BookWatch "Peak Everything" by Richard Heinberg

[KenB]

List,

I ordered this at the same time as Kunstler's  "World Made By Hand".

It consists of 11 self contained essays by Heinberg, that can be read in any order. Should keep me busy on this wet, dreary leap-day.


Ken

[KenB]

List,

It's not often I get a chance to read, but this afternoon I turned off the office for 8 hours and finished reading Kunstler and Heinberg.

I sat in the upstairs front room which has good natural daylight and took full advantage of the solar gain.  I turned off the heating and settled down for a good read.

As the sun was setting, and natural light fading, I had completed Heinberg, and was quite pleased that the whole experience had been exercised without using electricity or fossil fuel for heating.

Here is a brief excerpt from page 176 which just about sums up the current situation.

" In the era when I was born, commentators used to liken the global economy to a casino. A few folks were making trillions of dollars, Euros and yen trading in currencies, companies and commodity futures. None of these people were actually doing anything useful; they were just laying down their bets and, in many cases, raking in colossal winnings. If you followed the economic chain, you'd see that all of that money was coming out of ordinary people's pockets.. "

I think that we will look back at the early years of the 21st century and realise that the world was being drained of its natural resources and wealth by the unanswerable global corporations and the victims were the common public.




Ken

[KenB]

List,

Following a web trawl I have found that most of the chapters of Heinberg's "Peak Everything" are available as a series of museletters on his website.

If you start at 2001 and work through to 2007 you will have save yourself the expense of several of his recent books.

Here are 5 of the 11 chapters

1. Tools with a life of their own
http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/163

2. Fifty Million Farmers
http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/175

4. Five Axioms of Sustainability
http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/178

9. Boomer's Last Chance?
http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/148

10. A Letter from the Future
http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/110


More here http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/archived/2007



Ken