Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels, by Richard Heinberg
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Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels, by Richard Heinberg
Download Ebook PDF Online Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels, by Richard Heinberg
Climate change, along with the depletion of oil, coal, and gas, dictate that we will inevitably move away from our profound societal reliance on fossil fuels; but just how big a transformation will this be? While many policy-makers assume that renewable energy sources will provide an easy "plug-and-play" solution, author Richard Heinberg suggests instead that we are in for a wild ride; a "civilization reboot" on a scale similar to the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
Afterburn consists of fifteen essays exploring various aspects of the twenty-first century migration away from fossil fuels including:
- Short-term political and economic factors that impede broad-scale, organized efforts to adapt
- The origin of longer-term trends (such as consumerism), that have created a way of life that seems "normal" to most Americans, but is actually unprecedented, highly fragile, and unsustainable
- Potential opportunities and sources of conflict that are likely to emerge
From the inevitability and desirability of more locally organized economies to the urgent need to preserve our recent cultural achievements and the futility of pursuing economic growth above all, Afterburn offers cutting-edge perspectives and insights that challenge conventional thinking about our present, our future, and the choices in our hands.
Richard Heinberg is a senior fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, the author of eleven previous books including The Party's Over and The End of Growth. He is widely regarded as one of the world's most effective communicators of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels.
Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels, by Richard Heinberg - Amazon Sales Rank: #481531 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-03-16
- Released on: 2015-03-16
- Format: Kindle eBook
Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels, by Richard Heinberg Review
With rare insight, clarity, and compassion, Richard Heinberg helps us face the music. Over the years, since The Party’s Over, his books have earned our trust with their accuracy in delineating the limits of the possible. Now in this bold collection of essays, he helps us see the landscape being bequeathed us by the Great Burning — an understanding that is necessary to the Great Turning — and will save us considerable time and confusion. With ever more gratitude I bow to those who shake us awake.—Joanna Macy, author, Coming Back to Life:The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects.
Afterburngives us a sense of a survivable future – hope fed by Heinberg’s realistic deeper analysis, a sense of the trends ahead, and a bold (largely local) plan. Few are as good at the craft of synthesizing this powerful package then Richard Heinberg. This book will help fuel the future.—Randy Hayes, Rainforest Action Network Founder & Director of Foundation Earth
In my business we have a saying: hope is a terrible investment strategy. Let’s go further and say hope alone is a terrible strategy, period. Yet most of society continues to simply ignore the freely available and terribly important information about where we are headed on this planet, and simply hope that things will work themselves out somehow. They won’t, and we all know that now on some level. Afterburn bravely and thoughtfully examines the predicament we face, one idea and one fact at a time. Those who can stir in a few facts along with their hope will be able to both understand and foresee what the future holds. Pick up this book. Read it. Discuss it. Let it sink into your bones, and then understand that this book is not asking you to abandon hope, it is inviting us all to greatness.—Chris Martenson, PhD, Co-founder of Peak Prosperity
Afterburn is like a “Richard Heinberg’s Greatest Hits” compilation, drawing together a selection of his prolific output from the last few years. To choose what went in must have been to pore over an embarrassment of riches, given his seemingly untiring creativity and brilliance. He writes with incision, with passion, with rage, with compassion, and Afterburn captures in one single publication why he’s such a shining light of insight in times of much darkness. The Party’s Over changed my life. Perhaps Afterburn will change yours.—Rob Hopkins, founder, Transition Town movement and author, The Power of Just Doing Stuff
From the Back Cover Essential, visionary essays about our post-carbon future[Richard Heinberg] writes with incision, with passion, with rage, with compassion, and Afterburn captures in one single publication why he's such a shining light of insight in times of much darkness. The Party's Over changed my life. Perhaps Afterburn will change yours. --- Rob Hopkins, founder, the Transition movement and author, The Power of Just Doing Stuff This book will help fuel the future.---Randy Hayes, founder, Rainforest Action Network and director, Foundation Earth…From climate change to resource wars to the collapse of consumerism, we’re in for a wild ride. Afterburn consists of 15 essays exploring various aspects of the 21st century migration away from fossil fuels including:Short-term political and economic factors that impede broad-scale, organized efforts to adaptThe origin of longer-term trends (such as consumerism), that have created a way of life that seems “normal” to most Americans, but is actually unprecedented, highly fragile and unsustainablePotential opportunities and sources of conflict that seem likely to emerge.From the inevitability and desirability of more locally organized economies, to the urgent need to preserve our recent cultural achievements and the futility of pursuing economic growth above all, Afterburn offers cutting-edge perspectives and insights that challenge conventional thinking about our present, our future, and the choices in our hands.…With rare insight, clarity, and compassion Richard Heinberg helps us face the music. ---Joanna Macy, author, Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects…Richard Heinberg is a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, the author of eleven previous books including The Party’s Over and The End of Growth. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s most effective communicators of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels.
