The Post-Carbon Blog

Sharon Astyk "Depletion and Abundance"

Post Carbon Man — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 16:01:00 +0000

ISBN: 978-0-86571-614-8. "Depletion and Abundance: Life on the new home front (or, One Woman's solutions to finding abundance for your family while coming to terms with Peak Oil, Climate Change and hard times)" by Sharon Astyk was published by New Society Publishers in 2008. This paperback's 273 pages include acknowledgements, six parts, fourteen chapters, two appendices and index. Sharon's work is not familiar to us in the Europe but the accolades in the blurb comes from the likes of Bill McKibben, Dmitry Orlov and John Michael Greer. Early in her acknowledgements she thanks her influences who include George Monbiot, Julian Darley, Richard Heinberg, Dale Pfeiffer and Rob Hopkins. However this is the only mention of Rob in the book and no Transition books are mentioned in the appendices. As this work is three years old (we write in late 2011) then this may indicate the age of this book in a fast moving field in which Rob Hopkins has been rapidly accelerated to thought-leader. So, before Rob there were people like Sharon. She is struggling with the very question that we struggle with in the Transition movement and it is thus: how do we get an entire society to move to a sustainable future of natural abundance (and away from an unsustainable lifestyle of artificial fossil fuel "abundance") voluntarily BEFORE it is forced upon society involuntarily? Whilst it can be a pleasure rather than a pain?

Some believe that it cannot be done voluntarily. As George Monbiot wrote in Heat: nobody every rioted FOR austerity. So Sharon setup a scheme called "Riot for Austerity" with fellow Americans online to do, voluntarily, what many believed couldn't be done without technology or unacceptable sacrifice. Their aim was to reduce their consumption footprints to levels almost unimaginable to the western mind. Unlike ...

Thomas H. Greco, Jr. "The End of Money"

Post Carbon Man — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 18:15:00 +0000

ISBN 978-086315-733-2. "The End of Money and the Future of Civilisation" by Thomas H. Greco, Jr was published by Floris Books in the UK in 2010 (originally Chelsea Green in in the USA in 2009). The paperback gives you 295 pages including twenty chapters, an Epilogue, Acknowledgements, two appendices, References, Notes and an Index. Those of you who have read a few monetary reform books may well know the score. If you liked Peter North's "Local Money", "The Web of Debt" by Ellen Hodgson Brown, "The Grip of Death" by Michael Rowbotham or David Boyle's "Money Matters" then you will like this. It is actually quite similar to the Peter North work as it travels the road of local currencies but not to the enthusiastic extent of the Transition movement. Rather Greco extols the virtue of local currencies as part of a new ecology of money that is focused upon local "credit clearing". As with other books of its ilk this is not always an easy read - especially for anyone who finds economics and banking difficult concepts. Let's face it, that is most of us. Which is the problem. Greco doesn't really overcome this problem for his reader but, on the up side, his description of the future evolution of money is a far more satisfying solution than simply local currencies. Unlike others who write in this field he doesn't peddle a simple statist solution. He prefers local money in a free market of currencies where the medium of exchange is entirely separate from money as a measure of value. Greco has no doubt about the scale of the problem and kicks off in the second chapter with the term "mega-crisis" and the question "can civilisation be saved?" Woah.

However he is no doomster as he quickly persuades the ...

Mark Lynas "The God Species"

Post Carbon Man — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 08:50:00 +0000

ISBN 978-0-00-731342-6. "The Gods Species - How the Planet can survive the Age of Humans" was written by Mark Lynas and published by Fourth Estate in 2011. Lynas's "Six Degrees" remains one of the finest books on Climate Change that anyone should read. It is for good reason that it won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and is one of Post-carbon Living's top rated books. So when Lynas turned against his old buddies in the green movement and called for the support of GM crops and Nuclear power he turned from being just an awesome author but also one with interesting views. Views we have a lot of sympathy for. Since our work has never stemmed from a set of green orthodoxies we certainly are also free to turn over the mish mash that is the cultural legacy of 40 years of environmentalism. Some of it is good, some bad and some darn-right ugly. We live in enlightened era of breakthrough environmentalism where the likes of Chris Goodall and George Monbiot feel comfortable expressing concerns over resource depletion alongside support for technologies such as nuclear. There was nothing new in what Lynas was attempting. What proved unfortunate was the style in which he has attempted this renaissance. He likes to bang his own drum.

We first noticed it when we started to follow Lynas's Tweets. It became quickly clear that Lynas had no great vision of using social media to explore new ideas. No. He used Twitter to promote the sale of his books. This in itself is not wrong (it is his only income next to a retainer paid by the government of the Maldives) but what left us feeling jaded was the abrasive manner of his self-promotion. His Tweets started to resemble those of Bjorn Lomborg. ...

Richard Heinberg "Blackout"

Post Carbon Man — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:05:00 +0100

ISBN 978 1 905570 20 1. "Blackout - Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis" by Richard Heinberg was published by Clairview Books in 2009. For your money you get 200 page including Acknowledgements, Introduction, eight chapters, Notes, Bibliography and Index. What can we say about a book by Richard Heinberg? Next to Colin Campbell he practically founded and defined the modern concern about Peak Oil and how it will effect our civilisation. This is his fifth major book on the topic and (at the time of writing September 2011) he had already published his sixth "The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality". It seems hard to catch up. So, after four good books does the quality start to fail him? Well, sadly, yes. This is not necessarily a bad thing as this is a book he had to write. Whereas he had written continually about Peak Oil his critics would always level the criticism along the lines of "well, that's all right because we have 200 years of coal left". This is his response and it is well researched and workmanlike. However it is his least entertaining work and you have the feeling that it was a chore for him. Most of the book reviews numerous reports on the state of global coal supplies broken down country by country and region by region. His conclusion? Well, yes there is lots of coal left but the peak is still likely to come far sooner that the claim of "200 years supply" suggests. We are likely to see the peak of coal production somewhere between 2025 and 2075. So, by mid-century (within the lifetime of this reviewer) we will learn if we can expand our economies any further on the supply of cheap coal.
Putting the peak issue ...

