Walter Youngquist: Geodestinies
Preface. I was fortunate enough to know Walter for 15 years. He became a friend and mentor, helping me learn to become a better science writer, and sending me material I might be interested in, and delightful pictures of him sitting in a lawn chair and feeding wild deer who weren’t afraid of him. I thought his book Geodestinies: The Inevitable Control of Earth Resources over Nations and Individuals, published in 1997, was the best overview of energy and natural resources ever written, and encouraged him to write a second edition. He did try, but he spent so much time taking care of his ill wife, that he died before finishing it. I’ve made eight posts of just a few topics from the version that was in progress when he died at 96 years old in 2018 (500 pages).
More than any other energy and resources writer I know of, he focused on population as being the main problem that needed to be solved if we hoped to have a better future.
This first part covers many topics about energy, consumption, war, soil, oil production on various countries, and more. I have several more sections of this book in other posts under Experts/Walter Youngquist.
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The destinies of all nations and all people are in many ways bound up with the mineral and energy mineral resources of the Earth. Events of the geologic past have richly endowed some nations with valuable resources, whereas others have very few. The result is markedly different destinies for different nations. How these resources have affected the peoples of the past, how they influence our lives now, and how they will determine our futures is the study of GeoDestinies.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
walter youngquist, alice friedemann, energy skeptic
