The End Of Oil  

Jamais at WorldChanging has a review up of Paul Roberts' "The End Of Oil".

As might be expected from the title, The End of Oil is a good introduction to the question of oil production peaks and the economics of transitioning away from the petroleum world. Roberts hits the major talking points: oil field production rates (declining, often faster than expected); how easily new "undiscovered" oil sources can be found (not easily at all); the costs of non-conventional oil sources (high, but do-able); and how ready we are to move away from oil (globally, not very, and in the US, not at all). His very tentative and fairly conservative projections of when peak production will hit are unlikely to satisfy the online Peak Oil crowd, but will still scare the pants off of people accustomed to thinking that cheap oil remains plentiful. He mentions numerous times that there are those who claim that the peak happened in the last few years, but -- while never outright dismissing the assertion -- he doesn't seem to buy it.

His discussion of the nuances of global oil politics is among the best I've seen. Not satisfied with simplistic "war for oil" or "terrorist state" depictions, Roberts gives one of the very few accounts of the current US administration's global strategy that is both able to explain it in a way that makes sense and still be clear-eyed about its overwhelming focus on oil. He is clearly no fan of the choices this administration has made, but refrains from caricature and one-dimensional analysis. While the peak production section gives the book its aura of doom, the political analysis chapters are its intellectual center, and are enough to make the book worth reading.