Nature and Society
June-July 2008 edition

Book review:
“Peak Everything - Waking up to the century of declines”

Richard Heinberg

New Society Publishers, Canada 2007
214 pages. $45.95 hard cover.

Richard Heinberg’s first book on Peak Oil The Party’s Over was, for me at least, a significant book. His subsequent books on the subject, PowerDown and The Oil Depletion Protocol, were hardly less important. But often when I mentioned Peak Oil to people and expressed concerns about possible economic meltdown, they would reply: “Oh, but there’s plenty of coal”.

As the title of this, Heinberg’s latest book, suggests, well, it ain’t necessarily so. He argues that conventional oil production probably peaked in 2005-6 and natural gas will peak globally around 2010. But contrary to what we had believed, namely, that coal would last at current usage rates for another 200 years, recent studies have shown that coal will peak and begin to decline in a mere 10 to 20 years.

But, as he says, it doesn’t end there. This century we will see an end to growth and a decline in a number of parameters including population, grain production, uranium production, fresh water availability, arable land, wild fish harvests, and the yearly extraction of some metals and minerals such as copper and zinc.

In other words, as Heinberg notes, we are at the end of the period of greatest material abundance in human history, one that was based on temporary sources of cheap energy, and we are now at the beginning of overall societal contraction and simplification. It had to happen sometime, of course. Growth in population and consumption cannot continue unabated on a finite planet.

It need not be all doom and gloom, Heinberg insists. He reminds us of Ivan Illich’s 1974 book Energy and Equity that argued that inequality increases with the flow of energy through society. Hunter-gatherers, who lived on minimal energy flows, lived in societies free from economic inequalities. Thus, as energy declines, we might reasonably expect a more economically equal society. Indeed, a reversion to village life with extended families and local food production – but with a few modern frills such as global communications – could provide future generations with an existence that current generations would envy.

Heinberg concludes that our central survival task for the decades ahead is to make the transition away from the use of fossil fuels and ‘to do it as peacefully, equitably and intelligently as possible’.

There are, however, two problems whose potential consequences outweigh all others: climate change and energy depletion. If we do nothing about the former we will set off positive feedbacks, particularly the melting of the north polar ice cap reducing reflectivity and the melting of tundra and permafrost releasing methane, resulting in perhaps six degrees of warming and a largely uninhabitable planet. If we do not proactively reduce our reliance on oil, gas and coal ahead of depletion and scarcity, we could trigger economic collapse, famine, and war over remaining resources. As Heinberg notes, all that is required for these worst-case scenarios to materialise is for world leaders to do nothing.

So how do we achieve this great transition to an energy-depleted world? Heinberg says it will require ‘enormous adjustments on the part of every individual, family and community’ and if we are to make these adjustments successfully, then we need to plan rationally. We have to adopt strategies in nearly every area of human interest - agriculture, transportation, global war and peace, public health, resource management and so on.

In a later chapter, Population, Resources and Human Idealism, Heinberg elaborates on this axiom, arguing that if we want peace, democracy and human rights we must create the ecological condition for these things to exist, namely, a stable population at – or less than –  the environment’s long-term carrying capacity.

This is another important, readable, authoritative book from Heinberg. Buy it, read it and share it around.

Jenny Goldie