About the Author Richard Heinberg is the author of eleven previous award-winning books including The Party's Over, Powerdown, Peak Everything, and The End of Growth. He is a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of the world's most effective communicators of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels. A recipient of the M. King Hubbert Award for excellence in energy education, Heinberg has given hundreds of lectures on resource depletion to audiences around the world. He has been published in Nature and other journals, and has been featured in many television and theatrical documentaries.
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Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful. Cascading tipping points By R. Kreis For readers just beginning their conversation with peak oil and climate change (Hubbert’s Curve and the Keeling Curve), this collection of essays explains the thesis expounded by the Post Carbon “doomers” in a clear and compelling way. But, for those of us who have been following the topic for some years, Heinberg does not bring much new material to this, his latest effort. Let me be clear, I am sympathetic with Heinberg’s views (he signed my copy of End of Growth), but based on this book’s subtitle, I was hoping to read more thoughtful speculation on the time after the crash.As pessimistic as Heinberg’s prognostications may seem, I suspect he is holding back on what should be obvious: He knows the climate is poised to do something truly terrible; if not in our time, certainly in our children’s time. It won’t be boiling frogs, it will be cascading tipping points. Should we manage to dodge the bullet of NTHE, our destiny is sure to be pulling plows at the insistence of men with guns. Fate could have it that rapid climate change will hit about the same time our international financial balloon has burst and resource depletion has left us without means to adapt to changing conditions. The fate of civilization? Poof! We’ll be just another layer of debris in the earth’s crust.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful. Prepare for Slower, Simpler, and Smaller By Richard Reese (author of Understanding Sustainability) Once upon a time, Richard Heinberg was a mild-mannered college professor in northern California. In 1998, he happened to read an article in Scientific American that revealed the peak oil theory. A small clan in the lunatic fringe had been discussing the notion, but it was now being yanked out of the closet by a number of retired petroleum geologists — respectable experts having front line experience with an increasingly ominous reality.Peak oil was terrifying. The geologists were telling us that our way of life was racing toward the cliff. Dignified ladies and gentlemen naturally swept it under the carpet, because the notion was certainly impossible in this age of techno-miracles. Anyway, the anticipated calamity was still 20 or 30 years away, so there was no need to think about it.In 2003, Heinberg published The Party’s Over, which explained peak oil to a general audience. Since then, he’s made a career out of exposing the dark side of growth, progress, and other mischief. Eventually, he left the university and joined the Post Carbon Institute. His message is that resource depletion, climate change, and economic meltdown will blindside our way of life in this century. He suggests that now is a great time to pay closer attention to reality.Decades of explosive economic growth were only possible because of cheap and abundant energy, abundant high quality mineral resources, and highly productive oil-powered agriculture. Today, the perpetual growth monster is kept on life support by pumping it up with trillions of dollars of debt. Back in the 1960s, a dollar of debt boosted the GDP by a dollar. By 2000, a dollar of debt boosted GDP by just 20 cents. Today, the tsunami of debt is creating a new stock market bubble, and its collapse may be worse than the crash of 2008. The notion that “growth is over” inspires the titans of finance leap from tall buildings.Well-paid goon squads of spin-doctors are effectively conjuring doubts about peak oil. What they don’t mention is the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI). A century ago, it took one calorie of energy to produce 100 calories of petroleum. The EROEI was 100:1. Today, the EROEI of U.S. production has plummeted to 10:1. Tar sands, oil shale, and biofuels all are less than 5:1. Most fossil energy will be left in the ground forever, because of low or negative EROEI. Imagine having a job that paid $100 a day, but the bridge toll for getting there was $105.It’s already too late to cleverly pull the plug on climate change and live happily ever after. Our current strategy, ignoring the problem and denying it exists, is the preferred policy of our glorious leaders. It might be possible to soften the worst-case scenario if we reduced our fossil fuel consumption by 80 to 90 percent by 2050, a daunting challenge. The transition to renewable energy will be turbulent, because of its numerous shortcomings. For example, trucks, planes, and agriculture cannot run on electricity. Many uses of oil have no substitute.Welcome to the subject matter of Heinberg’s latest book, Afterburn. We’re living in the final decades of a one-time freak-out in human history, the Great Burning. For two centuries, we’ve been extracting and burning staggering amounts of sequestered carbon, for no good reason. What were we thinking? It’s nonrenewable, so using it as the core energy source for industrial civilization could only have