AN OPEN-ENDED ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR CLIMATE CHANGE/PEAK OIL ISSUES: Compiled in 2013 by John Olsen [email protected]
This collection is unapologetically biased. While many of my generation’s writers helped us shape a critical perspective – Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Lewis Mumford, Barbara Ward, to name a few of mine – this biography’s sources are all contemporary to our current time: none is older than 2005. Why then?
First of all, it anchors the discussion with a profoundly wise commentator on North American life: Howard Kuntsler. More pertinently, by mid decade, denial had been pretty effectively discredited, even among some of the most conservative regimes such as the USA, and attention had shifted to demanding a binding global response, even though the most profligate emitters were and are the original industrial states that largely control the global economy. The abject failure of the Copenhagen meeting confirmed that timid, self-serving politicians who head world governments are not likely to get their collective act together in time. The bias therefore lies in the premise that the evidence for global warming exists and is a man-made phenomenon is overwhelming and I can’t find any deniers that are worth paying attention to.
In my simple world view, climate change and peak oil are conceptually bound into one issue. If our early industrial-age ancestors hadn’t found cheap fossil energy, we would not have been able to contaminate our global environment to the point where many species have been extinguished and we ourselves face extinction. Nor, as a consequence, would our population have soared to today’s level. More fundamentally, if those of us alive today had not all grown up in a cheap energy era, we might have been open to the expectations and mindsets necessary to sustain a comfortable steady-state economy. Now, we fly half way around the globe on a whim, casually expect to be able to drive private, one-person gasoline hogs to span the vast distances between where we live and where we work and play, live in houses that provide 1,000 square feet of space and a private a bathroom for each occupant, simply because we can.
The conclusions most of these authors have drawn are not what anyone would call optimistic. Several global studies of life satisfaction clearly indicate that, above a modest income level, satisfaction does not track directly with income. If you would rather not be the irritating Cassandra in a discussion about the human condition, there are a few – very few - examples in these readings that offer a hopeful and survivable strategy for a sustainable future: a few more make a credible case for the eminent possibility of a good quality of life within the constraints of a future lifestyle of co-operative simplicity. Some even promise that technology will provide us with the means to mitigate the effects of our past technological mistakes.
But getting there won’t be easy: according to some, it won’t even be possible.
A few foundation documents are cited in this bibliography, e.g., The Stern Review and the IPCC Fifth Report: they are not annotated. The rest are written from the perspective that CO2 emissions, driven by the industrial society’s profligate use of fossil fuels, are forcing global temperatures to rise and the only options for humans are to radically reduce the emissions immediately or find mitigating strategies that do not themselves threaten global environmental dislocation. I was tempted to arrange these notes in some sort of conceptual sequence but opted instead to use a simple regressive date order.
2013: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, multiple authors, IPCC, Stockholm. This is the fifth report of the U.N. agency, the international Panel on Climate Change. This document is the summary of the Working Group 1 oversight of the whole report. Other Working Groups will report over the next twelve months. It may not be commonly known that the IPCC is highly scientistic in its procedures, which means that the individual studies that make up the whole report have been through the conventional peer review process, rendering most of their final reports outdated by as much as three years. Given a current CO2 concentration of over 400 PPM, those three years are precious.
2013: Cold, Hungry and in the Dark, Bill Powers, New Society Publishers. Powers is a Calgary-based energy investment analyst and ex-editor of The Canadian Energy Viewpoint and The US Energy Investor. He introduces his perception of the fragile gas industry with a post-seventies track of the North American natural gas experience, including some useful history of related legislation. He then concludes that, drill as we may, we can’t produce our way out looming crises. That section reviews half a dozen American and Canadian shows that let us down in the past and will do so again. His final chapter, A Look at the Future, is a bleak outlook for natural gas as even a transition strategy.
2012: The End of Growth, Jeff Rubin, Random House. This is somewhat repetitive of his 2009 work. The basic thesis is that the end of affordable fossil fuels may save the world from catastrophic climate collapse. In particular, he argues that Kyoto-like accords will never be viable but that motivation may come from spiraling costs of fuels. Unhappily, he doesn’t seem to offer a strategy for equitable distribution of energy when market forces drive the cost up. His description in Chapter 8 of the static economy suffers from the delusions of all economists in that they cannot describe anything like the real world when they invoke their pet measurement caveat, ceteris paribus. Rubin is a Plan B advocate. (See Plan C, 2008.)
