Peak Everything

Waking Up to the Century of Declines

A combination of wry commentary and sober forecasting on subjects as diverse as farming and industrial design, this book describes how to make the transition from The Age of Excess to the Era of Modesty with grace and satisfaction, while preserving the best of our collective achievements. Peak Everything is a must-read for individuals, business leaders and policy makers serious about effecting real change.

Contributors

Richard Heinberg

Richard Heinberg is the author of eleven previous books including The Party's Over, Powerdown, Peak Everything, and The End of Growth. He is a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of the world's most effective communicators of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels. Heinberg has given hundreds of lectures on our energy future to audiences around the world. He has been published in Nature and other journals, and has been featured in many television and theatrical documentaries.

Chapter Contributors Pages Year Price
Back in 2005, Richard Heinberg and I both published books on peak oil and its implications for everyday life in technologically “advanced” societies. We saw the general situation very …
3 $0.30
In titling this book Peak Everything, I was suggesting that humanity has achieved an unsustainable pinnacle of population size and consumption rates, and that the road ahead will be mostly …
12 $1.20
This book is not an introduction to the subject of Peak Oil. Instead it addresses the social and historical context in which Peak Oil is occurring, and explores how we can reorganize our thinking …
29 $2.90
In assessing and understanding technology and its effects on people and nature, it is at least as important to pay attention to the energy that drives our tools as to the tools themselves and the …
17 $1.70
There are reasons to think that our current anomalous abundance of inexpensive food may be only temporary; if so, present and future generations may become acquainted with that old, formerly …
20 $2.00
Will industrial production survive in the post-hydrocarbon era? The answer will of course depend on how much energy humans will have at their disposal. The total amount, as well as the per capita …
16 $1.60
My aim in this chapter is to explore the history of the terms sustainable and sustainability, and their various published definitions, and then to offer a set of five axioms (self-evident truths) …
14 $1.40
People who live a civilized life are like birds in a cage. As long as we stay within well-defined social bounds (and assuming we are lucky enough to have been born in a wealthy parasitic society, …
17 $1.70
No steady rate of growth in population or resource consumption is sustainable. During the course of the lecture, he asks, “Well, what can we do about this? What makes the population problem …
12 $1.20
The historic global shift from a regime of cheap fossil fuel energy sources to one of declining and expensive fossil fuels and scarce replacements will impact every living person, every …
15 $1.50
The problems of Climate Change and Peak Oil both result from societal dependence on fossil fuels. Climate Change has to do with carbon emissions and their effects — including the impacts on …
19 $1.90
In this chapter I hope to explore some of the circumstances that have made us Boomers what and who we are, and to argue that, having failed to live up to some of our expressed ideals and now …
14 $1.40
Greetings to you, people of the year 2007! You are living in the year of my birth; I am one hundred years old now, writing to you from the year 2107. I am using the last remnants of the advanced …
12 $1.20
Language is a powerful meta-tool that dramatically amplifies cooperative human efforts to control the environment. Language also opens the possibility for religion and science — which …
14 $1.40