a crappy ending. For thousands of years, Arab herders traveled across regions containing oceans of oil, left it alone, and enjoyed a good life. Self-destruction is not mandatory.The book takes readers on an up-to-date tour of the unintended consequences of the Great Burning, and presents reasonable arguments for why it’s moving into the sunset phase. The final chapters of Afterburn contemplate life after the burn. What can intelligent people do to prepare for a way of life that will be far smaller, simpler, and slower?In the 1930s, a Nazi control freak named Joseph Goebbels revolutionized mind control via high-tech propaganda. This was made possible by the latest consumer fad, radio. One person spoke, and millions listened, day after day. Today, with the internet, and hundreds of TV channels, many millions are speaking at once, presenting a fantastic variety of viewpoints. Truth (if any) can become a needle in the haystack.Many huge ideas have been born in the lunatic fringe, presented by heretics like Galileo and Darwin. At the same time, the fringe produces oceans of idiotic balderdash. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the mainstream world, where the one and only thing that matters is ongoing economic growth. Other issues, like climate change and resource depletion, are nothing more than annoying distractions that must be stepped around.Heinberg is interesting because he camps in the no-man’s-land between shameless mainstream disinformation and the wacko hysteria of the fringe. He’s a likeable lad, and a clear writer who makes an effort to be respectful and fair-minded. Until recently, it’s been compulsory for eco-writers to include hope and solutions, even if they’re daffy, because bummer books gather dust. It’s encouraging to see an emerging trend, in which the emphasis on hopium is becoming unhip, and readers are served larger doses of uncomfortable facts with no sugar coating.Afterburn includes small servings of magical thinking, but overall it lays the cards on the table. A way of life can only be temporary if it is dependent on nonrenewable resources, or on consuming renewables at an unsustainable rate. An economy requiring perpetual growth is insane. Nature will fix our population excesses and eliminate overshoot. The lights will go out. All civilizations collapse. Ours will too. We won’t be rescued by miraculous paradigm shifts. The biggest obstacle to intelligent change is human nature. Folks with food, money, and a roof don’t worry about threats that are not immediate. There is a possibility that humankind will no longer exist by the end of this century. And so on.Yes, things can look a little bleak, but don’t surrender to cynicism and give up. We can’t chase away the storm, but we can do many things that make a difference. Learn how to do practical stuff, like cook, sew, and garden. Become less reliant on purchased goods and services. Develop trusting relationships with your neighbors.Today is a paradise for folks interested in changing the world. Imagine cool visions of a new and improved future where we could nurture cooperation, eliminate inequality, mindfully manage population, and minimize environmental injuries. Unfortunately, visioning is limited by the fact that the future is certain to be radically different. What can we say for sure about 2050? I remain stubbornly confident that there will be sun and moon, mountains and oceans, bacteria and insects.When civilizations die, most or all of their cultural information also dies. Today, much of this information is stored in electronic media, or printed on acidic paper that has a short lifespan. Heinberg believes that it’s essential to protect our books, because they are vital for cultural survival. He fears that the amazing achievements of the Great Burning will be forgotten. “Will it all have been for nothing?”A far better question is, “What cultural achievements would we want to be remembered by?” During the Great Burning, we’ve learned so much about environmental history and human ecology. We are coming to understand why almost every aspect of our way of life is unsustainable. (Our schools should teach this!) The most valuable gift we could give to new generations is a thorough understanding of the many things we’ve learned from our mistakes, and the mistakes of our ancestors. They need a good map of the minefield.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. An important, must read book By P. Mulloy Journalist, author, and educator Richard Heinberg is a leading voice on the interaction between the economy, energy and the environment. Afterburn is a series of 15 essays written from 2011 through 2015 on issues of peak oil, fracking, economic growth and climate. He argues that despite increases from fracking, peak oil arguments have been surprisingly accurate and that at some point we will run out of oil. Fracking is not a solution, will create more problems than expected and produce less oil that predicted. Consumerism and an economy built on continual growth fuel our addiction to fossil fuels and block our efforts to create a sustainable society. Alternative energy sources cannot sustain our current economic system. Unless we can change our economy we face a period of economic decline, dwindling resources, increasing conflict and strife, and environmental disruptions. Heinberg prescribes “a burst of social innovation that brings more cooperation and sharing.” Heinberg writes with insight and passion. This is an important book. Heinberg’s critique is strong, his solutions less so.
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