[FossilFool]

If anyone felt so inclined, I wondered if anyone who has read a PO book or books might write the main points of the book or books that someone who is just reading the internet might not already know.

I haven't read any of these PO books, and I probably will never. They probably have some good points that I am not considering though that at least could decrease by a certain degree of uncertainty some aspects of this, not that it exists of course but other important aspects.

Or you can just write what book you read and say "I know something you don't know!" or whatever. But if you'd like to share about the books, I'd appreciate it.

[clv101]

Here's a list of the peak oil books I've read over the last two years:

http://www.vitaltrivia.co.uk/my-reading-list/

I plan to write 200 word mini-reviews (and volunteers?) for each when I get a chance but for now I would recommend these two for the background:

Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage
Kenneth S. Deffeyes

Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies
Richard Heinberg

This one to get a fundamental understanding of resource constraint:

The Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update
Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows

But if you only want to read one it has to be this one:

Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis
Jeremy Leggett

It has a different title in the US but I think it's the best since Leggett is a geologist, has personally worked for major oil companies looking for oil in the field, has taught petro-geology at university but also totally has his head around climate change having consulted for government on the subject. It's the only book I've seen to simultaneously address peak oil and climate change.

[Novus]

The only one of those books I read was Twilight in Desert.

The main focus of Twilight is just the facts to dispell the myths about the world's premire oil producer Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom's oil reserves are a state secret but the truth is out there inside the hundreds of technical papers published about the dificulties each individual field is facing. The truth is Ghawar and SA's other great fields are either platauing or in decline and the prospect of developing new fields is almost nil. The bottom line is SA's promise to fill the world's oil needs is nothing but an empty lie. The book is very dry and lacks the emotional appeals of the end of the world that other books may offer. The is left up tp the reader.

[sysfce2]

There's a whole forum for this:

http://www.peakoil.com/forum36.html

[Leanan]

I wrote a synopsis of Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies:

http://members.aol.com/leanan7/tainter.htm

It's not quite a peak oil book, but is very related.

For an idea of what Twilight In the Desert by Matthew Simmons is about, see this article:

http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=9692

For a very brief synopsis of David Goodstein's Crude Awakening: The End of the Age of Oil, see this article:

http://members.aol.com/leanan7/goodstein.htm