Robert L. Hirsch "The Impending World Energy Mess"

Post Carbon Man — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:03:00 +0100

ISBN 978-1926837-11-6. "The Impending World Energy Mess - what it is and what it means to YOU!" written by Robert L Hirsch, Roger H Bezdek and Robert M Wendling and published by Apogee Prime in 2010. The review copy is a first edition but is a paperback with dustcover (unusual!). For your money you get 251 pages boasting Preface, Foreword by James Schlesinger, Introduction, eighteen chapters, Postscript, References and Index. Those of us who have been following the peak oil story for a few years (about seven years in the reviewer's case) will be familiar with the work of this writing team. They were responsible for a 2005 report for the US Department of Energy called "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation & Risk Management". In it the team developed scenarios for crash programs to mitigate the risks arising from peak oil. They famously concluded that it would take around 20 years to adjust to peak oil hence we had better start earlier rather than later. Of course nothing happened. The report was of little interest to the US DOE. They buried it and it took a subsequent Freedom on Information request for it to emerge in to the public domain. The report has become a legend in its own lunchtime - so much so that it has become one of the corner stones of peakist folklore. Between the work of Richard Heinberg and Colin Campbell we had all we needed to launch a million paranoia's. From it the entire Transition movement was born as well as Post-Carbon Living.

However, one has to wonder: just how many of us ever read this report or know much about these authors? Well, you can read the 2005 report here. As for the authors, they are all highly qualified and have ...

Ha-Joon Chang "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism"

Post Carbon Man — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 14:28:00 +0100

ISBN 978-1-846-14328-1. "23 things they don't tell you about Capitalism" by Ha-Joon Chang was published in 2010 by Penguin. This hardback has 286 pages with Acknowledgements, Introduction, twenty-three "things" as Chapters, a Conclusion, Notes and an Index. "This book is not an anti-capitalist manifesto" states the author right up front. This is probably a good thing as we probably wouldn't have it on our pages if it was. This is a follow up to Chang's successful 2007 book "Bad Samaritans" which we also reviewed here as a timely reminder (since the crash of 2008) of just how far neo-conservative economic dogma has held us back from building a sustainable economic system. Without a said system we will not have the capital to build sustainable homes, energy infrastructure and food systems. Economics is at the heart of it all. Since the environmental movement arose in the early 1970's it has proudly touted its achievements in winning a battle here and there but it lost the war on the one front that REALLY mattered: economics. The conservatives won. The Chicago School won and it has lead us down a path that cannot be sustained. We learnt that greed was good and short term profits were all that mattered as the free market would sort everything else out. Come the dawn of an era of peaking energy supplies and climate chaos and we had a demonstration of what many came to call "market failures".

Despite these obvious failures the market still dominates the ideology of modern Government. Chang tears this apart and asks the questions that very few even ask these days. As with "Bad Samaritans" we get a well researched slice of work but overall this is a weaker effort. The strength of "Bad Samaritans" was that it was based ...

Donnachadh McCarthy "Saving the Planet without costing the Earth"

Post Carbon Man — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 21:45:00 +0100

ISBN 1-904132-39-1. "Saving the Planet without costing the Earth - 500 simple steps to a greener lifestyle" by Donnachadh McCarthy was published in Fusion Press in 2004. This review is of the paperback edition which has 237 pages including an introduction, ten chapters, resources, acknowledgements. Curiously, even though chapter ten is entirely about the author the last page of the book also has a one page summary of Donnachadh's life. In fact you can read all about in again in his 2008 "Easy Eco-Auditing" books (reviewed here). We suggest you read chapter ten first as it is a good snapshot of just how accomplished Donnachadh is. He makes it all sound so easy - the true renaissance man. It seems he is good at everything he has ever done. Rising from ballet professional (at a comparatively late age) to become part of the senior executive for the UK's Liberal Democrat party. He has pioneered domestic renewable energy on his London home and when I met him in late 2010 he was enthusiastically looking for a phrase to describe HIS "carbon negative" home. On the face of it we have every reason to applaud him.

Sadly his books don't quite hit the spot. Although "Easy Eco Auditing" was a good guide about starting an eco-auditing business it proved exceptionally weak on the justification as to WHY so many of his recommendations had any worth. Our immediate impression of "Saving the Planet..." was simply that it looked starkly out of place in a post-carbon literary world now dominated by the concepts of the ecological and carbon footprinting. Donnachadh's style was to largely shoot from the hip and go with what feels right. "Saving the Planet.." actually covers some of the basic justifications missing from the later book. Given this we felt ...

Donnachadh McCarthy "Easy Eco Auditing"

Post Carbon Man — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 12:09:00 +0100

ISBN 978-1-85675-293-0. "Easy Eco Auditing - How to make your home and workplace planet-friendly" was written by Donnachadh McCarthy. Published by Octopus publishing in 2008. This paperback has 304 pages which includes an introduction eleven chapters, Appendices, Resources, Eco-audit form, example home eco-audit report, Index and Acknowledgements. I first met the author in person before I had any idea of his fame. I certainly had no idea that he had published two books and had such a glittering writing career. If you wish to know anything about him then it is all here. Pretty much a potted history of his life over the last twenty years. And to think he used to be a freelance ballet dancer. So I brought his two books second-hand off Amazon. Donnachadh is a nice enough chap in person but I think the term "planet-friendly" jars a little. It wouldn't have been my choice. It isn't difficult to get to hate those tired old clichés about "saving the planet" but this author falls for it on every page. This planet friendly cliché may be partly offset on page 33 (pardon the pun) by his pro-carbon-offsetting stance.

