by Veritas » Sun 01 Oct 2006, 19:47:14
Greetings,
I was wondering what reading people would suggest as a good starting point for learning about peak oil, the post-oil future, alternative energies, etc.
The essence of my interest, and my studies, is to assess what the options are for the future. What transition strategies can we use, what should we reasonably expect.
I first became interested in the "low tech" future after reading a 1970-ish article by a guy named George McCrobie (i believe that was the author's name), which talked about the need to develop products locally in the event of high oil prices. The normal capitalist logic of mass production and economies of scale gets turned upside-down a bit when you can't ship everything everywhere for a negligible cost.
More recently I stumbled back across the peak oil issue (I wrote an essay on it like 7 years ago and pretty much forgot about it), and saw an opportunity for study. My background is political science and history, and I've held off on a masters/phD for lack of a subject that I could really say defined what I wanted to spend my life generating knowledge and expertise on.
Peak oil and a post-cheap-oil future strike a very solid chord, and it seems like there is a pretty significant amount of expertise already built up (judging by the activity and posts on this forum and the number of articles/news reports).
For someone just getting their feet wet on the issue, what is the best place to start? I've bought 3 books that I'm currently reading, and I'll be browsing through the many posts on this forum to learn what I can here as well. The books I've got are Kunstler's "The long emergency" (he's a sensationalist for sure, but its an easy read and there are some interesting historical facts and theories in there), David Goodsteins "Out of Gas", and Richard Heinberg's "Power Down". These were pretty arbitrary choices, so if there's any book we'd consider a must-read or an authoritative source, I'd like to know so I can get that under my belt before getting into more arterial reading.
Thanks,
-Ver