2011: World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, Lester R. Brown, W.W. Norton. Brown is the founder of the Earth Policy Institute, the originator of the Plan B series (Plan B; Plan B 2.0; Plan B 3.0; Plan B 4.0). This book is the latest in the series and does not continue the Plan B format. The core message is we can survive, both in basic terms and in life-style terms, if we manage over the next decade or two to control C02, population, water conservation and food and vegetation assets. His premise is that scientific and technical innovation can keep the world from tipping over the edge if we apply our collective political will to address the problems. For example, he cites the effect of current U.S. regulatory and persuasion tools on high-rise construction development. As with virtually all commentators on a sustainable built environment, he does not offer human settlement policies.
2011: The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality, Richard Heinberg, New Society Publishers. The Introduction and the first chapter offer the most comprehensive and clearest explanation of economic growth principles I have seen. Further, the second chapter sets out a convincing explanation of how the global house of cards collapsed beginning in 2008. In a finite world, growth will not be coming back, at least not in the short to mid term. The heading of Chapter 3 tells it all: “Earth’s Limits: Why Growth won’t Return.” He seems to be embracing at least part of the shock doctrine of Milton Friedman about developing tools that can be left lying about when the crisis erupts. What he does not address, is that Friedman and the Chicago school designed the mythical free trade solution and seeded it into the ideological infrastructure of Chile to await the military coup (which some allege he helped along). Can we do the same with the sustainable economy concept? The book is almost turgid with information, but worth the effort. In the end, he attempts to address the question about what we can do about it: “How do we get there from here?” p251 (Or, as Lenin said: “The point is, what is to be done.” He attempts to offer some suggestions but they all seem to require political will and fail to ask: what is General Electric going to be doing while we are rebuilding ourselves and our culture?
2010: Eaarth (sic): Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Bill McKibben, Alfred A. Knopf. His basic thesis is that the old earth no longer exists; nothing we can do now will bring it back, at least not for a thousand or more years. (Thereby explaining the title.) The first half of the book is an unparalleled expression of the contradictions of the soft path thesis. McKibbon is co-founder of 350.org which demands a return to the long-past 350 ppm carbon in the atmosphere. Essentially, the first half of this work renders that a dream: we’re stuck with the new Eaarth and better learn how to live in it. He also makes a concrete connection between peak oil and climate change. As things stand now, the sooner oil becomes unsustainable, the sooner we go back to coal – a much dirtier fossil fuel. Unhappily, the second half of the work, while it offers plenty of attractive examples of where awareness is turning into small-scale projects, he doesn’t answer the central geo-political question: what will Monsanto and GE be doing while we are becoming smaller and more local? Greatly to McKibben’s credit, he does touch on meta-physical question of the possible, even probable tie between conservation and social conservatism.
2010: The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s sustainability Crisis, ed. Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch, Post Carbon Institute & Watershed Media. This fourteen part treatment addresses virtually every aspect of the coming post carbon era, from basic ecology to education and features almost 3 dozen contributors, including well known historical and current authorities.
2010: Energy: Myths and Realities, Vaclav Smil; AEI Press. This is a dense, data-driven analysis of the literature of the promise of technological alternatives to the Plan A direction. For those who can endure the relentless documentation of the arithmetic of the soft path (Plan B) alternatives to faith in a petroleum future, this is a definitive rebuke of that fallacy. Smil spells out in a flood of hard and thoroughly documented evidence of the delusion of that path. The one issue he does not address, however, is the human settlement question. He deconstructs the Plan B alternative with such a sharp tool that it becomes difficult to sustain an emotional sympathy for him. As Rabindranath Tagore observed, “A mind that is all logic is like a knife that is all blade.” That said, his conclusions, with the settlement exception, are irresistible.
2010: Requiem for a Species: Why we Resist the Truth about Climate Change, Clive Hamilton; Earthscan. Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive account of the hard numbers around global warming but does not address peak oil (not even in the index). The political analysis is good, noting in particular our fetish about the virtue of growth and the capitalist ethos. A revealing note is sounded in chapter 2, “The Blair government (Stern Report) wanted to make economics the solution to the climate change logjam but could not see that, at a deeper level, the economic way of thinking is the problem.” Hamilton addresses most cogently the flaw implicit in unsupported faith in mitigation that is keeping national governments from committing to reduction of emissions. The weakest part of his case is addressed under the title “Disconnection from Nature,” a rambling discussion of human nature that contributes little of firm substance.