Whereas many greens vent their spleen again carbon offsetting Donnachadh sets a more reasonable tone. He writes “the fact remains that well-run carbon-offsetting schemes have a positive role to play in moving us towards a low-carbon economy.” Indeed he manages to devote over a page (34 through 35) to the “reasons to carbon offset”. He goes as far as agreeing with exactly the point made on this web site going back to 2007 and it is this “this voluntary tax on carbon emissions” doesn’t “disappear in general taxation”. It enshrines the “polluter pays” principle. In our view most of the people paying this voluntary tax are the sort of ...

Ha-Joon Chang "Bad Samaritans"

Post Carbon Man — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 12:04:00 +0100

ISBN 9781905211371. "Bad Samaritans - The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations & the threat to global prosperity" by Ha-Joon Chang was published by Random House in 2007. This paperback has 276 pages with Acknowledgements, Prologue, nine chapters, Epilogue, Notes and Index. Chang is a new author to the pages of Post-Carbon Living and an unusual choice as his work doesn't directly address climate change or peak oil. However his work is enlightening in the economic sphere as it serves as a timely defence of Keynesianism. In these neo-Liberal times, where Governments throw up their hands in horror at the idea of brokering a Green New Deal, it remains a salutary lesson to recall, as Chang demonstrates, that all our modern Western countries became industrialised because they adopted the very policies we now need to build low-carbon economies. But as soon as they become wealthy they decried these methods in favour of a new-found religion of the "free market" which, as Chang points out, means that other economies are NOT FREE TO CHOOSE any alternative path. Ironic. The apt phrase Chang chooses is "kicking away the ladder" of economic development from the developing nations. It keeps them firmly where they already are - poor.

The trouble is that we are all now "re-developing" nations. We are in transition through a new industrial revolution towards a post-carbon economy. Now is not the time to forget the lessons of history for reasons of pure dogma. This could place this book somewhere between Chomsky and Korten but this is not anti-capitalist rant. It is more an appeal to reason. The author surveys the evidence in the history books to compare the reality of how economic development happens versus the rhetoric of the World Trade Organisation and the "Washington Consensus" supplied by the World Bank ...

Mike Berners-Lee "How Bad are Bananas?"

Post Carbon Man — Sat, 14 May 2011 11:37:00 +0100

ISBN 978 1 84668 891 1. "How Bad are Bananas? - The Carbon Footprint of Everything" by Mike Berners-Lee was published by Profile Books in 2010. This 240 page paperback includes acknowledgements, introduction, 'quick guide', eleven main sections, more info, notes, references and index. We have piled through several books like this over the years starting with Chris Goodall's "How to Live a Low-Carbon Life" and ending recently with "Time To Eat The Dog" by Robert and Brenda Vale. So it is a crowded market. How exactly do you make books about carbon footprinting interesting these days? Berners-Lee's approach is to divide up our carbon footprints into ranges starting with "Under 10 grams" (starting with a text message) and going, in stages, all the way up to "1 million tonnes and beyond" (includes the footprint of the entire world). One of our key criticisms of the Vale's book is that it was vastly padded out with way too much detail about the calculations. Mike doesn't make this mistake as his text talks about footprints in a more qualitative & relative sense. Details are wisely left to the references section at the rear. Where all such books fall down is on their assumptions. It is a minefield and we nearly always find a bizarre assumption or inaccuracy. I am sure if I wrote this book then they would raise the same criticisms of my assumptions.

Thus, we are all human and this human failing shines through in each work like this. (In Goodall's case he showed his anti-car stance by delivering several questionable opinions about the cost of carbon saved in the area of buying low-carbon transport and converting it to liquid petroleum gas.) A natural bias leads to general ignorance leads to inaccuracy. Berners-Lee does waffle ...

Book review: Colin Challen MP "Too little, too late"

Post Carbon Man — Sun, 01 May 2011 11:48:00 +0100

ISBN 9780956037008. "Too Little, Too Late - the politics of climate change" by Colin Challen MP was published by Picnic Publishing in 2009. This book has 256 pages including Prologue, Introduction seven chapters, Epilogue, Bibliography, Appendix and Index. Colin didn't stand for re-election to his Morley and Rothwell in the 2010 British Elections. I checked his voting record at "theyworkforyou.com" and found a certain ambiguity on his political stand across a variety of issues. He may well have been the most right-on Climate Change Campaigner in Parliament that you have never heard of. His name was new to me. Funny story - we bought the review copy off the second hand Amazon marketplace and the copy arrived in as-new state - it didn't look like it had even been thumbed through. However, upon opening the cover we found the following handwritten on the title page: " To Chris, I hope you don't find this too depressing! Colin" We'll never know if this has been genuinely signed by the author but the recipient of this gift may not have been impressed enough to read it. An initial glance through might show why. It starts with what must be the most boring anecdote about Climate Change negotiations ever. The next few chapters, up to around page 100, deal with the machinations of the Conference of the Parties and many a reader might put this book down early on.

This would be a mistake as it is worth bearing with it. It does get better - we promise. Challen's book covers a brief period of history around 2007 (the afore-mentioned COP at Bali) through to 2009. There is a refreshing perspective here for the modern historian. Challen points out the irony of the WTO conference in Hong Kong and the UNFCCC conference in ...

Robert & Brenda Vale "Time to eat the dog?"

