What do you think?
Rate this book
Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short
Baby boomers enjoyed the most benign period in human fifty years of relative peace, cheap energy, plentiful grain supply, and a warming climate due to the highest solar activity for 8,000 years. The party is over—prepare for the twilight of abundance.David Archibald reveals the grim future the world faces on its current massive fuel shortages, the bloodiest warfare in human history, a global starvation crisis, and a rapidly cooling planet. Archibald combines pioneering science with keen economic knowledge to predict the global disasters that could destroy civilization as we know it—disasters that are waiting just around the corner.But there’s good news, We can have a good future if we prepare for it. Advanced, civilized countries can have a permanently high standard of living if they choose to invest in the technologies that will get them there. Archibald, a climate scientist as well as an inventor and a financial specialist, explains which scientific breakthroughs can save civilization in the coming crisis—if we can cut through the special interest opposition to these innovations and allow free markets to flourish.
226 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 15, 2013
9 people are currently reading
58 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
Want to read
August 30, 2016Well, doesn't this look like fun. I do love me some cheerless prognostications to share when the conversation gets dull and predictable.
July 3, 2014
A quick read, but really, really padded with silly things like fantasy scenarios of a Chinese attack on Guam--"The minister for cyberdefense, Madame Chien-Shiung Wu, has a Berkeley PhD in computer science and is young, brilliant, and beautiful—in a scintillating pink diamond sort of way—" and blah, blah. It's also repetitive. You could have a drinking game out of how many times the author repeats that Norman Borlaug was the father of the green revolution.
Some of the padding comes in the form of interesting digressions, however, such as what types and yields of nuclear weapons various countries have. There is a big difference between a Pakistani nuclear bomb and an Israeli one.
And when you cut out the clutter, the author does have something interesting to say: in a nut shell, despite claims that fracking will save us we are still running out of oil at a pretty rapid pace and we'd better do something about it. The author favors nuclear power which can not only provide electricity, but also be used to convert coal to liquid fuels, which is a better use of it than burning it to produce electricity.
The author is a climate warming skeptic and believes we are facing a cooling period rather than a warming one, and that a cooler world will be a hungrier world, as crop yields fall.
He says this will lead to massive starvation in the third world, which is more or less always happening anyway. Curiously, he doesn't mention immigration, or how, if there is massive starvation in Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East, there will presumably be a flood of refugees to Europe, America and Australia. There already is, of course, but one can imagine a true Camp of the Saints scenario if his predictions are even only slightly correct. Odd he doesn't mention it.
As far as his evidence for climate cooling--based on sun cycles--I have no way of knowing if that is correct. But then I have no way of knowing if the AGW climate advocates are correct either. (Though their shrill insistence that "the science" is "settled" does cause me to raise an eyebrow.) Time will tell.
But it does seem to me that the author's advocacy of nuclear power and the use of coal to produce liquid fuels is very sensible. Electricity can be used to run air conditioners as well as heaters, to put it in householder terms.
Some of the padding comes in the form of interesting digressions, however, such as what types and yields of nuclear weapons various countries have. There is a big difference between a Pakistani nuclear bomb and an Israeli one.
And when you cut out the clutter, the author does have something interesting to say: in a nut shell, despite claims that fracking will save us we are still running out of oil at a pretty rapid pace and we'd better do something about it. The author favors nuclear power which can not only provide electricity, but also be used to convert coal to liquid fuels, which is a better use of it than burning it to produce electricity.
The author is a climate warming skeptic and believes we are facing a cooling period rather than a warming one, and that a cooler world will be a hungrier world, as crop yields fall.
He says this will lead to massive starvation in the third world, which is more or less always happening anyway. Curiously, he doesn't mention immigration, or how, if there is massive starvation in Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East, there will presumably be a flood of refugees to Europe, America and Australia. There already is, of course, but one can imagine a true Camp of the Saints scenario if his predictions are even only slightly correct. Odd he doesn't mention it.
As far as his evidence for climate cooling--based on sun cycles--I have no way of knowing if that is correct. But then I have no way of knowing if the AGW climate advocates are correct either. (Though their shrill insistence that "the science" is "settled" does cause me to raise an eyebrow.) Time will tell.
But it does seem to me that the author's advocacy of nuclear power and the use of coal to produce liquid fuels is very sensible. Electricity can be used to run air conditioners as well as heaters, to put it in householder terms.
