Paul Roberts has put together a piece of reporting to do his profession proud. This is not just a book about oil, it covers energy as a whole. You can quibble with this or that detail (and I will), but this is an excellent introduction, the best single book on energy now available for ordinary citizens.
Roberts synthesizes the information he gathers superbly. The viewpoint he conveys is more optimistic than Heinberg's excellent
The Party's Over (see my review) but more urgent and pessimistic than Economist reporter Vaitheeswaran's
Power to the People (see my review). Roberts has no utopian libertarian illusions about business, but realizes that business is inevitably going to be part of the solutions that emerge, and so he gives careful thought to the role of corporations and industries.
Roberts does not explain how oil geologists use Hubbert's Curve to estimate oil reserves, and this is a weakness compared to Heinberg, Goodstein (
Out of Gas -- see my review), or the oil geologists themselves, Deffeyes (
Hubbert's Peak) or Campbell (
The Coming Oil Crisis). But he doesn't base his analysis on the over-optimistic estimates of the U.S.G.S. or Exxon Mobil, so this is not a major shortcoming. A bigger problem is that he doesn't mention or apply EROEI analysis (energy return on energy invested). If he did, he might be more pessimistic, and for this crucial physics application, Heinberg and Goodstein are quite valuable.
Based on everything he learned in his reporting, Roberts concludes THE END OF OIL with recommendations for U.S. energy policy. Here are his three major proposals:
1) The government should move immediately and aggressively to boost natural gas supplies. Gas will only serve as a bridging fuel, and might last two or three decades.
2) The government should implement a "carbon penalty," not in the form of a carbon tax, but rather a carbon trading system, a cap-and-trade regime. He suggests a delayed start and low starting costs that would rise over time, giving industry a clear timeline so it can plan to make the needed transition to non-carbon energy sources. Along with the carbon penalty, a well-funded R&D program would be needed to develop coal gasification and carbon sequestration. Roberts sees this as politically necessary in order to coopt the powerful coal industry, which could otherwise block the needed changes.
3) Finally, the government needs to launch an all-out drive to reduce Americans' high consumption of oil and energy. Raising auto fuel efficiency is the obvious place to start, and does not have to be based on radical new designs, at least not at first. The details of Roberts's proposal takes into account the fierce resistance of the automobile industry, and is based on incentives, just as with the coal industry.
All of these steps are just part of a bridging strategy to a renewable energy economy. Roberts doesn't do justice to all of these possibilities, but presents fascinating glimpses into research on hydrogen, fuel cells, and solar energy, particularly the advances in solar that have been made in Germany.
Fossil fuels are on the way out, whether we like it or not -- they are not renewable, and so once extracted in a frighteningly short few years, that's it. For more on renewable energy, including solar, wind and biomass fuels, see Hermann Scheer's
The Solar Economy: Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Global Future (see my review). A deliberate, proactive clean/renewable energy revolution is not taking place on schedule, and the likelihood grows greater with every passing year that social collapse will take place first, with the energy transition following of necessity. The best book on this is
The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization by the Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon.
My ENERGY REVOLUTION OR OVERSHOOT-AND-COLLAPSE? list has many more books on this subject.
