Plenty of opinions about energy

…In a self-assigned reading project, your friendly neighborhood business columnist has spent the past few months sampling recent books about energy — some read cover to cover, others perused or skimmed.

And after reviewing the assembled literature on one subject, one conclusion can be reached about books on energy:

There sure are a lot of them.

Given the volume of volumes, it’s not surprising that they cover just about every angle and permutation of energy.

You can, for example, find a wealth of books that not only predict that we’re all basically doomed, but also seem almost upbeat about the prospect, if it means a collapse of Western civilization and the loss of most vestiges of modern life. James Howard Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century” is replete with such cheery predictions as “the United States may not survive as a nation in any meaningful sense but rather will devolve into a set of autonomous regions” and “many of the suburban subdivisions will become the slums of the future.”

In a similar vein, you could try “High Noon for Natural Gas: The New Energy Crisis” or “The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies” (cover illustration of a man holding a gas nozzle to the side of his head) by Richard Heinberg.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer