Rauli Partanen, Harri Paloheimo, and Heikki Waris
Reviewed by Frank Kaminski
Toward the end of this book, its authors make an astute, if self-deprecating, observation about its potential merits. They’ve been discussing how innate human biases cause us to make cognitive errors when trying to make sense of world crises. They’ve described in particular the tendency of scientifically knowledgeable people to become less convinced about climate change the more evidence they encounter for it, due to confirmation bias. For the authors, this fact “raises the question of how meaningful writing this book has actually been.” Won’t skeptical readers simply cherry-pick the data that supports their views and reject the rest? While it is, of course, correct that some readers will do this, there’s no question that writing the book has been meaningful. Indeed, in this era of unprecedented challenge, few things could be more meaningful than accurate knowledge such as this book contains, together with the will to act on that knowledge.
Written by Finnish energy analysts Rauli Partanen, Harri Paloheimo and Heikki Waris, The World After Cheap Oil offers an exhaustive, up-to-date dissection of the world oil situation. It looks at the issue from every angle, starting with the looming supply shock for which the world’s developed nations are tragically unprepared, and moving on to the concomitant crisis with Earth’s climate that our oil use has unleashed. It also supplies an in-depth assessment of alternative energy sources, as well as the science, geopolitics, psychology and economics vital to understanding our predicament. Unquestionably the book’s strongest points are its wealth of hard data, straightforward explanations and informative visual aids. Indeed, the authors aptly describe their purpose as providing “a thorough package of information” about the end of cheap oil.
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