Inspect The Party's Over: Oil, War And The Fate Of Industrial Societies Interpreted By Richard Heinberg Released As Ebook

will not go into my personal feelings about the book other than to say I agreewith the author, His premise portrays complex industrial societies as found in North America/Europe/Pacific Rim will cease to exist as complex societies all because of geology, physics and chemistry.
We are approaching Peak Oil, or have, and the energy available in alternative sources is insufficient to continue the economic growth paradigm of industrialism, The disturbing thing is the development of alternative renewable sources has not occurred in a time frame that would assure a painless transition, The political leadership is absent except for the approach, as in America, that we go to war to assure our continued access to "cheap energy, " So we now control foreign sources of oil, but because of Peak Oil, what is available to tap becomes harder to reach, and hence more expensive, Renewable sources do not have the EROEI energy invested on energy invested to the degree that fossil fuels provide, So basically we are between a rock and a hard place, Wow. The only negative thing I have to say about this book is that there is too much information to properly absorb! It really does a good job of explaining all the reasons that our current oilbased lifestyles are not sustainable.
And not in any vague way, He lists all the relevant facts and processes geological, political, economic, etc, that give the reader insight into what the problem really is and how the current proposed solutions aren't going to be the answer, It's kind of scary but enlightening, Everybody should have to read this, Maybe then there would be hope! This book is now a few years old, would love to read a followup if there is one, Indeed, the party is coming to an end, At some point the production of easily attainable crude oil will peak and the forces of supply/demand will kick in with a vengeance, While the exact date wont be known until we are looking at it in the rearview mirror, most estimates have the peak occurring sometime in the next decade.
What effect such an event will have on life is hard to tell but suffice it to say that massive societal upheaval isnt out of the question, As Heinberg points out, we are far enough behind the game with our implementation of renewable energy sources that no matter what we do, were going to have an awkward period ahead of us.
Note of interest: Nuclear energy is not an infinite source, When a full EROEI energy returned on energy invested analysis is done, nuclear is extremely inefficient, Also, plutonium exists in finite amounts and must be mined from the earth a process that inherently leads to an environmental mess, The solution to the upcoming woes Selfsufficiency is the key, Ranking first among the list of things to do is learning how to grow our own food, Nothing makes a crisis worse more quickly than rapidly declining food sources This book is definitely worth reading, it has some important information, It also has a few flaws, but they don't detract from what the book has to offer,

Offers a very helpful perspective on the short period of human history that oil has been available, what the availability of abundant and cheap energy has meant, and where we are on the curve of availability which is moving toward the end.
Also, pay attention to natural gas,

The faults are mostly that the book could be construed as alarmist and overstated, although I didn't read it that way, Time will tell about that, Just because Malthus was wrong doesn't mean that this book is way off the mark, Oil is a finite resource, no one disagrees about that, The lack of clarity is all about timing and degree, I really enjoyed this thought provoking book, I highly recommend this book, Heinberg says that peak oil will occur betweenbut he leans towards earlier, Its impossible to figure out when exactly it will/has hit because lots of countries hide how much accessible oil they really have like Saudi Arabia, He says that we could pass peak oil without knowing it but that we will be able to look back and say "there it was, " A lot of the signs that he mentions will occur around peak oil are here already, I'm not sure if I'm reading into it too much but the struggling global economy, accompanied by a financial crisis, with no end in sight is fairly interesting to think about considering he wrote this book before the American melt down.
We have not prepared adequately with renewable energy so we are heading for a future with far less energy, Its just a question of how messy the let down will be, READ THIS BOOK! Love to hear what others think of it,

At the start of each chapter he had quotes from various people that were quite interesting, here's a sampling,

Forests to precede civilizations, deserts to follow,
Francois Rene Chateaubriand ca,

My father rode a camel, I drive a car. My son flies a jet airplane, His son will ride a camel,
Saudi saying

Under the rule of the "free market" ideology, we have gone through two decades of an energy crisis without an effective energy policy.
. . We have no adequate policy for the development or use of other, less harmful forms of energy, We have no adequate system of public transportation,
Wendell Berry

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist,
Kenneth Boulding ca.

