Thomas Homer-Dixon reads from Carbon Shift in episode 140 of the C-Realm Podcast.

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Product Description

“We are now so abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in fifty-five million years ago, and if it does, most of us, and our descendants, will die.”
—James Lovelock, leading climate expert and author of The Revenge of Gaia

“I don’t see why people are so worried about global warming destroying the planet — peak oil will take care of that.”
Matthew Simmons, energy investment banker and author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy

The twin crises of climate change and peaking oil production are converging on us. If they are not to cook the planet and topple our civilization, we will need informed and decisive policies, clear-sighted innovation, and a lucid understanding of what is at stake. We will need to know where we stand, and which direction we should start out in. These are the questions Carbon Shift addresses.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down, argues that the two problems are really one: a carbon problem. We depend on carbon energy to fuel our complex economies and societies, and at the same time this very carbon is fatally contaminating our atmosphere. To solve one of these problems will require solving the other at the same time. In other words, we still have a chance to tackle two monumental challenges with one innovative solution: clean, low-carbon energy.

Carbon Shift brings together six of Canada’s world-class experts to explore the question of where we stand now, and where we might be headed. It explores the economics, the geology, the politics, and the science of the predicament we find ourselves in. And it gives each expert the chance to address what they think are the most important facets of the complex problem before us.

There are no experts in Canada better positioned to explain the world that awaits us just beyond the horizon, and no better guide to that future than this collection of their thoughts. Densely packed with information, but accessibly written and powerfully timely, Carbon Shift will be an indispensable handbook to the difficult choices that lie ahead.

David Hughes is a former senior geoscientist with the Geological Survey of Canada

David Keith is Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment, University of Calgary

Jeff Rubin is Chief Economist, Chief Strategist and Managing Director, CIBC World Markets

Mark Jaccard is professor of environmental economics in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University and a member of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

William Marsden is an investigative reporter and author of Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn’t Seem to Care)

Jeffrey Simpson is a Globe and Mail national columnist and author, with Mark Jaccard, of Hot Air: Meeting Canada’s Climate Change Challenge

With a foreword by Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress and What is America?

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #254366 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-14
• Released on: 2009-04-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307357182
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Homer-Dixon clearly sets the scene. He correctly argues that cheap oil has undermined our economic models, and business as usual is no longer an option."
–Andrew Nikiforuk, The Globe and Mail

"And that's why the brief collection of essays in Carbon Shift really matters. Edited by Thomas Homer-Dixon, an intellectual straight shooter, the book offers six distinct point of views about Canada's troublesome twins: climate change and peak oil and their central role in Canada's discordant future."
–Andrew Nikiforuk, The Globe and Mail

"This book works because it's a set of essays by six people from different backgrounds: two oil experts, two economists, and two from newspapers. Oil has a lot of angles (if a liquid can have angles), and it's a relief to see someone making an attempt to bring this variety."
–Tom Spears, The Ottawa Citizen

About the Author
Thomas Homer-Dixon was born in Victoria, B.C., and holds a Ph.D. in political science from MIT. He is currently the Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo. His first book, The Ingenuity Gap won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Foreward

Civilizations are built on knowledge, population – and energy. They thrive only when a good balance is struck between these three, a balance dependent (like that of a bicycle) on motion, which is to say on growth. Human successes are always taken from the past or borrowed from the future: sooner or later the bike runs out of road. The first humans evolved by devouring the great wild beasts that once roamed all parts of the Earth. When they exhausted this primordial energy hoard at the end of the last ice age, they starved; and the humble survivors – our ancestors – became more and more dependent on plants.

Over time, early civilizations arose with the development of systematic agriculture. Through crop breeding, animal husbandry, deforestation and irrigation, they concentrated the energy of soil and seeds into the muscle power of domesticated animals and equally domesticated human beings. Towns, cities, governments and priesthoods rose like pyramids on a broadening agrarian base. Despite booms and busts along the way, humanity grew at an ever-increasing rate, especially after the crops of the Americas (such as maize and potatoes) spread around the world. By some two hundred years ago, human beings had reached the maximum number who could feed themselves by muscle power and pre-industrial machinery. That number was about one billion.

What has allowed us to soar nearly sevenfold since then was not any breakthrough in new food: all our crops are ancient; we have raised yields by tinkering, but we have developed no new staples from scratch since prehistoric times. The breakthrough was in energy – in finding new ways to use the vast stocks of fossil carbon that Nature had buried under the planet’s skin long before the first mammal crawled upon it.

We tend to think of the looming energy crisis in terms of cars, factories, heating and air conditioning, but the first thing to keep in mind is that fossil fuels are feeding us. We all know that coal and oil drive the tractors, trains, trucks, ships and freezers that grow, store and move food from farm to city, nation to nation. But how many are aware that we have literally been eating oil and gas for more than a hundred years? Fossil carbon is a prime ingredient of the artificial fertilizers that have sidestepped the decline of natural fertility each time a crop is taken off a field. A two-century carbon binge has allowed mankind to fill its planet way beyond the natural carrying capacity for feckless, reckless, self-indulgent apes. If we run out of carbon or fail to find good substitutes, we are back to dung and muscle power. Billions will die.

An absolute shortage of fossil energy is still a long way off. But the amount that can be easily, cheaply and above all safely exploited is indeed running low. Because of carbon dioxide’s effect on climate, an abundance of carbon fuel – especially in its dirtier forms such as coal and tar sand – is far more dangerous than a dearth. Long before fossil fuel gets truly scarce, its consumption will overthrow the predictable weather patterns on which all farming has relied for the past ten thousand years. In short, the industrial carbon economy has turned out to be what I call a “progress trap” – a seductive and seemingly benign development which, upon reaching a certain scale, becomes a dead end.