July 19, 2021
The only really interesting ideas that sand out to me in this book are his thoughts on global cooling. For the most part everything else is a mix of neoliberal and neoconservative taking points thrown together with evangelical preaching and oddly enough grug conspiracy stuff. I recommend a read for the global cooling and energy discussion but outside of that anything else isn't worth your time if your a dissident looking for deeper explanations.
March 17, 2019
I picked this book up at the local library recently because the title intrigued me. It's been 5 years since it was published, and it would be interesting to read what the author might say about the time since its publication in 2014 (as well as a critic's analysis of the book and the last five years). According to his bio on the book jacket, Archibald "explored for oil for Exxon and worked as an analyst in the finance industry."
Archibald begins by saying "the second half of the twentieth century was the most benign period in human history" thanks to the Cold War resulting in "fifty years of relative peace" (thanks to Mutually Assured Destruction), "cheap energy from an inherent oversupply of oil, grain supply increased faster than population growth, and the climate warmed because of the highest level of solar activity for 8,000 years."
It doesn't take long for Archibald to make his opinion of climate change clear- on page 4 (of the hardcover edition I read), he writes "The UN-EU establishment that gave us the global warming scare in order to establish a new world order (after the failure of Communism) is well aware of the problem of food supply. The increasingly untenable global warming dogma is scheduled to be replaced by propaganda about 'sustainability' by 2015; in fact, the switch is already underway." He writes more about how, in his words, "Global warming itself, as many others have noted, is the greatest swindle perpetrated in history." He then continues by saying that two Danish researchers (Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen) found that, "although there are many correlations between solar activity and the Earth's climate, the strongest correlation is between solar cycle length and temperature over the following solar cycle."
Chapter 2 is about the role of the Sun in climate and how the next two solar cycles (solar cycles 24 and 25) are going to be longer and see the Earth cool.
Chapter 3 begins by discussing how countries in the Middle East and North Africa (from Afghanistan to Morocco) and have to import half their food and their populations continue to grow rapidly, but (according to Archibald) "one day the grain will not be available in the required quantity, or the money will not be found to pay for it, and this region will witness world history's largest starvation event." It gets better- "What distinguishes the MENA region from the rest of the unpleasant portion of the world is a toxic combination of a very high population growth rate, a misogynist religion, distasteful autocratic and theocratic regimes, a high proportion of the world's oil supply, popular messianic movements, and nuclear weapons." Chapter 3 also has sections for Afghanistan, Egypt, Yemen, "Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia", "Libya and Saudi Arabia", "Jordan and Syria", Israel, Iraq, and Iran before sections for "The Outlook for World Grain Production", "What Collapse Will Look Like", "The World's Grain Reserves-Not Enough", and, finally, "The Fortunate Nations: Contraction Short of Collapse."
Chapter 4 is titled "Culture is Destiny", and in this chapter Archibald lays out his thesis that, as one section of this chapter is titled, "respect for private property explains everything." He cites Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson ("Professor Hanson contended that there were six crucial elements in the West's way of conducting wars that led to its arms prevailing for so many previous centuries") The Pentagon's New Map by Thomas Barnett and Niall Ferguson's Civilization: The West and the Rest, and points out the overlap between Hanson and Ferguson- "namely, the crucial importance of private property safe from seizure." Argentina is the example he uses here (and later in the book). As Archibald writes on page 76, "The great economic divide in the world is between those countries that respect private property and encourage individuals to accumulate wealth and those countries that make it difficult to accumulate wealth and property." Later in this chapter, there's a section titled "The Evolutionary Basis of the Free Society" where the author writes that group food-pooling was an early adaptation to the long and energy-intensive development of human children, but the development of language around 50,000 years ago allowed "more sophisticated and effective coordination in forager groups" and "careful mate selection by women with greater cognitive capacity enabled successful bond pairs and their children to survive at higher rates than food-pooling groups. The establishment of the institutions that we call the nuclear family and private property enabled a further leap in cognition that engendered what we call civilization." The remainder of this chapter is dedicated to "the problem of Islam", including a excerpt from Winston Churchill's 1899 The River War.
Chapter 5 is dedicated to nuclear weapons - not only Pakistan's (despite the chapter title, "Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons"), but also a primer on nuclear weapons design, the Indian nuclear weapons program and rivalry with Pakistan, the Israeli nuclear program, the Algerian and Iranian nuclear programs, and the effects of nuclear fallout.