Sooner or later, we sit down to a banquet of consequences,
Robert Louis Stevenson ca,
This is the best general introduction to the subject of "peak oil" and one of the first to break this subject to a general audience, Readers of TheOilDrum. com won't find anything in this they don't already know, but for newbies it's great, One of the most important revelations in the last century is that we have reached the peak of oil supply, and it is all downhill from here, What does that mean, and what are the implications of this startling realization to civilization as we know it That is the focus of this phenomenal study, Heinberg obviously tries to be level headed, and fair to all viewpoints, I've read books from both sides of the spectrum, from the doomsayers to the believers in technomiracles, Heinberg is somewhere in between, admitting that life will have to change in dramatic ways, but holding out hope for saving some of the best of what we have.
You will find it depressing, but it is important to make changes now if we are to save anything, Take the red pill, and take control of your future, In a way, it's a doomsday book, but it needs to be taken seriously,
The book theme is that Modern societies are based on consumption of resources that are coming to an end, Our leaders are in denial or just not interested in telling the painful truth, and sooner or later we humanity are all going to be plunged into a crises.
That is, unless we start taking action,
The book was published inthough it has a small revision at the end from after, some of the authors predictions have become true, I hope some of his other predictions don't, as if they do.
. . well as the Chinese curse goes "may you have an interesting life", . . we are heading for some interesting times, to say the least, An excellent in depth look at energy issues and possible solutions, Certainly there was much more hope in the early's when this was written, But yeah still knew there would need to be energy contraction,

Worth archiving as it explains it all so well, enlightening! The world is about to run out of cheap oil and change dramatically, Within the next few years, global production will peak, Thereafter, even if industrial societies begin to switch to alternative energy sources, they will have less net energy each year to do all the work essential to the survival of complex societies.
We are entering a new era, as different from the industrial era as the latter was from medieval times,

In The Partys Over, Richard Heinberg places this momentous transition in historical context, showing how industrialism arose from the harnessing of fossil fuels, how competition to control access to oil shaped the geopolitics of the twentieth century and how contention for dwindling energy resources in the twentyfirst century will lead to resource wars in the Middle East, Central Asia and South America.
He describes the likely impacts of oil depletion and all of the energy alternatives, Predicting chaos unless the United Statesthe worlds foremost oil consumeris willing to join with other countries to implement a global program of resource conservation and sharing, he also recommends a “managed collapse” that might make way for a slowerpaced, lowenergy, sustainable society in the future.


More readable than other accounts of this issue, with fuller discussion of the context, social implications and recommendations for personal, community, national and global action, Heinbergs updated book is a riveting wakeup call for humankind as the oil era winds down, and a critical tool for understanding and influencing current US foreign

policy.


Richard Heinberg, from Santa Rosa, California, has been writing about energy resources issues and the dynamics of cultural change for many years, A member of the core faculty at New College of California, he is an awardwinning author of three previous books, His Museletter was nominated for the Best Alternative Newsletter award by Utne in, As a daily newspaper journalist I once attempted to research and write a Front Page story detailing the problems associated with Peak Oil, It was part of my intellectual growth, I suppose, in that I was awakening to energy issues and beginning to incorporate them into my knowledge of urban planning and transportation issues.

I remember working my ass off to get that story to localize and regionalize what amounted to a global issue and working with the photographer to illustrate it.
I remember getting up at the ungodly hour ofa, m. just so we could ride a shuttle van with a person I found who decided to jettison her car because of high gas prices and who naturally breathed real life into my story.
Anyway, the photographer and I were both excited about the story, about getting at something big, To this day, the photographer, Dean Koepfler, remembers it, I actually spoke to him during a social occasion last year, and our attempt into raise the public's consciousness of Peak Oil was one of the first things he mentioned to me as we shared war stories from the newsroom.

"You were right," Dean said, almost wistfully, Maybe I was. The Front Page story never ran, It got junked into a sidebar and tucked inside where it played second third fourth fiddle to a story about alternative fuels,
The story behind why it got junked is long and not worth going into right now, But after reading "The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies" by Richard Heinberg, I can't stop thinking about my attempt at what Heinberg has more comprehensively accomplished: showing why we better get serious about rescaling our lives in light of the end of the cheap oil age.

I can't stop thinking about the fact that if people honestly processed what Heinberg has accomplished with this book, they would have to think differently and act differently and understand just how energy particularly oil and natural gas undergird everything we do, and how that undergirding is breaking apart.

