The Empty Tank: Oil, Gas, Hot Air, and the Coming Global Financial Catastrophe

Just in time to capitalize on the twin disasters of Katrina and high gasoline prices comes this jeremiad on the cataclysmic end of the fossil-fuels era. Geologist and ex-Greenpeace official Leggett, author of The Carbon War, argues incisively that oil production has peaked, with dwindling supplies and soaring prices in the offing. Worse than the possibility that the world cannot cope, he feels, is the threat that it will cope all too well by burning more coal and coal-derived synthetic fuels, thus exacerbating atmospheric carbon dioxide build-up and global warming. This will lead the planet down ""the road to horror,"" illustrated in a sketchy montage of the usual environmental doomsday scenarios: rising sea levels, extreme weather, famine and war. Leggett, who runs a renewable energy company, proffers a boosterish brief for renewable energy sources like solar and wind power as the only solutions to the crisis. His rather shallow treatment of energy options extols such dubious green nostrums as ethanol, bio-mass (i.e., crop-burning) and hydrogen power while dismissing nuclear energy, but doesn't provide the kind of meticulous accounting of costs, benefits and disadvantages such assessments demand. Leggett derides fossil-fuel apologists as fundamentalists convinced they will be Raptured before the environment implodes; his own visionary coda prophesies economic collapse and the rise of fascism before humanity is finally saved by renewables, which will bring peace, localism and deserts abloom with fields irrigated by desalinization plants. A little alarmism is called for when discussing energy and the environment, but these issues also deserve a more thorough and sober account of the choices we face than Leggett provides.