Chapter 6, "China Wants a War", is about the rising power of China, the South China Sea, Chinese cyberwarfare, the "century of national humiliation", and the possibility of when China will attack the United States. Amusingly, Archibald writes that the Chinese might attack before the US 2016 presidential election, which is amusing to read in this timeline where that didn't happen.
Chapter 7 is about how the US should be shifting to using synthetic fuel produced from coal (coal-to-liquid, or CTL) and how compressed natural gas is the second-best solution. Archibald's favored solution to the end of cheap oil and energy is the use of thorium-burning molten-salt reactors, rather than uranium-burning light-water reactors.
I haven't written as much here as I would like, but unfortunately I need to leave for work soon.
If you want to read something written by a climate change skeptic, feel free to read this- personally, I took this book with a grain of (molten) salt. Interesting, but I don't agree with it and I'm sort of glad I didn't spend my own money to acquire it.
Archibald begins by saying "the second half of the twentieth century was the most benign period in human history" thanks to the Cold War resulting in "fifty years of relative peace" (thanks to Mutually Assured Destruction), "cheap energy from an inherent oversupply of oil, grain supply increased faster than population growth, and the climate warmed because of the highest level of solar activity for 8,000 years."
It doesn't take long for Archibald to make his opinion of climate change clear- on page 4 (of the hardcover edition I read), he writes "The UN-EU establishment that gave us the global warming scare in order to establish a new world order (after the failure of Communism) is well aware of the problem of food supply. The increasingly untenable global warming dogma is scheduled to be replaced by propaganda about 'sustainability' by 2015; in fact, the switch is already underway." He writes more about how, in his words, "Global warming itself, as many others have noted, is the greatest swindle perpetrated in history." He then continues by saying that two Danish researchers (Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen) found that, "although there are many correlations between solar activity and the Earth's climate, the strongest correlation is between solar cycle length and temperature over the following solar cycle."
Chapter 2 is about the role of the Sun in climate and how the next two solar cycles (solar cycles 24 and 25) are going to be longer and see the Earth cool.
Chapter 3 begins by discussing how countries in the Middle East and North Africa (from Afghanistan to Morocco) and have to import half their food and their populations continue to grow rapidly, but (according to Archibald) "one day the grain will not be available in the required quantity, or the money will not be found to pay for it, and this region will witness world history's largest starvation event." It gets better- "What distinguishes the MENA region from the rest of the unpleasant portion of the world is a toxic combination of a very high population growth rate, a misogynist religion, distasteful autocratic and theocratic regimes, a high proportion of the world's oil supply, popular messianic movements, and nuclear weapons." Chapter 3 also has sections for Afghanistan, Egypt, Yemen, "Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia", "Libya and Saudi Arabia", "Jordan and Syria", Israel, Iraq, and Iran before sections for "The Outlook for World Grain Production", "What Collapse Will Look Like", "The World's Grain Reserves-Not Enough", and, finally, "The Fortunate Nations: Contraction Short of Collapse."
Chapter 4 is titled "Culture is Destiny", and in this chapter Archibald lays out his thesis that, as one section of this chapter is titled, "respect for private property explains everything." He cites Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson ("Professor Hanson contended that there were six crucial elements in the West's way of conducting wars that led to its arms prevailing for so many previous centuries") The Pentagon's New Map by Thomas Barnett and Niall Ferguson's Civilization: The West and the Rest, and points out the overlap between Hanson and Ferguson- "namely, the crucial importance of private property safe from seizure." Argentina is the example he uses here (and later in the book). As Archibald writes on page 76, "The great economic divide in the world is between those countries that respect private property and encourage individuals to accumulate wealth and those countries that make it difficult to accumulate wealth and property." Later in this chapter, there's a section titled "The Evolutionary Basis of the Free Society" where the author writes that group food-pooling was an early adaptation to the long and energy-intensive development of human children, but the development of language around 50,000 years ago allowed "more sophisticated and effective coordination in forager groups" and "careful mate selection by women with greater cognitive capacity enabled successful bond pairs and their children to survive at higher rates than food-pooling groups. The establishment of the institutions that we call the nuclear family and private property enabled a further leap in cognition that engendered what we call civilization." The remainder of this chapter is dedicated to "the problem of Islam", including a excerpt from Winston Churchill's 1899 The River War.
