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The Revolution
This is a revolution. If you want to shut an airport then stop flying.
Want an end to factory farming? Grow your own. An end to pollution?
Change to renewables. An end to war & poverty? Microgenerate. Life
for your childen? Stop needing oil. YOU have THIS Power. You do not
need Government. Seize the initiative. Bring democracy to your
community. Be an example to your children. Take responsibility.
Change for good today. |
Books - Authors R through U
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In this section you
will find our Book Reviews of the work of Authors R through U.
The topics we cover are across the spectrum of topics including
Global Warming, Peak Oil, Oil Security, Politics, Environmental
issues, etc. The views expressed here are purely those of the
reviewer's. These reviews are not prompted by copies direct from
the Publisher.
It is our policy to
be fair about each book and to point out good and bad in each
review. In our opinion we believe that the informed Carbon
Cutter should make a reasonable effort to read a selection of
these books based upon our recommendations. Knowledge is power. |
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Ruppert "Crossing the Rubicon"
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ISBN 0 86571 540 8. Michael C. Ruppert's "Crossing the
Rubicon - The Decline of the American Empire at the End of
the Age of Oil". Published by New Society Publishers in 2004.
This book weighs in at 674 pages (paperback) and it will put
you back some time to wade through it all. The Title
suggests scholarly insight on the scale of Noam Chomsky.
This is misleading. There is nothing in this book about the
"decline" of the American Empire. Indeed - entirely the
opposite. The author sets about proving that the US is at
the zenith of is power and, as he believes, is orchestrating
a careful plan to seize control of the World's Oil supplies
as they start to run out. They will use the cover of
security operations against Terrorism to do this. The events
of September 11th 2001 will be their Battle flag. As such
there is nothing original here as this is generally believed
by the majority of the World's population. Where Ruppert
goes further is in his detailed evidence search to back up
his beliefs in a multitude of layered conspiracy theories.
He starts with largely groundless beliefs that the US money
Markets run on drug money. Then he waxes lyrical about some
completely irrelevant database-linking software called
"PROMIS" in which the US Government built 'back doors' in
order to spy on everyone. Then he goes on to his set piece
that dominates most of the Book - his 9/11 Conspiracy
theories. He believes that the US Government conducted
events that day with Radio-Controlled Airliners and phantom
radar blips. This is undermined by his lack of hard
evidence. It is all vague. He uses innuendo & rumour. He
connects unconnected events & peoples to build his case.
 He
has no case. He claims that the Pentagon attack was never
witnessed although this is not true. The BBC interviewed a
witness on a documentary in 2006. Ruppert was a former LA
Cop who personally witnessed CIA involvement in Drug
running. In this he is undoubtedly sincere and he was
probably a good cop. However he will never serve in the
legal profession if he thinks this passes as evidence. Sadly
all the noise he generates can only distract the reader from
the REAL scientific facts on Peak Oil. Peak Oil is an
internationally recognised scientific and geological fact
that is undisputed. 9/11 conspiracy theories are just that -
theories. The book is a very personal work and totally based
on the authors work at the "From The Wilderness"
Publication. He see no irony in labelling his critics as CIA
cronies simply because they do exactly what he does -
overload the reader with nonsense so as to bury the genuine
facts that we should all be concerned about. Believe it, the
USA will destroy anything that gets in its way for the last
Oil on the Planet. Probably any other Nation in their
position would do the same. A lot of blood is going to be
spilt for Oil which is why we must turn our back on it and
soon. A Book not recommended unless 9/11 conspiracies are
your thing. Disappointing. |
Soloman "The Deniers"
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Review coming soon... |
Speth "Red Sky at Morning"
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ISBN 0 300 10232 1. Yale University Press published in 2004.
"Red Sky at Morning - America and the Crisis of the Global
Environment - A Citizen's Agenda for Action". James Speth
was an environmental adviser to both Carter and Clinton
Presidencies. He has also been CEO of the UN Development
Programme. However, beware any book with two subtitles - it
smacks of 'looking for an audience'. Speth writes about the
initial success in the USA on government action to protect
nature during the 1970's and then looks at how such success
did not materialise on a global scale. As an "insider" he
provides interesting insight into various successes and
failures from the 70's until the present day. On the way he
takes in various initiatives from the protection of
endangered species through to Global Warming and Kyoto. He
cites numerous facts and figures making this a useful source
book. However, a guide to 'action' it is not. He hastily
shoved a few pages on the back with list of web sites to
visit. It is very much an
after-thought and reminds you of the end of Al Gore's "An
Inconvenient Truth" where he completely forgot to talk about
solutions. Speth probably has much in
common with Gore in that he has spent time in the Whitehouse at
Presidential level and rose to that level of seniority through his
ability to use the appropriate Economic and Political language to
define what is wrong with the world. Greenpeace activist he is not.
