The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, by Richard Heinberg, is an introduction to the concept of peak oil and petroleum depletion.
Overview
The book's main points are that modern industrial societies are completely dependent on
fossil fuels; they are vulnerable to reductions in energy availability; fossil fuel depletion is inevitable; peak oil is imminent; and that oil plays a major role in US foreign policy, terrorism, war, and geopolitics
.
The book rapidly surveys some basic
law of diminishing returns
."
It then reviews the essential role of fossil fuels
Alternative energy sources are then discussed to see if they can make up for the energetic shortfall resulting from less available energy from fossil fuels, his tongue-in-cheek question being: “Can the party continue?” Heinberg is not optimistic that it will and in a sobering wrapup reviews “a banquet of consequences” of the end of cheap energy
. He ends the book by offering practical advice to readers about how to respond to the end of the era of cheap oil.
Three
Jean Laherrere, and Walter Youngquist. Colin Campbell also contributed the foreword to the book and Heinberg quotes from his research in the book. In addition, he quotes from the work of (and gives appreciation to) Michael C. Lynch, Bjørn Lomborg
, and Richard Duncan.
See also
Power Down: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World
