Thursday, November 1, 2012

The Big Flatline

Canadian economist Jeff Rubin's second book has been published in the U.S. with the title "The Big Flatline: Oil and the No-Growth Economy".  It came out in the spring of 2012 in Canada titled "The End of Growth".  It's available on Amazon both in print and on the Kindle.  If you don't have a Kindle, you can get the Kindle reader for PCs and Macs, or the Kindle App for your mobile device.  You can also find it on iBooks for an iPad or iPhone.  I purchased the iBooks version for $12.99.

This is the follow up to Rubin's "Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization".  Clearly he doesn't like short titles.  His blog can point you to that book--http://www.jeffrubinssmallerworld.com.  That book explains why we're running out of cheap "conventional" oil.  That's the kind of oil where you drill a simple hole and oil wants to come out.

The End of Growth/Big Flatline is overall the best general introduction to the issue of economic peak oil, combined with some rational projections about what might happen.  Plus some suggestions.  Jeff says that there's a lot of oil left in place.  My quick calculations confirm that--at most we've extracted 1/5 of what's in the crust, either as oil in sediments or as "tar sands" that can be cooked into oil.  Then I think the oil shale (not shale oil...) is quite a bit more.  That's organic material that hastened turned into oil yet.  Shell and other companies have been trying to cook oil shale into oil cheaply enough to be economically feasible for years.  Again, the concept of economically feasible oil leads us to a peak and and a decline

Jeff is also strongly of the view that what will really cause a decline in the greenhouse gas production that had driven climate change is economic contraction, not well-meaning but ineffective initiatives and agreements.  He spends several pages toward the end of the book illustrating the unreality of those good intentions.

Get a copy of Jeff Rubin's book.  It's pretty readable and informative.