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Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future
" We are now so abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in fifty-five million years ago, and if it does, most of us, and our descendants, will die. "
-James Lovelock, leading climate expert and author of The Revenge of Gaia
" I don't see why people are so worried about global warming destroying the planet - peak oil will take care of that. "
-Matthew Simmons, energy investment banker and author of Twilight in the Desert : The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy
The twin crises of climate change and peaking oil production are converging on us. If they are not to cook the planet and topple our civilization, we will need informed and decisive policies, clear-sighted innovation, and a lucid understanding of what is at stake. We will need to know where we stand, and which direction we should start out in. These are the questions Carbon Shift addresses.
Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down , argues that the two problems are really a carbon problem. We depend on carbon energy to fuel our complex economies and societies, and at the same time this very carbon is fatally contaminating our atmosphere. To solve one of these problems will require solving the other at the same time. In other words, we still have a chance to tackle two monumental challenges with one innovative clean, low-carbon energy.
Carbon Shift brings together six of Canada's world-class experts to explore the question of where we stand now, and where we might be headed. It explores the economics, the geology, the politics, and the science of the predicament we find ourselves in. And it gives each expert the chance to address what they think are the most important facets of the complex problem before us.
There are no experts in Canada better positioned to explain the world that awaits us just beyond the horizon, and no better guide to that future than this collection of their thoughts. Densely packed with information, but accessibly written and powerfully timely, Carbon Shift will be an indispensable handbook to the difficult choices that lie ahead.
David Hughes is a former senior geoscientist with the Geological Survey of Canada
David Keith is Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment, University of Calgary
Jeff Rubin is Chief Economist, Chief Strategist and Managing Director, CIBC World Markets
Mark Jaccard is professor of environmental economics in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
William Marsden is an investigative reporter and author of Stupid to the Last Drop : How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't Seem to Care)
Jeffrey Simpson is a Globe and Mail national columnist and author, with Mark Jaccard, of Hot Air : Meeting Canada's Climate Change Challenge
With a foreword by Ronald Wright , author of A Short History of Progress and What is America?
-James Lovelock, leading climate expert and author of The Revenge of Gaia
" I don't see why people are so worried about global warming destroying the planet - peak oil will take care of that. "
-Matthew Simmons, energy investment banker and author of Twilight in the Desert : The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy
The twin crises of climate change and peaking oil production are converging on us. If they are not to cook the planet and topple our civilization, we will need informed and decisive policies, clear-sighted innovation, and a lucid understanding of what is at stake. We will need to know where we stand, and which direction we should start out in. These are the questions Carbon Shift addresses.
Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down , argues that the two problems are really a carbon problem. We depend on carbon energy to fuel our complex economies and societies, and at the same time this very carbon is fatally contaminating our atmosphere. To solve one of these problems will require solving the other at the same time. In other words, we still have a chance to tackle two monumental challenges with one innovative clean, low-carbon energy.
Carbon Shift brings together six of Canada's world-class experts to explore the question of where we stand now, and where we might be headed. It explores the economics, the geology, the politics, and the science of the predicament we find ourselves in. And it gives each expert the chance to address what they think are the most important facets of the complex problem before us.
There are no experts in Canada better positioned to explain the world that awaits us just beyond the horizon, and no better guide to that future than this collection of their thoughts. Densely packed with information, but accessibly written and powerfully timely, Carbon Shift will be an indispensable handbook to the difficult choices that lie ahead.
David Hughes is a former senior geoscientist with the Geological Survey of Canada
David Keith is Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment, University of Calgary
Jeff Rubin is Chief Economist, Chief Strategist and Managing Director, CIBC World Markets
Mark Jaccard is professor of environmental economics in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
William Marsden is an investigative reporter and author of Stupid to the Last Drop : How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't Seem to Care)
Jeffrey Simpson is a Globe and Mail national columnist and author, with Mark Jaccard, of Hot Air : Meeting Canada's Climate Change Challenge
With a foreword by Ronald Wright , author of A Short History of Progress and What is America?
240 pages, Hardcover
First published April 14, 2009
5 people are currently reading
70 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 27, 2019
A very thoroughly researched and impartial book explaining the numbers behind concepts like peak oil and carbon emissions as well as the real world situations in a variety of places around the globe.