I can't stop feeling sad about how my story never saw the light of day isn't that what journalists and newspapers are supposed to do Tell people something they don't know, preferably something important
Heinberg even takes a swipe at mainstream newspapers for failing to tell people the broader story about oil and energy when they had one of the best opportunities to do so: when gas prices were skyrocketing earlier this decade.
I feel like calling him up and telling him I tried,
It is a strange feeling to read a really good book that marshals scads of evidence and fact and science to blow up people's misconceptions about how the world really works and then think to yourself: How many people know about this book, how many people are going to read it, how many people are going to understand that Heinberg isn't out to depress them but to motivate them to act in the face of physics and reality and the laws of thermodynamics
Heinberg's book is the most comprehensive and technically, albeit densely, precise rundown of our energy predicament I've ever read, covering everything from geopolitics and photovoltaic cells to oil and natural gas depletion.
Everything you ever wanted to know about energy and how it supports our modern industrial life is right here, And Heinberg lays out a number of things we can do to deal with the coming oil crash,
The United States has something likepercent of the world's population and uses a quarter of its natural resources, We consume the most oil, We support client states that oppress their indigenous populations so that we can enjoy the spoils of their resources, In our relationship with Saudi Arabia, we have one of the nastiest geopolitical foreign policy arrangements in the history of the planet, And, as this telling excerpt shows, we've been waging wars and implementing policies to secure the energy to maintain our wealth and hegemony for a long time:
"The U.
S. policy of maintaining resource dominance is not new, Shortly after World War II, a brutally frank State Department Policy Planning Study authored by George F, Kennan, the American Ambassador to Moscow, noted:
'We havepercent of the world's wealth, but only,percent of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity, To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality, . . we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation, '"
Incredible, isn't it Are people paying attention to this I mean, enough people to actually bring about significant change Oh, I forgot, They're busy watching "Gossip Girl, "
Well, as the title of Heinberg's book starkly puts it, the party's over, OIl is a finite resource, So is natural gas. And we're on the downslope of both, Coal is a poor substitute, and, when used, poisons the earth, Nuclear, while arguably better for the planet, is scary and just too costly to make happen on the scale we'd need to continue civilization as we know it.
Wind power will help, but can't be scaled to the present footprint of human civilization, Solar will help. But, as with wind power, scalability is extremely problematic, From Heinberg's point of view and he backs it with plenty of evidence our modern industrial society is ayear anomaly of sorts that was enabled by cheap, abundant oil, and, by extracting it and not caring about the consequences, we overshot our population and had a lot of fun and manufactured a lot of plastic and fertilized the fuck out of our soils and caused ecological damage and now here we are, facing the cliff, the downside of Hubbert's Peak, and we're still willing to listen to any politician who'll tell us, hey folks, it's OK, you can keep the party going.

So, what do we do
Heinberg lays out a comprehensive set of actions, local, regional and global, toward sustainability, He covers everything from farming and transportation to finance and foreign policy, Make no mistake, though, he believes there isn't enough oil or natural gas to sustain the current population or physical makeup of civilization, As a result, population will have to come down, communities will have to power down and make other living arrangements, and, to make this transition bearable, we need to get to work on it quickly.
Technology isn't going to save us, Getting better at pumping more oil out of the ground isn't going to save us, And remember: it takes energy to produce energy, If we want to rescale and prepare for renewable sources of energy i, e. , wind, solar, Heinberg argues, then we should start investing our current energy reserves into the project of building wind turbines and solar communities, Instead, Heinberg worries, we'll probably just continue throwing it at the fossilfuel party whose biggest guests include our gasguzzling National Automobile Fleet and our Middle Eastern client states who'd love to give us more oil but would like a nice big shipment of guns with which to properly oppress their civilian population.

What Heinberg envisions is people embracing egalitarian living arrangements, and local farming and economies, What this will require is detoxification from consumerism and TV watching and the belief that you can get something for nothing, Also, it would help if people would understand that money isn't money money is simply a medium of exchange to simplify the process of trading one thing for another, so that you don't have to carry around beaver pelts and trade them for large boulders.
Money is petrodollars. Money is energy. Without energy, money is meaningless,
When I think about Heinberg's book, I still think about my illfated attempt at researching and writing a big piece about Peak Oil, My story never saw the light of day, But, as Heinberg's updated and expanded book points out, the issue of Peak Oil increasingly is finding its way into the mainstream,
That's good.
Then again, the mainstream whether it's mainstream media, thought, culture, etc, seems to have a way of dismissing people like Heinberg and their books, I've seen it before. Hell, I've experienced it before,
I suppose the best way to think about Peak Oil and Peak Natural Gas, etc, is in a local way, That is, what can we do where we live In my journalism days, at least I tried, At least I tried. Now, with the fundamental problem of the end of the cheap oil age, I'm thinking about what I should do to prepare for the future, Thankfully, there is more than one answer to that question,
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