The Peak Oil Library  

Occasionally people ask me for peak oil related books to read (or are unfortunate enough to look at my bookshelves and start browsing through some of the stuff I've collected over the years) - given that there seems to be quite a large range of relevant material around (some of it decades old) I thought I'd compile a list of the most influential and widely read books in the field.

The list has been influenced by Jay Hanson's "Dieoff Q&A Reading List" (which also suggests books in some other related fields like politics and human nature / evolutionary psychology) as well as some of the books listed at Jeff Vail's "A Theory Of Power" site and a post by Matt Savinar to ROE3 listing the books he found most important.

I haven't read every single book on the list (yet), so I'd be interested in hearing what you think of them, or if you have any other suggestions that you think are must-reads (I know there are other books out there - the list doesn't try to be exhaustive).

Energy

• Beyond Oil: The Threat To Food And Fuel In The Coming Decades - John Gever
• Energy and Resource Quality: The Ecology of the Economic Process - Charles Hall
• The Curve of Binding Energy - John McPhee
• The Prize - Daniel Yergin
• The Control of Oil - John Blair
• Blood and Oil - Michael Klare

• The Coming Oil Crisis - Colin Campbell
• Beyond Oil : The View From Hubbert's Peak - Kenneth Deffeyes
• The End of Oil - Paul Roberts
• High Noon for Natural Gas - Julian Darley
• Crude - Sonia Shar
• Twilight In The Desert - Matthew Simmons

• The Last Days of Ancient Sunlight - Thom Hartmann
• The Party's Over - Richard Heinberg
• Powerdown - Richard Heinberg
• The Long Emergency - James Howard Kunstler
• Hegemony or Survival - Noam Chomsky

• An Essay on the Principle of Population - Thomas Malthus
• Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Environmental Decision Making - Howard Odum
• The Sixth Extinction - Richard Leakey
• Limits to Growth - Dennis Meadows
• Overshoot - William Catton
• Our Ecological Footprint - Williams Rees
• The Tragedy Of The Commons - Garrett Hardin
• Mind and Nature - Gregory Bateson
• Ishmael - Daniel Quinn
• The Collapse of Complex Societies - Joseph Tainter
• The Future Eaters - Tim Flannery
• Going Native - Michael Archer
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond