The World After Cheap Oil just got published!

The world is again talking about oil, although right now it is largely because the prices of oil have decreased substantially in just a few months. There have been many reasons presented in the discussions, some of them better than others, most of them relevant in one way or the other. One of the biggest in our view is the increasing economic problems the world is having, and the resulting inability to pay for and consume as much oil as we would like. The reasons behind those economic problems are also many, from excessive debt to historically high oil prices.

In our book The World After Cheap Oil (Routledge 2014), we discuss the many reasons and the interdependencies behind the those economic problems, and why affordable oil is not coming back in the long term.

”If you are already familiar with the peak oil literature, this book will provide you with a comprehensive, up-to-date summary that covers nearly every relevant topic within this field. If you are new to this discussion, prepare to have your world shaken.” –Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute

Here is the cover-text:

Substantial evidence suggests that we are currently living at the peak of oil production with few prospects for cheap oil ever returning. Yet the media, politicians and regular people have hardly started to talk about what this means. Oil literally runs our societies from transportation to food production to economic activity. Without oil, everything stops. There are powerful arguments that if we fail to increase oil production, we will also fail to grow our economy as a whole. For oil importing western nations the news is bleak; higher oil prices seem to put a glass ceiling on their economic growth, making current debt problems worse no matter what monetary and economic policies we might choose.

The World After Cheap Oil offers a thorough package of information about oil; its uses and its role in our society’s important sectors. It presents the most prominent substitutes and alternatives, and their limits and promises. It also delves deep into the many risks, problems and mechanisms that can make the world after cheap oil a much more unstable place for nations and humanity as a whole. The book also explains why there has been so little public debate on the subject, and what the future might look like after oil production starts its final, terminal decline.