Post Carbon Man — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 21:53:00 +0100

ISBN 978-0-500-28790-3. "Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living" by Robert and Brenda Vale was published by Thames & Hudson in 2009. For your money you get 384 pages with an Introduction, seven Chapters, a Conclusion, Notes, Sources, Resources and an Index. I suppose a title like that is designed to be incendiary given how close the English are to their pets. The Vales certainly know how to sex it up. For some the very idea couldn't be more offensive than if they had advised us to eat our children. Really. All the publicity this book got at its launch in 2009 came about precisely due to its coverage of the sustainability footprint of our pets. This was a shot in the arm and it certainly got everyone talking and thinking. But apart from this publicity blast does the rest of this book deserve its infamy? Our conclusion: yes, it is well worth it, with a few caveats. To their credit we have to say that the Vales are quite cognitive of the books shortcomings. It would be easy to criticise the work for its accuracy and such but the introduction pretty much heads-off this kind of critique as the authors admit its flaws. So let us focus on the less obvious problems. Firstly you will notice an obsession with numbers. Obsessive to distraction.

Although it is the purpose of the numbers to compare the footprints of different things the Vales insist on showing not only how they calculated the number but also the calculations. This may be occasionally useful if you wished to check their calculations and assumption but I would have edited this book down to half this size to give it more va va voom. The assumptions and technical calcs could have been ...

(Edited by) Richard Heinberg & Daniel Lerch "The Post Carbon Reader"

Post Carbon Man — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 18:42:00 +0000

ISBN 978-0-9709500-6-2. "The Post Carbon Reader - Managing the 21st Century's Sustainability Crises" edited by Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch. Published in 2010 by Watershed Media and the Post Carbon Institute. A large book at 523 pages including Foreword, Preface, Acknowledgements, sixteen parts with a total of 34 chapters, Notes and Index. Some 42 authors contributed to this work most of whom are "Fellows of the Post Carbon Institute". With the one exception (of our very own Rob Hopkins) this is dominated by North American voices. As with all such works - no matter how righteous and admirable it is, it only goes to show just how far behind Europe and the rest of the World, North America is. They may possess some of the best minds and advanced thinking but that thinking appears to exist in their civic society which sits entirely outside the US Government and Federal system. If just a small ounce of all this commonsense found its way into Congress then maybe the US could one day lead the world in terms of action as well as talking around the problem. The sixteen sections of this work are: "Foundation Concepts", Climate, Water, Biodiversity, Food, Population, Culture and Behaviour, Energy, Economy, "Cities, Towns and Suburbs", Transportation, Waste, Health, Education and Building Resilience. Authors include Richard Heinberg, Richard Douthwaite, Bill McKibben, Chris Martenson and Rob Hopkins.

So what you are getting are 34 mini-essays giving you the state-of-the-art in post-carbon thinking. Some of us would pretty much buy anything written by Heinberg - everything else is a bonus. There is very good coverage of the topic here and this presents a very broad horizon on the topic. The section on Waste was eye-opening. On the down side we do get some Climate Change scaremongering from the likes of ...

Zac Goldsmith "The Constant Economy"

Post Carbon Man — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 17:29:00 +0000

ISBN 978 1 84887 067 3. "The Constant Economy - How to Create a Stable Society" by Zac Goldsmith published by Atlantic Books in 2009. This work predates Zac's controversial election to be the Conservative MP for Richmond Park. The book is a short one with only 200 pages in quite a large font and thick paper for the pages. Your money gets you a Preface, Introduction, ten chapters (or "steps"), a Conclusion, Sources & Bibliography, Acknowledgments and Index. You will find this a quick read. Zac became the Editor for The Ecologist in 1997 and has pioneered campaigns on climate change, GM food and pesticides. This book is a result of his work John Gummer MP on the Conservative Party's "Quality of Life" policy review. As such this seems to be the result of thinking that is half the usual environmentalist litany (as per the contents of The Ecologist), and part Conservative Party acceptable politics. For example the matter of man made climate change, economic growth and aviation is so soft peddled as to almost not be mentioned in this book at all. Regardless, he is in no-mans-land. No doubt much of what he has written will self-ghettoise himself as a the Tory party's token big greenie. Many who like The Ecologist will be mortified about how toothless much of the book may seem in comparison to Zac's campaigning years. I guess he wasn't going to win this one.

At least he got himself in Parliament and for a Party that isn't associated with environmentalism. This is a great "bunker-buster". It allows the rest of us to kick down the door of conservative thought and get these people to wake up and realise that this isn't 1979 any more. Margaret Thatcher is ancient history and the paradigm of endless ...

Greg Craven "What's the worst that could happen?"

Post Carbon Man — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 20:21:00 +0000

ISBN 978-0-399053501-7. "What's the worst that could happen? - A rational response to the climate change debate" by Greg Craven was published by Perigree (Penguin Books) in 2009. The paperback has 264 pages boasting ten chapters, appendix, resources, notes, references, acknowledgements and an index. Craven is a high school physics and chemistry teacher whose YouTube video "The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See" has probably passed 1.5million downloads by now. The first I heard of this was during a BBC4 documentary in February 2011 called "Meet the Skeptics" by which time I already had the book in my shelf to read. Without wishing to gush like an excited schoolboy this is, without doubt, the best book ever written about climate change. But it was a book that should never have needed to be written. Let me explain why. This is not a book about climate change. This is not a book about why we argue about climate change. It isn't even a book about the politics of climate change. No, it is one thing: it teaches ordinary lay people how to perform a personal risk assessment. That's it really. It was written after the video went viral on the web. The book is needlessly overly long, not sure why, but it hits all the right buttons precisely because it doesn't pretend to give you THE ANSWER. No, this is a book that tells you how to analyse the debate and reach your own conclusions.