2010: How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate, Jeff Goodell; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Written in a journalistic, first person style, the book is highly readable. While expressing skepticism, the author points out that we are already heavily engaged in geoengineering the planet through such means as water management, commercial agriculture, energy systems, etc. He touches only lightly on what might be the most dangerous aspect of geoengineering: that it is done within the framework of profit-driven entrepreneurism. If we continue to seek solutions to our coming emergency from the private sector, we will open ourselves to unregulated entrepreneurial geoengineering – encouraging the prospect of global environmental collapse because some nut-head pseudo scientist takes a notion to shoot a sulfur compound into the clouds in order to garner cap and trade credits (mandated by an increasingly private sector-oriented UN). To give him a hint of credit, he does touch oh so lightly on the issue of the need for a democratically-mandated command planning to offset our blind commitment to free market economics. Even so, the scariest part of his treatment deals with the role of the military in the campaign for mitigating the devastating effects of killer green house gasses. He also scores big in my books for clearly labeling the Doctor Doom proponents of mitigation: men - and the gender designation is deliberate - like Edward Teller and Lowell Wood that exploited the cachet of science to get us in this bind.
2009: Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe…, James Hansen; Bloomsbury. Hansen is the pre-eminent progenitor of our growing awareness about global warming. His writings are thus important but I found them suffused with scientism’s concern with objectivity to the point of dullness.
2009: Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization, Jeff Rubin; Random House Canada. Rubin writes well for an economist but don’t expect him to give you the Coles Notes version of the Stern Report. What he does do well is to show the relationship between our seemingly inescapable dependence on petroleum to the global warming process. After having forecast the inevitable disruption of the global and local economies, it does seem he belongs to the Plan B school (See 2008 Plan C.) of GW forecasting by suggesting significant but not life threatening changes to the northern economies. A final cavil: he seems to have his book title wrong. In a rolled-back economy, the world gets bigger, not smaller.
2009: Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse. David Orr; Oxford.
If you don’t read anything more than the preface, this work is worth looking at. For example: “The faith [in our survivability] placed in better technology is tied to the faith in unfettered markets and commerce” and “Until the great financial implosion of 2008, amnesia also veiled the spotty and often shabby record of corporations and financial institutions operating without the countervailing power of alert government and an engaged and sometimes enraged citizenry.” [Emphasis mine]. Orr’s discussion of the kind and scale of governance required to survive the coming long emergency is insightful but lacks an action prescription. That said, he offers a valuable commentary on the tension between private property and the common good, specifically taking issue with Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons thesis about market solutions. He also explores - without solving - the question of what constitutes and “act of god” disaster such as a flood or drought, when the root cause is human made. His treatment of the meta-theory of what is needed to confront the seemingly inevitable climate collapse is instructive, albeit biased by the unavoidable zeitgeist of American Exceptionalism. More critically, when in the final chapter headed “…What is to be done?” he explores the dynamics of the promised new order, he reveals his faith in Plan B. (See Plan C, 2008)
2008: Climate Wars; Gwynne Dyer, Vintage Canada. Dyer speaks a particularly strong but cynical truth about the possible and likely effects of a changing global climate. His title uses the word “War” deliberately. He takes Kunstler’s Long Emergency through a series of eight scenarios, not organized in any perceptible linear pattern, but randomly projected from as early as 2019 to as far forward as “Wipeout” which he speculatively sets at about the year 2175. (In his radical scenario eight, Dyer sees perhaps 300 million global survivors speaking only English and Russian and living on a seven meter higher sea shore around the Arctic Ocean.) His scenarios, presented in the style of modern military game language, address geographically specific situations ranging from the failure of rivers that rise in India and are needed to irrigate Pakistan to the ejection of Mexico from NAFTA and the erection of an impervious border fence when a quarter of all Americans are of Mexican descent. To his credit, all of his scenarios are conditional on international policy options but he is profoundly cynical about the likelihood of the politicians co-operatively adopting the policies that would achieve relief or remediation. He makes a strong case that we cannot go home again: we must rely on the technology that got us into this dilemma to get us out. He employs the metaphor of the final exam: pass or fail, once and for all time.
