Product Description

The world is about to run out of cheap oil and change dramatically. Within the next few years, global production will peak. Thereafter, even if industrial societies begin to switch to alternative energy sources, they will have less net energy each year to do all the work essential to the survival of complex societies. We are entering a new era, as different from the industrial era as the latter was from medieval times.

In The Party's Over, Richard Heinberg places this momentous transition in historical context, showing how industrialism arose from the harnessing of fossil fuels, how competition to control access to oil shaped the geopolitics of the 20th century, and how contention for dwindling energy resources in the 21st century will lead to resource wars in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South America. He describes the likely impacts of oil depletion, and all of the energy alternatives. Predicting chaos unless the U.S. -- the world's foremost oil consumer -- is willing to join with other countries to implement a global program of resource conservation and sharing, he also recommends a "managed collapse" that might make way for a slower-paced, low-energy, sustainable society in the future.

More readable than other accounts of this issue, with fuller discussion of the context, social implications, and recommendations for personal, community, national, and global action, Heinberg's book is a riveting wake-up call for humankind as the oil era winds down, and a critical tool for understanding and influencing current U.S. foreign policy.

Please note:
In producing the second edition of The Party's Over, the printers made an unfortunate mistake, duplicating page 110 on page 100 -- which was omitted entirely. We apologize for this error. Customers who have bought a copy with this error can find the correct page 100 here.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #353828 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-23
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
February 1, 2003

The Party's Over (TPO) is an excellently and thoroughly researched treatment of precisely the oil depletion problem, almost entirely free of the usual hidden political agendas, irrelevant personal memoirs, and philosophical delusions.

I would recommend TPO to anybody on this list . . . as a convenient and politically neutral "Pack-'O-Facts" that can be offered to friends, family, colleagues, policy makers, and anybody else in your life or world that you may feel needs a sober sit-down and some rational talking-to about the energy future of industrial civilization.

The Endnotes section at the book's end, organized by chapter, is the best bibliography I've ever seen on all aspects of the topic. This book bears direct comparison to only three other more-or-less mass or general market books that I'm aware of:

1. Thom Hartmann, Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight;
2. Jeremy Rifkin, The Hydrogen Economy;
3. Kenneth Deffeyes, Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage.

With respect to these, I feel that TPO is:

• less irrelevantly philosophical than Hartmann's book, more up- to-date, and more pointedly technical in sources used.
• very similar to the first half of Rifkin's work, where he delineates the problem, but again a more comprehensive and at the same time more focused presentation. The second half of Rifkin's work, where he cheerleads in rather political mode for a salvaging of the world's economy via distributed hydrogen/fuel-cell infrastructure is not directly relevant, except I suppose inasmuch as it would seem to contradict Heinberg's skepticism about propping up global industrial civilization through a 11th hour switch to alternatives. I'd personally go with Heinberg's conclusions.
• again, in topic/coverage very similar to Deffeye's quite interesting work, but frankly for those who want a quick and focused rollup presentation/package for opening the topic with others, Deffeye's work is overly encumbered with too much aranca about oil geology and personal author's memoirs.

Overall, The Party's Over will serve as the state-of-the-art topic-opener on Hubbert catastrophism, for people on this list, well into the foreseeable future.

Scott Meredith
AlasBabylon list owner

About the Author
Richard Heinberg is the author of nine books and is widely regarded as one of the world's most effective communicators of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels. With a wry, unflinching approach based on facts and realism, he exposes the tenuousness of our current way of life and offers a vision for a truly sustainable future.

Senior Fellow-in-Residence at Post Carbon Institute in California, Heinberg is best known as a leading educator on Peak Oil and its impacts. His expertise, publications and teachings also cover other critical issues including the current economic crisis, food and agriculture, community resilience, and global climate change.

Customer Reviews

The most Provocative Book Ever
I ordered this book after viewing the documentary, "The End of Suburbia". This was a page turner. I had an understanding about the problems with energy and how we need to change society or our inactions will change it for us. I was moved, cornered, and energized. This is the best book for a lay person who wants to know how the West was brought about and how we're sharing our glamorous view of life with the rest of the world. I hope everyone who reads this will know what to invest in. And I hope if you read this book, you have intelligent people around you who will be able to critically think and ponder the reality of this. This book really excited me, not because I'm a Luddite at heart, but as a person who deep down knows there is so much more to life than what is being packaged and delivered to the masses. This will reinforce to those who already walk lightly on the earth and to those who have no idea how life as we know is sustained and how we got here. This is the ultimate history lesson because life comes down to accessing free energy and molding it to suit us and to thrive. Only now, we have learned the hows and whys. Are we smart enough to move or are we so tied up with politics and capitalism that only a small group of the human population will know what to do. And we're locked up and muted. This book is empowering and at moments, I cried.

Entertaining. . .
If I were rating this book solely on entertainment value, I'd have given it 4 stars. . . it was a very enjoyable read. That said, I'm not sure I could even give the arguments in the book 2 stars. I found it particularly ironic that while he repeatedly disparages economist, he liberally quote Paul Ehrlich, who was so thoroughly embarrassed in his 1980's bet with the economist Julian Simon.

Read it then Judge
Notice how almost all of the criticism of the book is not directed at what is said in the book but at some doomsayers from 30 or so years ago. Since the 1970's technology has given us a much better handle on what we have in the ground. We know from such innovations as 3-D seismic mapping that only 40% of the world's land and oceans have any potential for oil discovery and that there is a 50% chance that less than 1 trillion barrels of recoverable oil are in this 40%. This is something we had no clue about before the 1990's. As technology has enabled us to become more efficient at extracting the oil we know we have, it has ominously showed us how little is actually left. Heinberg's greatest success is in showing how the energy returned must exceed the energy spent when analyzing a source of energy. Hence it does not matter how cheap all these renewables get. Since oil is needed to build solar panels and ethanol plants and nuclear plants, we will not have enough cheap oil to upgrade the infrastructure in time to prevent a collapse.