Craven asks you to identify and leave your biases at the door then draw up a grid. The grid has two rows and two columns. Across the top on the left is a column headed "Significant action now" whilst on the right it reads "Little or now action now". The two rows, ...

Chris Bird "Local Sustainable Homes"

Post Carbon Man — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 12:20:00 +0000

ISBN 978 1 900322 76 8. "Local Sustainable Homes - How to make them happen in your community" by Chris Bird was published in 2010 by Green Books/Transition Books. This is a paperback in the usual Transition-style consisting of 240 pages including an Introduction by Rob Hopkins, fifteen chapters, references, resources and index. This is the first book we've seen that lists www.post-carbon-living.com as a resource. That was very sweet of them. We are not sure we deserve it but thanks anyway. We were listed under "Information, advice, education and research" as a "down-to-earth website that includes updates on the refurbishment of a 1980s home". Well, now you know. Chris is a Totnes resident so pretty much he comes from Transition-central. His career as a freelance journalist has included writings on sustainable buildings for the likes of The Observer and Selfbuild & Design. It is difficult to know what to expect from a book like this. We naturally thought it would be dominated by eco-retrofit projects and self-builds. Although there is that element you will find far more inside the covers. It may not be all to everyone's taste though.

We felt that a lot of it seemed a little like padding. Almost as if there wasn't much to write about so Bird went on a Transition-tour of Totnes, Brighton and Sheffield. Bird's work had a lot to live up to seeing as we had just previously read Alexis Rowell's excellent "Communities, Councils & a Low-Carbon Future - What we can do if government won't". The Rowell work is beyond compare as a useful "how-to". Somehow you are setup to expect the same level of practical detail from Bird. Now we weren't expecting Bird to go into detail about how to build a home or do a ...

Crude - The Real Price of Oil

Post Carbon Man — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 16:31:00 +0000

"Crude - the real price of oil" by Joe Berlinger is a 105 minute documentary from 2009 covering a couple of years in the monolithic court case between the Cofán people and Texaco (today Chevron). The movie is bought to you by a man who's track record seems to be in rock-band documentaries. The Cofán are indigenous to a rainforest area of Ecuador where Texaco setup shop in the 1960's to extract oil. According to the local's case the oil company dumped more oil and toxic sludge in the jungle than was ever spilt by the Exxon-Valdez. There are over one thousand poisonous waste ponds in the jungle that are not sealed. The poisons are leaking into the water supply and, allegedly, causing a cancer epidemic amongst the people who call the jungle home. Thus started an epic 17 year struggle that is still underway to get compensation for the people of Ecuador. It may seem like a simple David versus Goliath struggle between evil corporation and good Indians. However Berlinger plays it pretty straight and allows both sides to tell their side of the story. Chevron had sold up and moved on when Ecuador-oil took over many years before. As part of the deal the Ecuadorian state should have picked up the tab for any further clean-up efforts.

In Houston it looked as if the Ecuadorians were going back upon their contractual obligations and the local Indians were looking to rip off a wealthy American corporation. However, as the story unfolds we are left with the impression that the poisonings date back to before the state-owned Ecuadorian company took over. One of the main lawyers for the Indians is based in New York and was making regular trips to South America to talk to his counter-part - a local ...

Alexis Rowell "Communities, Councils & A Low-Carbon Future"

Post Carbon Man — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 16:25:00 +0000

ISBN 978 1 900322 65 2. "Communities, Councils & a Low-Carbon Future - What we can do if government won't" by Alexis Rowell was published by Transition Books/ Green Books in 2010. The author is a former London Borough of Camden Councillor and works with Transition Belsize so he was well placed to write this work. In fact, apart from maybe the seminal work by Rob Hopkins, THIS book may well prove to be the most useful of all the Transition Books so far - and it has stiff competition. Anything following this up has a hard act to follow. Alexis had created a perfect, state-of-the-art, guide to engaging with Councils. Not only that but I believe this is THE book that EVERY Council's Sustainability or Environment Officer should have on their book shelf. We have seen Transition Towns give away Transition Books to the local library before - but I think we should raise the money to buy a copy of this book and send it to every Council in the Country. It is a gold-mine. Where did the author find the time to find all of this stuff? I was amazed. I thought I pretty much new what-was-going-on-where when it came to Council best-practice around Britain. However I had hardly scratched the surface of the topic.

There are so many great case-studies in the book it is over-whelming. If you don't have this book with you when you meet with your local Council then you are missing a trick. It is the bible for all future contacts.... Until, we assume, somebody updates it in a few years. It is a fast moving field and this work will date rapidly. Certainly I was impressed by just how much is going on out there. However, given the youth of the ...

Marek Kohn "Turned Out Nice"

Post Carbon Man — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 16:22:00 +0000

ISBN 978-0-571-23815-6. "Turned out nice - How the British Isles will Change as the World Heats Up" by Marek Kohn was published by Faber & Faber in 2010. The paperback is 368 pages long including 9 chapters, notes, bibliography and index. The author has been described as "one of the best science writers we have" according to the back-page blurb. Other than that we learn nothing about the author and his is a name we remain unfamiliar with in terms of this topic. The title of the book pretty much tells you what it is about however you may be forgiven for thinking that this is a somewhat dry (pun unintended) retelling of climate predictions for Britain in 2100. In fact the weather, 90 years from now, is often incidental to the story that Kohn tries to weave. Most of this work reads like a travel guide to a future Britain. Its language is mostly quite unscientific as the author tries to capture the reader's imagination through a work of near-science-fiction. That isn't to say that it isn't based in the best science. It is. However the author does two things: firstly he divorces climate change from the coming energy crunch. It is only briefly mentioned. Secondly his predictions of the social and political evolution in Europe seem somewhat fanciful.

