Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (Paperback)

Deffeyes energizes his readers by sweeping us easily through the denser strata of the complexities and developmental progress that built "Big Oil," but he also warns of relying on technology to save us in the future. Unlike many technological optimists, this life-long veteran of the industry concludes that new innovations like gas hydrates, deep-water drilling, and coal bed methane are unlikely to replace once-abundant petroleum in ease of use, production, and versatility. The Era of Carbon Man is ending.

A no-nonsense oilman blessed with a sense of humor, Deffeyes deftly boils his message down to the quick. Easily-produced petroleum is reaching its nadir, and although they are clean and renewable, energy systems like geothermal, wind and solar power won't solve our energy needs overnight. "Hubbert's Peak" represents an important aspect of the energy crisis, but it is only one factor in this multi-faceted problem that includes biosphere degradation, global warming, per-capita energy decline, and a science/industry community intolerant of new approaches to energy technology research and development. An exciting new book by the Alternative Energy Institute, Inc., "Turning the Corner: Energy Solutions for the 21st Century," addresses all of the components associated with the energy dilemma and is also available on Amazon.com.

Anyone who is concerned about what world citizens, politicians, and industry in the United States and international community must do to ensure a smooth transition from dependence on dangerous and polluting forms of energy to a more vital and healthier world, needs to read these books. Future generations rely on the decisions we make today.

Thirty years ago, U.S. oil production peaked, and has been declining ever since. Shortly, world oil production will hit the same peak, and begin to decline. That doesn't mean there will be no oil left; thirty years after hitting its own peak, the U.S. is still the second largest oil producer in the world. But it does mean that demand will outstrip supply, and that means the economic dislocations of the late 70s - the spiking prices, the long gas lines, the deep recession - will become permanent. Eventually, other sources of energy, both renewables and plentiful fossil fuels like natural gas, will fill in the breach. But it will be a long and painful process, requiring a ton of capital investments in research and in infrastructure that a suddenly poorer first world will be ill able to afford.

"Shortly", Deffeyes argues, means in one to six years, and probably in the early part of that range. One can quibble with some of his arguments for that timing. With luck, he acknowledges, there may be one significant set of oil fields yet to be discovered, in the South China Sea (unexplored so far because the competing jurisdictions of the several nearby island nations have made contracts hard to nail down.) And I don't think he's given sufficient weight to the fact that all the oil recovery in the Middle East is still "primary", using old-fashioned pumping technology. But if all the quibbles are granted, it only affords the world economy another five or ten years of grace.

So, if Deffeyes is wrong, the time to start making those massive investments and changes is today. If he is right, the time to start making them is ten years ago, and all we can accomplish by swift action is to make the period of intense pain a decade or two shorter. Though Professor Deffeyes isn't political enough or impolite enough to say so, Clinton (for all his green talk) failed to provide any leadership to reduce our dependence on petroleum. And his successor, of course, is providing energetic leadership, but all of it is geared to marching us all double-time into still more rapid consumption of what little oil is left. History will remember neither President Slick, nor President Oil Slick, any more kindly than it now remembers Herbert Hoover for fiddling while the fuse that would set off the Great Depression burned.

The book is an easy read, short and set in a conversational style that permits the reader to glide through the more technical portions if so inclined. The technical details and the mathematical arguments could be tighter, and the folksiness, which would be delightful in a lecture room, is occasionally a bit much on the written page. For those reasons, it would be easy to give the book only four stars. But those faults are inseparable from the book's virtues. They're compromises Deffeyes chose to make in order to be accessible to a wide audience, and his book deserves to reach one.

If environmentalists take Deffeyes' message seriously,they'll realize that we will soon be so starved for oil that ANWAR is certain to be plundered, and that nuclear plants are certain to sprout across the landscape like, well, like mushrooms. If Deffeyes is on or near target, nothing can prevent those developments. Greens today should be using ANWAR and an expanded nuclear industry as bargaining chips, to be traded for strict CAFE standards, investment in renewable technologies, non-industry oversight of nuclear safety, and (since the near term alternative will be coal) investment in natural gas pipeline infrastructure.