Chapter 5 is dedicated to nuclear weapons - not only Pakistan's (despite the chapter title, "Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons"), but also a primer on nuclear weapons design, the Indian nuclear weapons program and rivalry with Pakistan, the Israeli nuclear program, the Algerian and Iranian nuclear programs, and the effects of nuclear fallout.
Chapter 6, "China Wants a War", is about the rising power of China, the South China Sea, Chinese cyberwarfare, the "century of national humiliation", and the possibility of when China will attack the United States. Amusingly, Archibald writes that the Chinese might attack before the US 2016 presidential election, which is amusing to read in this timeline where that didn't happen.
Chapter 7 is about how the US should be shifting to using synthetic fuel produced from coal (coal-to-liquid, or CTL) and how compressed natural gas is the second-best solution. Archibald's favored solution to the end of cheap oil and energy is the use of thorium-burning molten-salt reactors, rather than uranium-burning light-water reactors.
I haven't written as much here as I would like, but unfortunately I need to leave for work soon.
If you want to read something written by a climate change skeptic, feel free to read this- personally, I took this book with a grain of (molten) salt. Interesting, but I don't agree with it and I'm sort of glad I didn't spend my own money to acquire it.
September 14, 2014
This is what you call doomer porn. Yet he may prove to be accurate.....the solar cycle issue is coming scarily accurate here in fall 2014, oil is a little more in the future. However as a famous General said..."there is no security on this earth...only opportunity."
April 22, 2019
Five years after publishing, some of the predictions look dead on, some not so much. I wanted more information on food, growing seasons, etc. In agriculture alone, this doom porn could have been a fascinating read. Water shortages in marginal lands, growing season variability, was right up the alley of the sunspots, but instead I got lame China predictions (sadly, not really in this author's wheelhouse given he assumed they would choose to invade Taiwan before the end of the Obama administration). I guess I was hoping for more thoughts on the things we can't control (the sun, precipitation and got a half-assed compilation of the collective hobby horses of the WUWT comment section instead
August 16, 2024
This is a great book looking into the future. The author presents facts and applies those facts to the future. The book flows well and you won’t be able to put it down.
March 4, 2017
The earth is cooling, get ready!!
solid summary of the solar science behind the coming decades of global cooling. also some great scenario analysis of possible outcomes.
solid summary of the solar science behind the coming decades of global cooling. also some great scenario analysis of possible outcomes.
July 22, 2014
Interesting, if flawed. First of all, Archibald must be heavily invested in thorium molten-salt nuclear reactors because he feels they are the answer to everything. His point on the sunspot activity and the cooling of the planet is worthy of further research. While I am concerned about our environmental impact and the prevalence of: super storms, rising sea levels, ozone holes, el nino, fracking (an area I think he is totally wrong on. Come on-injecting chemicals under high pressure into the earth! That is where our clean water comes from; you think it isn't causing earthquakes in some areas?, I can appreciate the lack of a large body of historic data, and some of the conflicting evidence. The point is, why do anything to harm the planet in any way? Let us hope that many of his dire predictions are wrong. He has a short-term window, so I think this book and its predictions should be perused again in 5-10 years. Read it, but with large quantities of "salt" and an open, questioning mind.
August 26, 2015
If you are into 'doomsday is near' camp, you will thoroughly enjoy this grim outlook of the future. It's a fascinating read in the first few pages but it tends to get far fetched & repetitive. I think things can't get this bad as author makes it out, after all humanity has survived this long even with its fair share of missteps. Some of the things the author talks about are very pertinent & world needs to think about finding solutions soon. I personally enjoyed reading this book & it sure did spook me a little.
July 17, 2015
As a work of fiction, it was more enjoyable reading than Twilight. I'm as overly fond of apocalyptic stories as the next person.
As a work of nonfiction, it was just too difficult separating out the vitriol and editorial, from the facts. The author often strays into predicting the future in domains where he does not have expertise or data to back. Even if the predictions come true, this would be exactly the situation where a "broken clock is right twice a day".
As a work of nonfiction, it was just too difficult separating out the vitriol and editorial, from the facts. The author often strays into predicting the future in domains where he does not have expertise or data to back. Even if the predictions come true, this would be exactly the situation where a "broken clock is right twice a day".
March 30, 2014
Questionable!
April 10, 2014
one man's depressing view of earth's dwindling resources and what the future holds if the population continues to increase.
August 8, 2014
Bad science, bad logic, bad writing.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews