Energy
The world is becoming increasingly dependent on oil to fuel improvements in the human condition and nowhere is this more evident than in China’s rapidly growing economy. There is still a raging debate about how soon the earth will run out of oil or out of inexpensive oil, but it is clear that on a longer-range time horizon that oil is unlikely to dominate the energy scene the way it has for the past century. The book chosen in this section concentrates on the United States, but presents a comprehensive look at the kinds of technologies that could be developed to reduce dependence on oil. For the longer-range future, the possibilities for alternative energy sources are important to understand.
Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profits, Jobs, and Security - 2004
Amory Lovins
Learn more (Rocky Mountain Institute)
This book was recommended to me by Paul Baran, whose credentials as a deep thinker about the future are nonpareil. It’s an admittedly biased look at the potential for the United States to wean itself off of oil – Lovins has been involved in several alternatives to oil energy. Nonetheless, this is a thoroughly researched, carefully reasoned and amply documented look at a path that would essentially eliminate U.S. dependence on imported oil. Lovins’s arguments rest on three primary means of displacing oil: 1) using oil more efficiently (particularly through making vehicles lighter and safer through advanced materials), 2) substituting for petroleum fuels other liquids made from biomass and waste, and 3) substituting saved natural gas for oil in uses where they’re interchangeable, such as furnaces and boilers. He also argues for replacing oil with hydrogen, but does not rest his arguments on that more uncertain technology. He presents each oil-displacing technology in two different portfolios: conventional wisdom, with future expectations broadly accepted by industry and government, and state-of-the-art, with the best technologies sufficiently developed by mid-2004 to project confidently. It’s a good argument for genuine feasibility of seriously reducing U.S. oil dependency and thereby presents a wide variety of means for reducing overall world dependence on oil.
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