2008: Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change, Pat Murphy; New Society Publishers. Speaking of bias, this work is far and away my favorite treatment of the issues of global warming and peak oil; it also adds the vital matter of the growing gap between classes and caps the whole thing off with practical, immediately applicable actions. Part I succinctlyback grounds the inter-related three issues and moves on to explain that Plan A (proceed as we are going while hoping for replacement energy possibilities to emerge), Plan B (Change fuel sources, protect the environment while maintaining current life styles) fail to address the real issues and offers Plan C (radical restructuring of human settlements and move towards voluntary curtailment/contracting economy.) Plan D is simply to die off. Part II introduces the essential element required to re-structure whole societies by restoring community while Part III begins to lay out the practical measures for survival. He concludes: “Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘I grasp the hands of those next to me and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work.’ It will not be easy. But what generation has ever been given such a chance and a challenge to transform its world?”
2007: Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Decline, Richard Heinberg; New Society Publishers. In spite of the title, this book does not detail the phenomenon except for a review of some of the author’s previous work in the introduction. However, that introduction provides a succinct and well graphed argument for issues of peak energy/peak resource exploitation and gives a solid picture of what the implications are for future societies. A pithy example: “ … it is hard to escape the conclusion that while the 20th Century saw the greatest and most rapid expansion of the scale, scope, and complexity of human societies in history, the 21st will see contraction and simplification.” Useful for the introduction alone, the rest of the book – what might be called the software of the topic – is worth a read but is not annotated here.
2006: The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (a summary), Nicholas Stern; for pdf version Google “The Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change.”
2006: The Emperor’s New Hydrogen Economy, Daryl McMahon; iUniverse. The author makes his point bluntly, early and in bold print: “the hydrogen economy is a really, really bad idea.” He goes on to show in considerable detail why that is so, including the inescapable fact that there are no hydrogen wells. The point of that assertion is that hydrogen is a conductor of energy, not a source. The first and second laws of thermodynamics make it clear that, since hydrogen does not occur anywhere in its pure state, energy must be used to isolate it from air, water, fossil fuels, or any other source. What he doesn’t make explicit and I need to do so, is that the innate appeal of hydrogen is that it might be able to take the place of liquid petroleum products that fuel our acquired demand for convenient, fast and – above all - personal transportation. What we need to do is to relieve ourselves of dependency on that kind of transportation by designing new settlement patterns. He leaves no aspect untreated of the extraction, shipping, distribution, use or environmental effects of hydrogen as a replacement fuel. That said, he does address some applications of hydrogen, particularly when captured by electrolysis, that show promise for future use. For example, where surplus electric energy is generated by natural forces such as wind or falling water, there are potentially practical uses - mostly on site - of surplus electricity to manufacture hydrogen.
2005: The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophe of the Twenty-First Century, James Howard Kunstler; Atlantic Press. Kunstler is an early critic of the suburbanization of America. Unhappily, he doesn’t spend much time in this work about that petro-dependency phenomenon, a subject he has long commented on. In spite of that shortcoming, this is worth reading in that it neatly and without excessive use of hard data makes the point that there is no way we can side step the coming emergency. It is coming no matter what we do to try to head it off. His description of that post-cheap energy era suffers from being overly Ameri-centric. A footnote: in a couple of unsatisfactory novels that followed this work, Kunstler seems to believe that life in the coming emergency will look very much like late 19th Century small town USA with a plot line crafted for a Hollywood survivalist movie. Still, his creds as a critic of suburbanization are well worth the effort .
It took me a few months to read all of these so I don’t expect anyone to rush out and borrow or buy the whole package. As useful as I have found these readings to be, if I had to choose one or two as a short study to cram for Dyer’s final exam, I would choose the first half of McKibben’s Eaarth for its exposition of the problem and Plan C for its offer of a feasible and practical step towards a solution. What these books do not do adequately is to show the road map towards a more frugal, sustainable, no-growth economy (devastating for global capitalism). For an insightful examination of that question, take a look at 2011: The Unfinished Global Revolution: The Pursuit of a New International Politics. Mark Malloch-Brown; Viking Canada.
I compiled these annotations to help readers make their own selections. If you want to discuss the issues, contact me at [email protected] . Good hunting.