Kohn seems to expect that climate change, rather than being utterly divisive, will in fact heal all ill-will. Europe will expand southward and eastward to engulf the nations ruined by climate change. The author expects this reaction as opposed to the somewhat gut-reaction we might expect. Some of us would expect boat-fulls of refugees and a fortress-Europe reaction. I hope Kohn's vision is right. I fear I am not wrong.

Beyond this the writing remains somewhat flowery. This book ...

Keith Farnish "Time's Up!"

Post Carbon Man — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 12:57:00 +0000

ISBN 978 1 900322 48 5 paperback. "Time's Up! An uncivilized solution to a global crisis" by Keith Farnish was published in 2009 by Green Books. For the £10 cover price you get Acknowledgements, Introduction, 16 Chapters (in four sections), an Afterword, References, Notes and an Index. The inside face page has a disclaimer "The author and publishers accept no liability for action inspired by this book". Now that might just give you a clue on this one. The author is a blogger, writer, philosopher and activist but prior to picking this up he was unknown to us. Having read this we see why. It is a book of two halves. The first half, up to page 145, verges between the incredibly dull to the incomprehensible. If this was all to this book I might have graded it as codswallop. This first half is a work of philosophy. Farnish takes navel gazing to new lows as he spends over one hundred pages trying to talk about "The Scale of the Problem". and "Why it matters". In detail this seems to involve the worst kind of scaremongering about all of the kinds of threats mankind faces from mother nature. Let me tell you about my own experiences with mother nature. When my little girl was born she had a lot of eczema. My wife scoured the internet looking for natural cures. When we questioned one medical doctor about this he was dismissive. "Nature is nasty" he told us.

Well, nature is many things but it is neither "nice" nor "nasty" - it simply is what it is. A machine we are all part of. It doesn't judge or take sides. It doesn't care. Farnish uses the first half of the book to tell us how we are messing with ...

Chris Goodall "How to live a Low-Carbon Life" 2nd Edition 2010

Post Carbon Man — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 15:44:00 +0000

ISBN 978-1-84407-910-0. "How to live a low-carbon life" second edition was published by Earthscan in 2010. The paperback gives you 300 easy-read pages consisting of 13 Chapters, Notes, Acknowledgements and Index. As an update upon his earlier 2006 book you can probably copy everything from the review, four years ago, and paste it here. So we'll focus on what is new or different. First things first, whereas the original spoke about getting carbon footprints down from 12.5 tonnes per person to 3 tonnes, the new edition talks about getting from 14 tonnes down to 2. This difference comes from updated accounting which now includes the embodied energy for imported goods. The new target adopts the UK Climate Change Act's recommendations of an 80% cut. This was good to see as our 2006 review did suggest the adding of more work on embodied energy. The first four chapters in Chris's original work have been condensed down into just one which accounts for the lower chapter and page count of the new edition (300 pages vs 318 and 13 chapters versus 17).

As before though, this first chapter is probably the most important. If you judged a book by its cover and took into account the fact that Chris's previous work was "Ten Technologies to Save the Planet" you might think him to be some techno-optimist. However, the truth is far from this stereotype. Although Chris writes in his comfort zone of numbers and science, he treats the problem as a very human one. He takes the first 30 pages to tear through lazy assumptions that somehow our carbon footprints are either someone else's problem or to be solved by technology. His most impassioned pleas concern flying. Chris believes the key is individual action. Private Companies and the Government cannot ...

Stephen H. Schneider "Science as a Contact Sport"

Post Carbon Man — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:05:00 +0000

ISBN 978-1-4262-0540-8. "Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate" by Stephen H. Schneider was published by National Geographic in 2009. We reviewed the hardback copy which had 295 pages including Foreword, Introduction, nine Chapters, Acknowledgements, Notes and Index. We admit to reading this book in just one sitting. It served as an antidote to the previous read that was the somewhat turgid "Questioning Collapse". It is all relative as "Science as a Contact Sport" wasn't THAT entertaining but it was nice just to kick back and read what is, effectively, an autobiography. Schneider probably knows more about man-made climate change than any man alive. Or so says Tim Flannery, Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council in the Foreword. This may well be true as he started out in climatology in the early 1970's when the field barely existed as an area of science. Right from the off he made a name for himself in the media when he part-penned a paper that suggested the world was in for global cooling. Of course this early work on aerosols was wrong and he corrected the model some three years later. Inevitably, to this day, he is still reminded about this. Of course the climate change deniers find this fact hilarious with the obvious refrain about Schneider "not making his mind up - why should we believe him now?" However, as the good man clearly says, good science evolves through mistakes.

Schneider does seem to have known almost everyone who was anyone. He worked alongside both Al Gore and Carl Sagan. It was with Sagan that he had his most regrettable bust-up with when he revealed that Sagan's theory of "Nuclear Winters" was fundamentally flawed. Schneider believed that Sagan had ignored the evidence in order to ...

Patricia A. McAnany & Norman Yoffee "Questioning Collapse"

Post Carbon Man — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:04:00 +0000

ISNB 978-0-521-73366-3. "Questioning Collapse - Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability and the Aftermath of Empire" edited by Patricia A. McAnany & Norman Yoffee was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. The paperback is 374 pages long including a list of figures, list of contributors, preface, acknowledgements, introduction, fourteen chapters in four sections and an index. The title somewhat gives the game away as this is billed as the answer to Jared Diamond's 1997 work "Guns, Germs and Steel" and his 2005 opus "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed". We have not read the former as it is a work of history of little relevance to today's globalised economy on the brink of its carbon constrained future. However, the second work has been read and was reviewed here. In "Collapse" Diamond walked us through the anthropological history of multiple cultures, from ancient times to modern days, and reviews how depletion of natural resource contributed to those societies' collapse. This clearly is of interest to us at post-carbon living. Indeed that book is now quite celebrated to the point that it now appears on the syllabus to several University courses as well as being required-reading for the modern ecologist. However, all is not well in the halls of academia. On page 4 we read "Diamond is probably the best-known writer of anthropology even though he is not an anthropologist!" Zing.

