Book review: The Last Oil Shock

…In common with what you would expect from the genre, Strahan gives a thorough account of the history of the oil industry, and a fascinating section on the life of M.K. Hubbert, clearly a remarkable man, and the official unacceptability of his message during the Kennedy era when Americans were being promised a man on the moon. The murky world of official reserve estimates is delved into and the more pessimistic projections from Campbell et al compared, claiming that apart from the clearly inaccurate forcastings of the US Geological Survey, based on faulty data, other assessments are so close as to provide a near-consensus of Peak before 2020.

Strahan describes in detail just how dependent on fossil fuels modern economies have become for everything from heating and transport to, most significantly, food, and the critical impact this has had on human population growth:


So it is very well for economists to sneer that Malthus has been continually proved wrong by human ingenuity. Ingenious we may be, but for the last century our single big idea has been petroleum, on which we now depend utterly for industrial materials, almost all our transport, and critically for food; every calorie you consume takes ten calories of fossil fuel to produce. And now our big idea is no longer big enough, we are forced to adopt the next best alternatives, which all come with stringent conditions attached. the sources that are abundant and energy dense such as coal have the potential to devastate the climate and life on earth. The sources that are renewable and clean are so diffuse as to make the job of replacing oil truly monumental. It is going to get a whole lot harder to keep proving Malthus wrong.

Strahan pulls no punches in alerting us to just how precarious and vulnerable our situation is, pointing out at the beginning of the ironically titled chapter