Question on Peak Oil [View All]

[minerva50]

Can anyone recommend a good general discussion of the topic of Peak Oil? My book group is reading Heinberg’s latest, Peak Everything. I’m very disappointed with it, it seems to be a disparate collection of essays, thrown together to make up a book to sell to his followers and make a few bucks. I’d prefer a rational discussion by someone who doesn’t have an agenda. What disturbs me about what I’ve read so far is that many of the “experts” seem a little too enamored of apocalypse, like they are looking forward to the new world without petroleum, so that they’re too quick to dismiss any solutions that may allow us to maintain an industrial society. I even read one article by a guy who said we’d already passed peak invention, that the number of new ideas per capita had peaked shortly after the start of the industrial revolution, so we could not rely on human ingenuity to bail us out. Maybe I'm just an eternal optimist or in denial, but I doubt it’s all that hopeless.