The fifteen authors who contributed to "Questioning Collapse" are not happy at all. It seems Diamond has stepped on way too many toes on his way to the top and the "proper" anthropologists are fuming. It may well be that they have a point but we are slightly ham-strung in that, despite the name of this book, much of it doesn't address Jared Diamond's 2005 book. This can be ...

Review: Randy Olson "Don't be such a Scientist"

Post Carbon Man — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 14:40:00 +0000

ISBN 978-1-59726-563-8. "Don't be such a Scientist - Talking Substance in an Age of Style" by Randy Olson was published by Island Press in 2009. This paperback has 206 pages consisting of introduction, five chapters, three appendices, notes, acknowledgements and index. It is noteworthy to mention that Island Press is a non-profit organisation dedicated to environmental problems. The author is a bit of an egg-head, by his own admission, with multiple degrees and a Ph.D. from Harvard in marine biology. He took the extraordinary step, early in his thirties, to abandon his tenureship to pursue a second career in Hollywood as a film-maker. There is no denying his credentials to write at length about the communication of science. However his work does focus largely on film-making and there-in lies one of many significant faults. Likewise another significant fault is the author aiming this book only at scientists. His objective was to make them understand that science is deathly dull and that no one is remotely interested in the facts any more. If scientists believe that a simple repetition of facts will get them anywhere, outside of academic circles, then they are sorely mistaken. Olson observes that this is understood by about a third of scientists. Another third of the scientists, he has come into contact with, are vaguely interested in his ideas, whereas the remainder virulently reject any idea that science needs better communication.

The case in point, that Olson quotes, is Carl Sagan who did more than any man to popularise science to the masses but whom was vilified by his peers. To many in the science establishment the very idea of popularising and communicating science to anyone, in a manner that may make it better understood, is anti-science heresy. So this is a book where science ...

Michael Foley "The Age of Absurdity"

Post Carbon Man — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 20:12:00 +0100

ISBN 978-1-84737-524-7. "The Age of Absurdity: Why modern life makes it hard to be happy" by Michael Foley was published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd in 2010. The paperback offers 260 pages consisting of five parts of fourteen chapters, acknowledgements, notes and index. No doubt Amazon recommended this one to us because of our previous purchase of "Irrationality" by Stuart Sutherland (Constable and Company 1992 ISBN 978-1-905177-0703) which we reviewed in March of 2010. So is this just another "Mr Angry" and his personal attempt to brand all of modern life as "rubbish" (to quote a Blur album)? What intrigued us about Foley's work was the potential it unlocked to understand why people are so unhappy that they continue to drive economic activity even after this became demonstrably unsustainable. People want so much, the next big holiday, the next plasma screen TV, the next gadget from Apple, yet none of it makes us happy. So we drive an industrial system of consumption whose sole purpose is to turn natural resources into waste as quickly as possible in some vain attempt to make us "happy". Yet we never can be because this objective is, of course, absurd. In the review of the Sutherland book we felt a little let down by the author who seemed unable to objectively understand what were his own subjective feelings on a matter and what was truly "irrational". It simply came out as pop-psychology dressed up in the clothes of science.

Foley's book is far more a work of philosophy hence arguably more personal. His approach is similar to Sutherland's in the way he find numerous anecdotes and scientific papers to justify his every whim no-matter how contradictory the end result appears to a lay man. But as a whole the result is ...

The Treasury & Absolute Power

Post Carbon Man — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 09:02:00 +0100

The UK currently gets around 5.5% of electricity from renewable sources and that will need to increase to around 30% to meet the 15% 2020 target for all energy. Modeling show that small scale renewable installations could meet 2% of electricity demand in 2020. The UK currently gets less than 1% of heat from renewable sources. This this will need to rise to around 12% in order to meet the 15% 2020 target for all energy. When the then Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband announced the feed-in tariff (FITs) levels on February 1st 2010 his department also published a blueprint for a similar scheme to be introduced in April 2011 to incentivise low carbon heating technologies. The renewable heat incentive (RHI) would be a world first. The FIT & RHI schemes were designed to bring about a significant increase in the amount of locally produced clean, renewable, energy, as a contribution to the wider shift of the energy mix to low carbon.

The RHI scheme was to incentivise renewable heat generation at all scales. This will guarantee payments for those who install technologies such as ground source heat pumps, biomass boilers and air source heat pumps. Under the proposed tariffs the installation of a ground source heat pump in an average semi-detached house with adequate insulation levels could be rewarded with £1,000 a year and lead to savings of £200 per year if used instead of heating oil. The heat incentive could help thousands of consumers who are off the gas network lower their fuel bills and gain a cash reward for cleaning-up their heating supply.

The Feed In Tariff was modeled upon a scheme operating successfully in Germany for many years. Its intention was to boost the use of domestic renewable energy, hence it will boost the ...

