Carbon Shift: How Peak Oil and the Climate Crisis Will Change Canada (and Our Lives)

By Thomas Homer-Dixon

Book Overview

"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 one: 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 solution: 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?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307357198
• ISBN13: 9780307357199
• Release Date: April 2010
• Publisher: Vintage Books Canada
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Carbon: Where We Are and Where We May Be Headed

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.

Hard-hitting science and economics

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