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Book review of Heinberg’s “Afterburn: society beyond fossil fuels”
Book review of Heinberg’s “Afterburn: society beyond fossil fuels”
Preface. This book has 15 essays Heinberg wrote from 2011 to 2014, many of them available for free online. These are some of my Kindle notes of parts that interested me, so to you it will be disjointed and perhaps not what you would have chosen as important — but it gives you an idea of what a great writer Heinberg is and hopefully inspires you to buy his book.
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Heinberg, R. 2015. Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels. New Society Publishers.
The most obvious criticism that could be leveled at the book “The Party’s Over”, which came out in 2005, is the simple observation that, as of 2014, world oil production is increasing, not declining. However, the following passage points to just how accurate the leading peakists were in forecasting trends: “Colin Campbell estimates that extraction of conventional oil will peak before 2010; however, because more unconventional oil—including oil sands, heavy oil, and oil shale—will be produced during the coming decade, the total production of fossil-fuel liquids (conventional plus unconventional) will peak several years later. According to Jean Laherrère, that may happen as late as 2015.”
In the “Party’s Over”, I also summarized Colin Campbell’s view that “the next decade will be a ‘plateau’ period, in which recurring economic recessions will result in lowered energy demand, which will in turn temporarily mask the underlying depletion trend.
Economics 101 tells us that supply of and demand for a commodity like oil (which happens to be our primary energy source) must converge at the current market price, but no economist can guarantee that the price will be affordable to society. High oil prices are sand in the gears of the economy. As the oil industry is forced to spend ever more money to access ever-lower-quality resources, the result is a general trend toward economic stagnation. None of the peak oil deniers warned us about this.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Inspiration For the Burned-Out Localizer
Richard Heinberg wants you to “learn to be successfully and happily poorer.” Photo: video screenshot.
Inspiration For the Burned-Out Localizer
While Marx predicted that socialism would follow capitalism, Richard Heinberg predicts the next thing will be localism.
“All roads appear to lead eventually to localism; the questions are: how and when shall we arrive there, and in what condition? (And, how local?),” Heinberg writes in his latest book, Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels.
But that’s not what’s new in this collection of Heinberg’s essays. Anyone following the Transition movement has been hearing for nearly a decade that more active local economies are the inevitable future once the triple threat of climate change, peak oil and economic crisis topples global industrial capitalism as we know it. The message came through loud and clear in 2008 with The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins and the world’s local future has been a core tenet of Transition ever since.
What’s new about Afterburn is that it offers two things that Transitioners or anyone else who forecasts a more local future needs today: inspiration and advice for the future that’s better than most of what you’ll read elsewhere.
Inspiration
These days, with gas prices hovering around $2.50 a gallon and all the talk about cheap gas from fracking, if you still care about peak oil, then you’re going to be pretty lonely. It’s easy to feel like you’re the crazy person for seeing an end to fossil fuels and thinking it’s a big deal when everybody else acts like the party of cheap energy and economic growth is going to last forever.
– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/06/inspiration-for-the-burned-out-localizer/#sthash.LLWef4Ru.dpu
A Resilient Society
A Resilient Society
The final video in a four-part video series. Released in conjunction with Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels.
Resilience is a word that’s gaining a lot of currency in recent years, as more and more people realize there are some shocks headed our way. But what would a more resilient society look like?
This video is the fourth in a four-part series by Richard Heinberg and Post Carbon Institute. The themes covered in these videos are much more thoroughly explored in Heinberg’s latest book, Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels. (View the entire series here.)
Special thanks to New Society Publishers for partnering with us on this fantastic series and to Shutterstock.com for granting image rights.
…click on the above link to view the presentation…
The Great Burning
The Great Burning
Part two of a four-part video series. Released in conjunction with Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels.
What will we do when the Great Burning comes to an end?
In this short video, Richard Heinberg explores why The Great Burning — the combustion of oil, coal, and natural gas — must come to an end during the next few decades. If the twentieth century was all about increasing our burn rate year after blazing year, the dominant trend of twenty-first century will be a gradual flame-out.
This video is the second in a four-part series by Richard Heinberg and Post Carbon Institute. (View Part 1 Here.)The themes covered in these videos are much more thoroughly explored in Heinberg’s latest book, Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels.
…click on the above link to view the video…
