, strange to say, after reading this book I am not as pessimistic as I once was. I think we are going to solve our energy problems through the combination of existing energy sources, oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar and other fringe renewables, and especially through conservation and a more efficient use of the energy we have. (By the way, Roberts' discussion of natural gas and how it is coming heavily to market and why right now, is very interesting.) As any astute economist knows, a penny saved is better than a penny earned (if only because of taxes!), so it is true that energy not wasted is cheaper and more reliable than energy that we have to get from OPEC.

There is a slight danger however of an incredibly horrendous downside in this brave new world that I hope will be there for my grandchildren. If we continue to go hog wild with fossil fuels, especially if China, the US and the rest of the world indiscriminately burn coal to fire our economies, we may put so much CO2 into the air that we will not be able to stop a runaway green house effect. That danger is worse than a nuclear winter: think of Venus where lead melts on the surface on the planet. That could happen here, and we could get beyond the point of no return without realizing it.

That danger alone is reason enough to work as diligently as possible to find ways to avoid using fossil fuels, but if we must, pay the cost to "scrub" them and dispose of the carbon without letting it get into the air. Roberts gives a good idea of the problems involved in doing this and where the technology and--more importantly--where the mentality of our leaders is on this subject.

Ignore the nay-sayers. This is an outstanding book.