Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future [Hardcover]

Civilizations are constructed of population, energy and knowledge. All three of these dimensions are under significant threat from the relationship between our species and our surrounding world. Success over the last hundred years, industrializing much of the world, has been borrowed from the future rather than sustainably building on the past. Ignoring the achievements of industrial society would be irresponsible. Little more than one billion people could exist on the agriculture of the pre-hydrocarbon economy, we now support more than six billion, but crop yields subsidized by oil and gas for a century have their consequences. An all-encompassing depletion of Earth's oil resources is not a likely path because the economics of the situation will drive the cheap reserves we've built our world on to extinction. Our societies will follow. Yet, we may not have time to experience a reality without cheap oil. For more than a century scientists have understood the effects of radiative forcing on the products of combustion. Concentrations of methane (due to population) and levels of carbon dioxide (due to industrial process) have been slowly increasing the Earth's temperature since human population has been growing exponentially.

Peak oil and climate change have epic implications for continuity of the human species. If one of the two possibilities is in our future, as the leading Canadian scientists within Thomas Homer Dixon's Carbon Shift argue, our lives will change forever. If they both occur (to varying degrees), Homo Sapien Sapien's role on the Earth will change past the point of familiarity over the next decade.

Carbon Shift is a must read for forward thinking people. One great example from the book demonstrates how economist Robert Solow tried to predict GDP growth in 1956. Solow argued that because 70% of costs were labor related and 30% of costs were capital related, GDP would grow .7% for every 1% in increased labor and .3% for every 1% increase in capital. But a study of growth shows that GDP has grown much faster. This is the Solow Residual that was later explained by Reiner Kummel. Demonstrated by Kummel, the discrepancy between predicted growth and actual growth was because Solow had left out energy. Kummel modeled energy inputs on a per joule basis and nearly perfectly reproduced the growth curve of the last few decades. A 1% rise in energy inputs led to .5% increases in GDP, but this revelation came with a damning realization. We are paying for energy about a tenth of what it is worth. Eventually the cost and the value will equalize. In Robert Ayers and Benjamin Warr's recent paper, Economic Growth Models and the Role of Physical Resources, they take it a step farther with the following conclusions,

The first is that exergy is a major factor of production comparable in importance to labour and capital. The second is that the empirical work/exergy ratio f is an important measure of technical progress in the long run. Similarly, and third, the output/work ratio g can be regarded as a useful indicator of the extent to which the economy is "dematerialising" (if it is) or "informatising"66 in some sense. Third, it is possible that technical progress as traditionally defined can be approximated reasonably well by mathematical expressions involving ratios of capital, labour and exergy inputs. Source: Ayres and Warr
Essentially this work demonstrates that we each have the equivalent of many energy slaves (the average US citizen having ninety of such slaves). The average US citizen has the benefit of work equivalent to 90 human slaves to support our lifestyle because of cheap energy. Basically, we are completely dependent on inexpensive fossil fuel energy. Some argue that a peak in oil production will look like: a spike in oil prices, followed by global recession, followed by more spikes in the cost of oil. A repeating cycle. Eerily similar to what the world is now experiencing. In fact, James Hamilton of the Brookings Institute presented in a recent paper that the current recession was caused by oil price shocks.

In a nutshell: Higher oil and gasoline prices whacked the U.S. auto industry, the effects of which cascaded through large swathes of the rest of the economy and helped curtail spending. Energy prices also pummeled consumers' disposable income and confidence. To the extent that the housing meltdown did play a huge part in the recession, that too can be partially chalked up to higher oil prices: Cheap digs in the distant suburbs went underwater with $4 gasoline. Source: Keith Johnson of the Wall Street Journal

All of the above occurring while we are beginning to understand the role of feedbacks in climate change.

Carbon Shift may be frustrating for someone looking for an absolutist description of our current situation. The scientists within, David Keith, J. David Hughes, Mark Jaccard, Jeff Rubin,William Marsden, and Jeffery Simpson, aren't necessarily in agreement on our needed course of action. They each advocate differing approaches, each presenting solid cases on why we should be concerned about peak oil and/or climate change with varying degrees of urgency. However, this book serves as an excellent primer to intelligent thought about these issues. I learned a tremendous amount from spending time with each of these thinkers through Thomas Homer-Dixon's editing. The only essay that might fall short for some is the discussion of Canadian policy by Jeffery Simpson. I found this intriguing because I'll soon be a Canadian immigrant and because there are lesson learned for the United States political approaches. Yet, I could see why many would want to skip this one. Every essay is spot on with relevance and importance.

This is the kind of hard hitting, heavy thinking journalism lacking in major media and public space discussions of the issues that will change our lives forever within the next generation.

This consists of a series of essays on the issue of carbon usage. The essays cover a range of issues from the amount of carbon based fuels left on earth, to the economic implications of extracting those carbon based fuels and what the implications will be to the environment and the economy if we don't stop using carbon based fuels in the future.

While I did not necessarily agree with every point presented in the book, I found the essays to be thought provoking and these essays caused me to ask questions that hadn't occurred to me previously. I would recommend this book to all who have an interest in the status of fossil fuels, as well as climate change. This is not a book for a beginner in either subject, but rather an extension of the readily simplified material that is already available.