[julianj]

Half Gone
Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis
By Jeremy Leggett
Pbk Portobello Books 2005
312 pages

US Title is: The Empty Tank

This book on oil depletion and climate change starts with a Douglas Adams-like whimsical tale: The Story of the Blue Pearl – Earth’s entire history to date in 17 pages. When we humans, the Thinkers, arrive, then create industry, burning huge quantities of fossil fuels, we make two mistakes:

Big Oversight One

This is the discovery of greenhouse gases and that some Thinkers have vested interests, particularly the “Empire of Oil….the single biggest user of oil however, was the military of the Number One Nation State They and the oil states dug in to defend their perceived interests and elected not to hear the Scientific Thinkers warning about the planet.”

Big Oversight Two

Which could be called the Lynch/Odell/Yergin/Browne position: oil won’t run out anytime soon. Even though dissident thinkers were pointing out that the “[We] would no longer be able to run [our] lives on growing amounts of cheap oil.”

After this unconventional intro the book settles down to a more mundane explanation of the twin problems of oil depletion and climate change. Annoyingly Leggett invents his own terminology – instead of “peaking” he calls it the “topping point”. I think this will confuse readers who are not fully informed about the issue. He should have stuck to the accepted terms.

Leggett issues dire economic warnings: “Should the Early Toppers [i.e Campbell] be right…..there have been five price peaks since 1965, all of them followed by economic recessions of varying severity.”

He moves onto very strong ground as he describes from personal experience how oil is found, and how it has to have very specific geological conditions before an oil field can be formed. Which is why there is no oil on most of the planet. That’s the reason that we aren’t finding much more: there isn’t anywhere we haven’t looked already. He also outlines the difficulties of extracting and using unconventional oil.

Leggett then discusses the Topping Point (Peak) using the views of people we all are familiar with: Deffeyes, Campbell, Laherrère, Bakhtiari and Skrebowski, setting their views against those with the conventional mindset.

What makes this book refreshing is that it views the crisis as larger than just peak oil. He puts it in the context of widespread economic distruption and global warming. A substantial part of the book recaps his earlier “The Carbon Wars” – how fossil fuel advocates sabotaged the attempts to form a global consensus on Climate Change.

The final part of the book is called “What we can do about it”. Leggett suggests methods of amelioration, which cuts across the doomer perspective of many peakniks: “It will be possible to replace oil, gas and coal completely with a plentiful supply of renewable energy, and faster than most people think.” He does admit that we have left it too late to head off economic trauma. Leggett also warns of the danger of using coal – if we burn a fraction of the reserves we have we are in for a crispy atmosphere. He is particularly scathing about the callous cultural mindset of coal devotees.

One of his particularly interesting suggestions is that renewable micro-power will be used in small, distributed energy grids, not national networks. “A new town, village or community might have its own ‘private wire’ network.” He looks to the days when parked fuel cell vehicles slot their power into the micro-grid instead of being inert when stationary.

Leggett also dismisses nuclear: it will be too late, financial institutions won’t invest in it, beside the waste problems and the threat of terrorism. He prophecies that the battleground which will decide the fate of the planet will be renewables versus coal.

In an epilogue he postulates a future for the Blue Pearl and its Thinkers, which after turmoil, becomes stable again despite the ravages of Big Oversight One.



This is an excellent book, with some new insights. It is very clear on the impact of our wrecking the planet, yet not doomy. It is the sort of book you can give to a “newbie” without them going blank or jumping out of the nearest window. On a personal level I was greatly amused at some of his comments, particularly as the first Depletion event I went to (The Energy Institute, Oct 04) apparently was quite a turning point for the industry: he quotes from it quite a lot – I was too much of a newbie peaknik myself to know that at the time.

[qwanta]

Thanks for posting your review.

What's Leggett's take on how peak oil will impact global warming?