He concludes that peak oil is a difficult concept to pinpoint due to alternative oil sources.
We still have 100-200 years of reserves available though using them may wreak havoc on the environment.
While carbon pricing is an option a more important thing seems to be to change our lifestyle to one that doesn't require perpetual growth.
As things are going now eventually something might snap and it could be like what happened to the Soviet Union but for the world economy.
He concludes that peak oil is a difficult concept to pinpoint due to alternative oil sources.
We still have 100-200 years of reserves available though using them may wreak havoc on the environment.
While carbon pricing is an option a more important thing seems to be to change our lifestyle to one that doesn't require perpetual growth.
As things are going now eventually something might snap and it could be like what happened to the Soviet Union but for the world economy.
May 17, 2009
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,
In summary, I argue three theses. 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.
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,
In summary, I argue three theses. 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.
February 5, 2019
Complex ideas are very well communicated in Carbon Shift. An invaluable read for those seeking a quick and well rounded view of the economics of climate change and the future of our energy infrastructures.
July 28, 2011
This book is a collection of essays about the issues around two of the biggest challenges the world may face in the next few decades: energy scarcity and global warming. The two issues are linked because our use of fossil fuels is putting extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is a contributor to global warming. The important points to take away are that we're not running out of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal), but that we're running out of the high-quality, easy-to-extract versions of those fuels. What's left costs more to produce and can't (yet?) be produced at the same rates as we're used to. Which means it's likely that energy costs will rise. The hope is they will rise enough that we will have an incentive to switch to alternative energy sources. The question, though, is whether we can find enough alternative sources to replace what we lose by going off oil. Not all the essays in the book agree. At least one claims that we will develop new energy sources, and at a reasonable cost. But all the essays agree that major changes are coming and that we have to act in advance to avoid major disruptions and hardships. if you're new to "peak oil" and global warming, this is a good if somewhat cursory introduction. If you're familiar with these topics, the point-counterpoint quality of the essays should stimulate some hard thinking.
July 9, 2009
This book reminds American readers that while the United States is, of course, the center of the universe, there is a country to the north of the US with a stake and a meaningful role to play in the matter of climate change and its mitigation.
Thomas Homer-Dixon's previous book, The Upside of Down, was voluminous, diligently researched, and thoroughly engrossing. Judged against that, Carbon Shift was a bit of a disappointment, but once I adjusted to it and recalibrated my expectations I got a lot out of it. I typically finish one in four books that I start, and I did finish Carbon Shift.
Homer-Dixon acts more as editor than author, and interestingly, the authors of the various chapters disagree with one another on some pretty basic points, like whether we have enough fossilized carbon in the ground to considerably change the Earth's climate. A couple of months after the fact, the major take away message from the books remains, "Canada matters."
Thomas Homer-Dixon's previous book, The Upside of Down, was voluminous, diligently researched, and thoroughly engrossing. Judged against that, Carbon Shift was a bit of a disappointment, but once I adjusted to it and recalibrated my expectations I got a lot out of it. I typically finish one in four books that I start, and I did finish Carbon Shift.
Homer-Dixon acts more as editor than author, and interestingly, the authors of the various chapters disagree with one another on some pretty basic points, like whether we have enough fossilized carbon in the ground to considerably change the Earth's climate. A couple of months after the fact, the major take away message from the books remains, "Canada matters."
June 30, 2009
Grim, no-nonsense reading, in this case from Canadian experts. Whenever I read this kind of book, I wish I could ask the authors "so, what kind of plan do you have for your children and grandchildren?". In other words, aside from doing what we can (which sometimes feels like a tiny drop in the bucket, although it IS important to do whatever we can), how can we plan to help them deal with this worrisome new world?
November 2, 2010
It has been a long while since I read this book, but for me it was one of the earliest academic examinations of this issue that is so important to us. I see Dr Homer-Dixon is speaking at a hydro sponsored conference. Have registered for the live webscast, but in the meantime back to the bookself.
December 20, 2008
I am still waiting for the coming of the book. But, it could be interesting book.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews