7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent on some points, misses the boat on others, July 30, 2007
This review is from: Future Energy: How the New Oil Industry Will Change People, Politics and Portfolios (Hardcover)
Bill Paul's book takes a stab at predicting what the energy sector of the future will look like. It's refreshing to see a journalist taking the future of energy seriously. I really like some of his analysis. For example, he calculates that if all the hidden subsidies were included, the cost of a gallon of gasoline would be at least $11 a gallon. These subsidies include such things as military expenditures, lost economic opportunities due to transfer of funds to oil-producing countries, and the like. Paul is certainly correct here. In my opinion, $11 a gallon is actually a lowball figure. For example, he says nothing about one of the most destructive forms of government subsidy, local regulation requiring the provision of certain numbers of parking spaces around businesses and residences. Most American localities have such regulations, which are known as parking requirements. The idea behind parking requirements is to make sure that free parking is always available. Unfortunately, the effect is to favor automobile travel over other forms of transportation, like walking, that don't require all that vehicle storage space. It's a form of enforced inefficiency. U.S. building codes also favor the automobile in other ways, such as by requiring very wide streets. Parking requirements are one of the main reasons why housing is so expensive in the U.S. The cost of parking requirements in the United States is in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year, which would shove up that per gallon price a few more dollars. For more on this, see Donald Shoup's book "The High Cost of Free Parking."
Paul assumes economic growth is a good thing. Economic growth is generally measured by GDP, which as a measure of well-being is so inaccurate as to be almost laughable. GDP is measured by counting up what is spent on various items. This works more or less OK if you're counting food bought by hungry people, but very poorly indeed if you're counting money spent on bombs or automatic rifles, or on parking garages for rich people's cars. GDP is not corrected for increasing population, pollution, exhaustion of natural resources, or declining quality of life. More accurate measures of economic growth, such as the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare or Genuine Progress Indicator, tend to show that there has been far less genuine economic growth than the official statistics suggest. For more on this, see McKibben's book "Deep Economy," Daly's "Beyond Growth," or Brian Czech's "Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train."
I think Paul is too optimistic on how easy it's going to be to make the switch to new technologies and keep our current American lifestyle going. Driving 90 minutes alone each day just to get back and forth to work in my opinion is not a viable option for the long-term future, no matter how efficient the car. The U.S. population is still climbing. None of Paul's proposals will work if this continues. Even if we managed to find a way to fuel all the existing cars with alternative fuels, it's very unlikely we could find enough to fuel cars for all the newcomers, not to mention housing, heat, lighting, etc. No matter how you look at it, a stable population is the first requirement for a sustainable economy. In the U.S. that means we have to take reducing immigration seriously. If we want to keep any semblance at all of the current U.S. lifestyle, we can't invite an unlimited number of people to this party.
Paul is excited by the possibility of converting garbage and other wastes to energy. I tend to disagree with him here. A great deal of the wastes we deal with today are themselves products of the age of cheap oil. An example is meat by-products, such as turkey offal. Cheap turkey is itself a product of cheap grains, which are produced using natural gas-based fertilizers and shipped long distances using diesel fuel. These products are not likely to be available for energy production in the future. For more on this see Kunstler's book "The Long Emergency."
Paul devotes a chapter to "Every Drop of Oil We Can Get is Important," discussing how to get more oil out of of the ground to meet demand. Paul has this completely backward. The more we push to get the last drop out of U.S. oil fields now, the sooner the earth's oil endowment will run out. Fossil fuels are the product of millions of years' worth of sunlight falling on ancient swamps. When they're gone, they're gone. We'd do better keeping them in the ground for a while longer. That oil will be worth a lot more in 50 or 100 years than it is today. What we need to be aiming for is the softest possible landing when making the transition away from fossil fuels. The sooner we start, the longer we'll have at least some of those fuels around to ease the transition.
Paul thinks raising gas taxes is a loser because of how Americans feel about their cars and trucks. He prefers a scheme known as Tradable Gasoline Rights, or TGR. I simply don't see the advantage of this over conventional gas taxes. I think a rise in gas taxes would work fine if it were carefully handled. The most important point is that it needs to be a tax shift, not a tax increase. Raise gas taxes while reducing income taxes, with the shift in tax types being dollar-for-dollar as closely as possible. Why would people object to this? After all, if they really wanted to, they could simply take their income tax savings and spend them on gas. We need to tax less things we want--like income and employment--and more of things we don't want--like fossil fuel use.
Paul also doesn't like gas taxes because they can hurt the poor. Wake up! Anyone who can afford a car these days probably isn't among the poor.
I really enjoyed Paul's analysis of the risk of large shocks in oil prices. This is a serious problem that doesn't get enough attention.
The High Cost of Free Parking
The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train: Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, and a Plan to Stop them All
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
good but incomplete introduction, August 4, 2007
This review is from: Future Energy: How the New Oil Industry Will Change People, Politics and Portfolios (Hardcover)
The reader should know that one purpose of this book is to give investors advice on companies to invest in. Mr. Paul hardly mentions solar or wind power, though in Denmark the wind provides 20% of the country's energy. The author believes that, except for a difficult transition period because we have failed to plan and with a few caveats, basically everything will be just fine. The author also believes that with more government control that things will be even better, despite the government's past failings in this area. The facts the author himself mentions would indicate a less rosy picture.
Nonetheless, I gave this book 3 stars. It is clearly written, not too abstract or technical; has a good glossary, index, appendixes and footnotes; and has a list of relevant internet web sites. The author states that one of his purposes is to open a discussion. I believe the author has succeeded in that area.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Naive, vague and poorly researched, December 19, 2009
This review is from: Future Energy: How the New Oil Industry Will Change People, Politics and Portfolios (Hardcover)
I just finished this one and it was not very good. Paul is obviously a journalist and not an economist, engineer or investor. His work is basically an overview of the myriad energy futures that may come to pass. He does not once drill deeply into actual economic data. He barely explains new technologies. He recommends companies (like home improvement retailers) that could see growth of their core business seriously stunted by an energy shock. He recommends companies like the telecoms that are only in the least way, tangentially related to a new energy industry. He is basically throwing darts at a table of the S&P 500 and then explaining why those companies could potentially profit from peak oil and supporting these explanations with anecdotes from random "experts" he has spoken to. At the end of the book he even recommends Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers!
Plus he is not a very good writer. The book is littered with clichés and he even sprinkles on some lame jokes.
Skip this book if you are even vaguely familiar with alternative energy and peak oil.
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