This is actually a positive feature of this work and we recommend
this for its novel point-of-view. Beware - it is based at a US
audience. It is a perfect briefing as to the workings of the UN and
inter-governmental climate-change initiatives as well as a critique
of these global bodies. |
Salomon "The Energy Saving House"
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ISBN 1-89804-935-1. "The Energy Saving House" by Thierry
Salomon & Stéphane Bedel. This Book was published by the
French "Eco-Centre" known as "Terre Vivante" and was adapted
for the UK by CAT after purchasing the rights at the
Frankfurt Book Fair in 2001. A lot of the technology in the
book is rather more suited to a Northern Mediterranean
climate than our colder Northern European one. Hence the CAT
edition went through some heavy rewriting. There is a lot of
mention of Nuclear Power Stations throughout this slim book
(142 pages) which also betrays its French origins. At points
it makes you wonder if CAT regretted this decision as it may
have been easier to start from scratch. Another oddity of
this work is that it was backed by Friends of the Earth who
we guess supplied some funding for the project. Both the
original authors are engineers specialising in renewables.
The first half of the books is little more than a primer for
anyone wishing to build their own home as these sections
largely deal with house design. For the vast majority of us
who can do little about the aspect or design of our house
this offers little useful advice. Few of us are about to rip
up our floors to install underfloor heating. The section of
Air Conditioning struggles to have any relevance in the UK.
From the middle of the book we get on to simpler changes
that can be retrofitted. There are a few interesting details
about items most of us are already familiar with, such as
light bulbs and plumbing fittings. However, there is almost
nothing new here that you can't read about in a dozen other
books. A very strange omission from the book is the near
complete non-mention of Ground Source Heat Pumps. There is a
brief mention of a "geothermal underfloor heating" which
looks like a translation error. The layout of the book is
pleasant and it is easy to read. However the scatter-gun
effect of having lots of panels all over the page when the
pages are so small is a little distracting. The foot notes
should also have been at the back as they get in the way.
There is a reasonably good resource section at the back and
it is jammed with interesting facts and figures.  However
I would probably not recommend this to the UK audience or
beginners. Getting hold of the Chris Goodall book is the
best starting place in this more northerly position.
Considering the cover price of £12 GBP this is also grossly
over-priced for its tiny size. A small book can be good for
someone who would be put off by a more mighty tome, but
unless you are really interested in the maths, statistics,
science & engineering, then this won't enlighten you. It
would gather dust in a drawer. A wasted opportunity for FOE. |
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Paul Roberts "End of Oil"
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ISBN 0-7475-7081-7. Published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2004.
An early work I read on the matter of oil depletion. From the
praise poured over it on the front, rear & inside covers this
certainly caught the attention of the newspaper columnists too.
I chuckled at the irony of The Independent suggesting you should
"fill your roof with polystyrene and buy a smaller car" as if
that is going to make any difference. Polystyrene is made of
oil. Ever part of your car is constructed with the power of oil.
It all seems so hopeless. Subtitled "You live in this world. You
use oil. You must read this book." the book walks us through the
recent history of oil right up until today - the official
half-way point to the bitter end. We learn where the oil comes
from, why it is running out, why it is so important and what the
hell we should do about it. On the way he blasts the
US Foreign and Energy policy. Inside there is another subtitle "The
Decline of the Petroleum Economy and the Rise of a New Energy
Order". Boy, he likes subtitles. New Energy Order? What can he mean?
Maybe the lack of energy is the
 new order? He believes in a new
American Energy Policy - surely one that must come - one that is
realistic at looking at reducing Demand. The sacred of sacred holy
cows. Getting Yanks out of their SUV's before all shit is let loose
and millions start dying for this madness. How about enforcing
stricter and stricter fuel efficiency standards on the American
Motor Industry? They have been doing it in Europe and Asia for years
and there it has given them the edge on the technology. No, instead
the US car companies lobby Washington stating reasons of free trade.
