Richard Heinberg - Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...52

Table of Contents

Praise for PEAK EVERYTHING

Richard Heinberg brings important news that few will want to hear the limits weve been hearing about for four decades are really upon us. He also brings a pretty good hint of the directions we might take to escape the tightening knot. An important book from an important thinker.

Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

If humans survive the ongoing catastrophe that is this culture, it will be in great measure due to people like Richard Heinberg, who have the courage to directly face our predicament and the honesty to clearly yet gently describe our alternatives. Heinbergs work is always both inspirational and educational, and Peak Everything is no exception. This book should be required reading at all high schools and colleges, for all activists, and for all policy-makers.

Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame

There are few harder questions than the ones Richard Heinberg takes on in Peak Everything. Fortunately, he addresses them with his customary fearlessness, intellectual rigor and good sense. More than anyone else Ive encountered, Heinberg has an answer to the most fundamental question of all; How shall we go on from here. Reading this, I can believe there is hope that we can.

Sharon Astyk, author of Depletion and Abundance:Life on the New Home Front and Independence Days: A Guide toSustainable Food Storage and Preservation

Once again and with eyes as peeled to the task as a Buddhas Richard Heinberg jumps into the cauldron of global resource de- cline. This is his most integrated report from the social, economic, and ecological contraction now unfolding, which he delivers with mindfulness, compassion, and a view to humanitys strengths.

Chellis Glendinning, author of My Name Is Chellis and Im in Recovery from Western Civilization

Peak Oil is a great threat to our way of life, and Richard Heinberg is one of the worlds best-known writers and analysts of the subject. In Peak Everything, Heinberg gives us a series of provocative essays about the profound individual and global implications of Peak Oil.

Albert A. Bartlett, Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Colorado at Boulder

With Peak Everything, Richard Heinberg is once again on the cutting edge. We are all indebted to him for helping us understand our 21st cenury world.

Lester R. Brown, President, Earth Policy Institute, and author of Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble

Join the Conversation

Visit our online book club at www.newsociety.com to share your thoughts about Peak Everything. Exchange ideas with other readers, post questions for the author, respond to one of the sample questions or start your own discussion topics.

See you there!

Acknowledgments

It would be impossible to thank everyone who has helped with this book in some way. The chapters herein developed over many months, during which I was traveling a great deal and speaking to audiences large and small about the problem of oil depletion, its likely consequences, and what we can do to wean our societies from our collective addiction to fossil fuels. I met hundreds of people during these travels whose words and pioneering actions are reflected in these pages.

Once again, I must acknowledge an enormous debt of gratitude to my wife Janet Barocco, who supports and balances me in so many ways as I pursue the rather lopsided life of a writer-lecturer.

This is the fourth book project on which I have had the pleasure of working with Chris and Judith Plant of New Society Publishers. A note of appreciation must also go to Ingrid Witvoet, who shepherded the book through the production process, and Murray Reiss, who copy-edited the manuscript.

My thanks to Jennifer Bresee for research assistance, and to Susan Williamson for general assistance.

As in the past, my students and co-faculty at New College deserve mention for their ongoing support, as do the subscribers to my monthly MuseLetter.

Finally, I would like to voice both appreciation and thanks to Julian Darley and Celine Rich-Darley founders of Post Carbon Institute, and catalysts in the global response to the twin crises of fossil fuels (climate change and resource depletion).

Foreword

By James Howard Kunstler

Back in 2005, Richard Heinberg and I both published books on peak oil and its implications for everyday life in technologically advanced societies. We saw the general situation very similarly but expressed our views of it differently. I hugely admired Richards version of the story, The Partys Over, especially the trenchant title. He brought tremendous kinetic clarity to a set of terrifying issues that the best technical guys had previously only been able to present in mind-numbing charts and sludge-like prose. I think both of us set out to shock the general reading public with news that had left us both, personally, deeply shocked as the implications revealed themselves and we realized that the age of Cruisin for Burgers was coming to an end.

Mostly since then, the public has proved to be unshockable by the news that were entering a historical period of hardship, that many of the familiar touchstones of daily life from square meals to daily commutes to the simple confidence that the lights will go on when you flick a switch will not be with us much longer. I think there was an assumption by Richard and myself and lots of other people thoughtfully observing the scene by then, that our society would take the message, spread it virally (and rapidly!), and that our leaders in business, politics, science, and the media would marshal our peoples best efforts to meet these challenges at least to formulate some kind of consensus for action.

No such thing happened. Some people on the margins took note, but the general public got distracted and deluded. We all know how denial works at the macro level now. Not only was the peak oil predicament broadly misunderstood (as Richard points out, it was never just about running out of oil), but a mini-industry of delusion generators sprouted up to refute peak oil, folks like the espousers of so-called abiotic oil theory the idea that the earth has a creamy nougat center of oil that continuously refills producing oil fields (for which there is no evidence whatsoever, by the way). Worse, the organs of legitimate governance, such as the US Department of Energy, refused to even acknowledge that a) we had a big problem with future oil supplies, and not too far out, either, and b) it had awful implications.

For most of the first decade of this century, the federal government was run by the George W. Bush gang, and it was understood that they operated on a strange ethos of faith-based-Babbittry in which the highest-and-best version of civilization was thought to be credit-card consumerism accessorized by endless happy motoring (all lavishly garnished with Christian prayer). In other words, they had a deep vested interest in keeping all the usual rackets running: suburbia, derivatives-trading, highway-building, strip-mining. Fittingly, this operating system foundered utterly at the climax of the 2008 presidential election. Thats when the Frankenstein monster of

Next page

1234567...52

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines»

Look at similar books to Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Richard Rohr

Just This: Prompts And Practices For Contemplation

Richard Heinberg

The Partys Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies

Richard Grossinger

The Bardo of Waking Life

Richard O. Peterson

In a Waking State: Edgar Cayce Lectures

Richard Heinberg

Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

Heinberg

Blackout coal, climate and the last energy crisis

John Michael Greer

The ecotechnic future: envisioning a post-peak world

Richard Dotts

The 95-5 Code - For Activating the Law of Attraction

Richard Heinberg

Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels

Richard Heinberg

Snake Oil: How Frackings False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future

Richard Heinberg

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

Roland Smith

Peak

Discussion, reviews of the book Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.