Even if abundant sources of clean energy were to come on stream tomorrow, we would still face problems of overpopulation, overconsumption, soil erosion and the most unequal distribution of wealth and health in history. But, as the essays in this important book explore and document in different ways, a “carbon shift” – a swift transition to much cleaner energy – is our only hope of escaping the dire consequences of our runaway success.

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Customer Reviews

Hard-hitting science and economics
Civilizations are constructed of population, energy and knowledge. All three of these dimensions are under significant threat from the relationship between our species and our surrounding world. Success over the last hundred years, industrializing much of the world, has been borrowed from the future rather than sustainably building on the past. Ignoring the achievements of industrial society would be irresponsible. Little more than one billion people could exist on the agriculture of the pre-hydrocarbon economy, we now support more than six billion, but crop yields subsidized by oil and gas for a century have their consequences. An all-encompassing depletion of Earth's oil resources is not a likely path because the economics of the situation will drive the cheap reserves we've built our world on to extinction. Our societies will follow. Yet, we may not have time to experience a reality without cheap oil. For more than a century scientists have understood the effects of radiative forcing on the products of combustion. Concentrations of methane (due to population) and levels of carbon dioxide (due to industrial process) have been slowly increasing the Earth's temperature since human population has been growing exponentially.

Peak oil and climate change have epic implications for continuity of the human species. If one of the two possibilities is in our future, as the leading Canadian scientists within Thomas Homer Dixon's Carbon Shift argue, our lives will change forever. If they both occur (to varying degrees), Homo Sapien Sapien's role on the Earth will change past the point of familiarity over the next decade.

Carbon Shift is a must read for forward thinking people. One great example from the book demonstrates how economist Robert Solow tried to predict GDP growth in 1956. Solow argued that because 70% of costs were labor related and 30% of costs were capital related, GDP would grow .7% for every 1% in increased labor and .3% for every 1% increase in capital. But a study of growth shows that GDP has grown much faster. This is the Solow Residual that was later explained by Reiner Kummel. Demonstrated by Kummel, the discrepancy between predicted growth and actual growth was because Solow had left out energy. Kummel modeled energy inputs on a per joule basis and nearly perfectly reproduced the growth curve of the last few decades. A 1% rise in energy inputs led to .5% increases in GDP, but this revelation came with a damning realization. We are paying for energy about a tenth of what it is worth. Eventually the cost and the value will equalize. In Robert Ayers and Benjamin Warr's recent paper, Economic Growth Models and the Role of Physical Resources, they take it a step farther with the following conclusions,

The first is that exergy is a major factor of production comparable in importance to labour and capital. The second is that the empirical work/exergy ratio f is an important measure of technical progress in the long run. Similarly, and third, the output/work ratio g can be regarded as a useful indicator of the extent to which the economy is "dematerialising" (if it is) or "informatising"66 in some sense. Third, it is possible that technical progress as traditionally defined can be approximated reasonably well by mathematical expressions involving ratios of capital, labour and exergy inputs. Source: Ayres and Warr
Essentially this work demonstrates that we each have the equivalent of many energy slaves (the average US citizen having ninety of such slaves). The average US citizen has the benefit of work equivalent to 90 human slaves to support our lifestyle because of cheap energy. Basically, we are completely dependent on inexpensive fossil fuel energy. Some argue that a peak in oil production will look like: a spike in oil prices, followed by global recession, followed by more spikes in the cost of oil. A repeating cycle. Eerily similar to what the world is now experiencing. In fact, James Hamilton of the Brookings Institute presented in a recent paper that the current recession was caused by oil price shocks.

In a nutshell: Higher oil and gasoline prices whacked the U.S. auto industry, the effects of which cascaded through large swathes of the rest of the economy and helped curtail spending. Energy prices also pummeled consumers' disposable income and confidence. To the extent that the housing meltdown did play a huge part in the recession, that too can be partially chalked up to higher oil prices: Cheap digs in the distant suburbs went underwater with $4 gasoline. Source: Keith Johnson of the Wall Street Journal

All of the above occurring while we are beginning to understand the role of feedbacks in climate change.

Carbon Shift may be frustrating for someone looking for an absolutist description of our current situation. The scientists within, David Keith, J. David Hughes, Mark Jaccard, Jeff Rubin,William Marsden, and Jeffery Simpson, aren't necessarily in agreement on our needed course of action. They each advocate differing approaches, each presenting solid cases on why we should be concerned about peak oil and/or climate change with varying degrees of urgency. However, this book serves as an excellent primer to intelligent thought about these issues. I learned a tremendous amount from spending time with each of these thinkers through Thomas Homer-Dixon's editing. The only essay that might fall short for some is the discussion of Canadian policy by Jeffery Simpson. I found this intriguing because I'll soon be a Canadian immigrant and because there are lesson learned for the United States political approaches. Yet, I could see why many would want to skip this one. Every essay is spot on with relevance and importance.

This is the kind of hard hitting, heavy thinking journalism lacking in major media and public space discussions of the issues that will change our lives forever within the next generation.

Carbon: Where We Are and Where We May Be Headed
This consists of a series of essays on the issue of carbon usage. The essays cover a range of issues from the amount of carbon based fuels left on earth, to the economic implications of extracting those carbon based fuels and what the implications will be to the environment and the economy if we don't stop using carbon based fuels in the future.

While I did not necessarily agree with every point presented in the book, I found the essays to be thought provoking and these essays caused me to ask questions that hadn't occurred to me previously. I would recommend this book to all who have an interest in the status of fossil fuels, as well as climate change. This is not a book for a beginner in either subject, but rather an extension of the readily simplified material that is already available.