John Michael Greer "The Ecotechnic Future"

Post Carbon Man — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 18:30:00 +0100

ISBN 978-0-86571-639-1. "The Ecotechnic Future - envisioning a post-peak world" by John Michael Greer was published by New Society Publishers in 2009. The book is 269 pages long including Introduction, three Parts of thirteen Chapters, Afterword, Notes, Bibliography and Index. Greer is a new author on the scene (by our standards) however this is not his first work. He had previously written "The Long Descent" (New Society 2008) which, as far as we can tell, was along similar lines to this one. When we purchased this work it was based upon some favourable reviews online at Amazon. What we didn't know was that Greer heads the "Ancient Order of Druids in America". Uh-oh - crank alert. Even worse his blog is called "The Archdruid Report". On this basis alone I would feel pretty constrained about recommending this book to any of the locals in our Transition Town. But bear with it. Regardless of Greer's unorthodox background this is a very good book. It is philosophical and challenges the way that many of the "peakist" crowd think about peak oil. Essentially Greer points out that there will be no sudden crash. Instead he prefers to believe in several hundred years of slow muddling through. And he isn't joking about the "muddling through" bit. He calls it "succession". Greer believes that there is no "one way" to solve the current crisis. There is no golden bullet and no magic solution.

Hence, there is no known model for society, in current existence, that we know will survive in the post-peak world. We can only guess at some of the aspects but we cannot engineer it to happen. It will happen through a process of "dissensus" whereby lots of societies and groups will try all kinds of alternative ways of ...

Jared Diamond "Collapse"

Post Carbon Man — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 19:03:00 +0100

ISBN-13 978-0-140-27951-1. "Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive" by Jared Diamond was published by Penguin Books in 2006. This book is a hefty 575 pages long including Prologue, 16 Chapters, Acknowledgements, Further Reading list and Index. The paperback version doesn't seem that physically large until a brief flick through shows the tiny font and ultra-thin pages. This work is sprawling and you need that "War & Peace" moment before diving in. It is an epic. Heaven only knows how Diamond found the time to write it seeing as this is not his first book (his previous works include "The Third Chimpanzee", "Why is Sex Fun?" and "Guns, Germs and Steel"). However it is for "Collapse" that he has become best known. It is a reference that crops up again and again in recent books on sustainability. Everyone seems to name check this work. Such a reputation begs a read however hard, but was it worth it? Diamond is certainly the renaissance man, a Pulitzer Prize winner and (obviously) an extremely well travelled gentleman. Nominally he is a Professor of both Physiology, Geography AND Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA whilst apparently lecturing mostly on the topic this books covers - anthropology and ecosystem collapse. Beyond these multiple professional qualifications his work takes in linguistics, genetics, animal behaviour, ecology, evolution, molecular biology, etc, etc.

Diamond also has a command of no less than twelve languages and discovers rare birds in his spare time. Spare time? He appears to have lived more in one lifetime than most geniuses live in twenty. As indicated above, this is not always and easy book to read. One is immediately drawn to the conclusion that it would make an excellent mini-series on the National Geographic Channel. Which, bizarrely enough is practically what has happened. ...

Jeff Rubin "Why your World is about to get a whole lot smaller"

Post Carbon Man — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 22:05:00 +0100

Jeff Rubin "Why your World is about to get a whole lot smaller"

ISBN 978-0-7535-1963-9. "Why your world is about to get a whole lot smaller - Oil and the end of globalisation" by Jeff Rubin was published by Virgin Books in 2009. This paperback boasts 286 pages including Intro, two main sections, 8 chapters, a conclusion, acknowledgments, notes and index. Rubin is a new name for many us used to the works of Hopkins or Heinberg. He was the Chief Economist at CIBC World Markets and claims to have been one of the first economists to predict the 2008 Oil price spike as long ago as 2000. They call it "the dismal profession" and one might be a tad wary of reading what an economist has to say about peak oil. Indeed, as the old adage goes, if you believe infinite growth can continue on a finite planet you are either mad - or an economist. That would make Rubin a very different sort of economist. Not for him the cheerful ignorance of the Chicago School. In short, he is "OUR" sort of economist, much as Lord Stern. This work stems from Rubin's research conducted alongside fellow CIBC World Markets employee, Senior Economist Peter Buchanan. Together they looked the growing trend for oil supplying countries to start "cannibalising" their own supplies. In English that means that the people in oil exporting nations start to use their own petroleum in the same fashion as it was used in the countries they used to sell it to. Outrageous behaviour.

Clearly Rubin is a man who understands from the get-go that none of us will perpetuate western lifestyles if EVERYBODY has a western lifestyle. In order for poor people to become rich the rich will become poorer. Two other colleagues ...

Andy Reynolds "Wind & Solar Electricity" (LILI)

Post Carbon Man — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 17:04:00 +0100

ISBN 978-0-9549171-6-6. "Wind & Solar Electricity - a practical DIY Guide" was published by the Low Impact Living Initiative in late 2009. Your £10 will buy you 187 pages which includes Introduction, ten chapters, appendix and index. There are a large number of illustrations throughout but, other than the front cover, nothing is in colour which reflects the non-profit nature of LILI. The LILI mission is to "help people reduce their impact on the environment, improve their quality of life, gain new skills, live in a healthier and more satisfying way, have fun and save money" all of which is totally laudable. We must pay them a visit sometime as they are based in Winslow not far from us in Buckinghamshire, UK. No doubt many a Transition Towner has been through their doors. Andy's book is a perfect result of the "gain new skills" part of that mission. Indeed the "practical DIY guide" subtitle is the real clue here. This is the second LILI book we have reviewed and the second by Andy. Although duty-bound to 'cheer-on' LILI we expect the most useful skills (that many of us will be learning) would center around the garden and chicken-raising. A glance through the many services supplied by LILI we can spy such topics as making biodiesel, composting toilets, rammed earth building, sustainable sewage, building yurts and pig keeping......

....so it is largely aimed at the converted. Nothing wrong with that as long as we don't all come over as too esoteric and start reinforcing prejudices. Sustainable living has to become the predominant paradigm if it is to sustain everyone all of the time. Since the tide has largely surged in the other direction most of us have been dragged under without even knowing. Some of ...