If you really believe if the free market all of these manufacturers
would probably be out of business as soon as the oil price starts to
spike. The US has only sown the seeds of its own destruction by its
laziness. Now they trail the world in their thinking and are
increasingly looking like Neanderthals as everyone else leaves them
to their self-enforced dark ages. So be it. Recommended. |
Paul Roberts "End of Food"
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Review coming soon.... |
Simmons "Twilight in the Desert"
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Written by a self-professed Oil Industry expert this is a
detailed, and at times, very dull analysis of the future
prospects of Oil extraction from Saudi Arabia. Matthew Simmons'
work does provide a quasi-scientific view of future oil supplies
and has courted considerable controversy. His work has caused
ripples of dissatisfaction within Saudi Arabia. Of course - his
work undermines everything that the Saudi Oil Companies have
been telling the World for forty years. Namely it is this: the
Saudis claim to have potential Oil reserves to meet global Oil
Demand for between fifty to one-hundred years. Matthew believes
this is wildly optimistic.
The problem for the
Saudis is that they stopped publishing independently verifiable production
figures in the 1970's. Hence you had to guess the figures, or believe
whatever the Saudis told you. Most of the world drifted into blissful
ignorance and believed whatever the Saudis said on the basis that it sounded
good. Too good. Too good to be true. It probably is. The difficulty that the
author points out is that the Saudis having been pumping many of their
fields flat-out for years. This will deplete them artificially early. This
is based upon empirical evidence from oil fields all over the world. The
Saudi's are pumping vast amounts of water into the fields to force the oil
out. This is flooding the fields until they will become unusable. Saudi
capacity is already falling according to Simmons.
A book to send you to sleep. If you manage to digest it all then it just
proves one small element of the oil depletion end-game: time is running out
far quicker than any Western Government wishes to tell its people! We are
sleep-walking to disaster. |
Stein "When Technology Fails"
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ISBN 1 57416 047 8. Published in 2000 by Clear Light
Publishing of Santa Fe, New Mexico but available from Amazon
online. Written by Matthew Stein the full title reads "When
Technology Fails - A Manual for Self-Reliance & Planetary
Survival". The title of this mammoth 403 opus is slightly
misleading for this is a straight 'survival techniques' book
in most respects. It isn't clear what "Planetary Survival"
means. Sure, this lump of rock will spin round the sun for a
good few years to come. Are WE the "Planet" described? Guess
so. From the description you might expect this book to
provide guidance on what to do when you find something
doesn't work - but there is no guidance on fixing
technology. Instead you largely get a survival guide on how
to get by after your entire society and economy collapses.
This is a glimpse of your future, localised, community in
100 years time. But that is not how the author intended it
to read. There is no real information about how our next
human century will evolve or how we get from A to B. It is
just assumed that you will suddenly need to eat, or make a
pot, or make soap, and so on, then reach for this book to
show you how. Each survival skill is treated in isolation
and the whole approach is largely as a big text book
attempting to summarise hundreds of other books. As such you
should let it wash over you. We doubt you would really have
the patience to read the entire thing from cover to cover.
We diligently read up to page 200 and started to skim
through the remainder after we got to the First Aid section.
It simply isn't interesting enough for the average reader.
So treat it as a text book and dip into it as you need. But
therein lies the problem. When will you 'need' this exactly?
Unless you spend a lifetime following the advice in this
book, so that you are well practiced in all the tools and
techniques described, then you simply won't be ready when
you need this advice. You need to ramp up slowly and gain a
few core skills. The future society will have individuals
with one of these skills each. Hence the community must come
together and relocalise around these group skills. No one
human could acquire all these abilities. No man is an
island. Out of context this book is useless to a future you.
To those of us in Europe or Asia you must also be aware that
this book is completely North American-centric. We see a lot
of this kind of parochial publishing out of the US. It goes
with the territory. We simply don't publish much like this
in the rest of the world. If we do it isn't making it on to
Amazon. Best we focus on local specialist publishers such as
Permanent Publications. American culture is built around the
myth of the "back woods". Inside every American is a
mountain man trying to get out. If you live outside that
culture you simply won't have access to the resources that
such a culture breeds.
 Maybe
it is time we developed our own survivalist culture and
resources. We will need them. Whilst the author is an
Engineer be also aware that he is passionate about something
called "alternative healing" and does waste a lot of the
book peddling his personal faith in Shamanic healing and
"healing with energy" (whatever that is). A mixed bag. Use
it as a starting point and then seek out the resources and
books pertinent to your culture and locality. |
Lori Ryker "Off the Grid"
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We haven't reviewed this book yet. Have you read it? If so
we would love to hear from you. |
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