MUST READ: The Big Picture	Year
Walter Youngquist	Geodestinies: The Inevitable Control of Earth Resources over Nations & Individuals a few left at thesocialcontract.com	1997
James H Kunstler	The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century	2005
Garrett Hardin	Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos	1995
David Pimentel	Food, Energy, and Society	1996
John Perlin	Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization	1991
Clive Ponting	A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations	1993
Ward & Brownllee	Rare Earth Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe	2000
Laurie Garrett	Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health	2001
Skeptic Magazine	The most fun way to learn critical thinking, understand how we know what we know, and steer between being too gullible and too rejecting.
	OIL & GAS: how integral they are to our lives, why they're so difficult to replace, history
Kenneth Deffeyes	Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak	2005
Kenneth Deffeyes	Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage	2001
Matthew Simmons	Twilight in the Desert: the coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy	2005
Julian Darley	High Noon for Natural Gas: The New Energy Crisis	2004
Daniel Yergin	The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power [Pulitzer Prize winner]	1993
	Fossil Fuels and Food: How far have we overshot carrying capacity?
D. & M. Fisher	The Nitrogen Bomb. April 2001. Discover magazine
Gever, Kauffman, et al	Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades	1991
Vaclav Smil	Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production	2000
Rich Pirog, et al	Food, Fuel, and Freeways http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/pubs/staff/ppp/food_mil.pdf
	Can we avoid WW III as energy declines and times get harder?
Lutz Kleveman	The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia	2003
Michael Klare	Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict	2001
Chalmers Johnson	The Sorrows Of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic	2004
Robert Baer	Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude	2004
Ahmed Rashid	Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia	2000
	The most likely short-term "solutions"
Robert L. Hirsch	Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management. The "solutions", which need to be started at least 10 years ahead of Peak Oil, are: Heavy Oil, Gas-to-Liquids / Liquified Natural Gas, Enhanced Oil Recovery, Efficient Vehicles, and Coal Liquids www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf	2005
Howard Bucknell III	Energy and the National Defense. [Déjà vu --- we've been through this before! This is an extraordinary guide to how people dealt with the energy crisis in the 70's. Bucknell, like Hirsch, perceived this as a liquid fuels crisis. The same debates, political inertia, solutions, etc as now went on. Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it...]	1981
Department of Energy	Standby Gasoline Rationing Plan
	Filling in the gap between Energy Supply and Demand
Feral Metallurgist	Other sources of energy cannot deliver sufficient surpluses to replace the potent portable energy we know as gasoline and diesel. It is not generally understood that poorer quality energy sources can be critically dependant upon oil for their extraction, processing and distribution. In other words, oil is the precursor for other sources of energy; gas, coal, nuclear, solar, hydro, because these require oil fuel to create and maintain infrastructure. It also gives them the illusion of being "profitable". http://www.unknownnews.net/040712a-fm.html
Buckminster Fuller	Energy slave unit = avg output of a man doing 150,000 foot-pounds of work per day 250 days per year. In low-energy societies, nonhuman energy slaves are horses, oxen, windmills, riverboats. Now, the average American has more than 8,000 energy-slaves at his or her disposal, and these slaves can work under extreme conditions: no sleep, 5,000° F, at 400,000 pounds per square inch pressure, etc”
	Oil & Natural Gas
	Oil is the main transportation energy source on land, air, and water; and the major feedstock for over half a million products, such as plastics, paint, medicine, roads (bitumen), solvents, inks, chemicals, etc. Natural gas is the feedstock for fertilizers that allow an extra five billion people to be alive than could otherwise exist on our finite planet.
	Shale Oil
Randy Udall, & Steve Andrews	The Illusive Bonanza: Oil Shale in Colorado “Pulling the Sword from the Stone” http://www.aspencore.org/images/pdf/OilShale.pdf
	Fusion - dismisses all other possible energy solutions
Martin Hoffert, et al	Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet 1 Nov 2002 Science
	Hydrogen.
Joseph J. Romm	Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate	2004
U.Bossel & B.Eliasson	Energy and the Hydrogen Economy www.methanol.org/pdfFrame.cfm?pdf=HydrogenEconomyReport2003.pdf
Alice Friedemann	The Hydrogen Economy: Energy and Economic Black Hole http://www.energybulletin.net/4541.html
	Solar
Howard Hayden	The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World	2005
	Biomass (1)
	Takes more energy to make than you get -- but it makes great moonshine -- so it's not a total loss
D. Pimentel, T. Patzek	Ethanol Production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel Production Using Soybean and Sunflower	2005
	Biomass (2)
	Eventually soil structure and nutrition will be destroyed, turning the land into a desert
N. Brady, R. Weil	The Nature and Properties of Soils	2001
	Biomass (3)
	175,000 square miles of land across ten states are going to turn into a dustbowl when the Ogallala aquifer is drained within the next two decades-- where is the land to grow energy crops going to come from?
John Opie	Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land	2000
	Wind
E.ON Netz Corp.	http://www.nowhinashwindfarm.co.uk/EON_Netz_Windreport_e_eng.pdf German wind farm realities
Incoteco (Denmark)	http://www.glebemountaingroup.org/Articles/DanishLessons.pdf Danish windpower
Pacific NW National Laboratory	Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States Where the wind blows, how strong, and when: many regions are not suitable for wind production rredc.nrel.gov/wind/pubs/atlas/atlas_index.html
	Nuclear
H Hirsch, O Becker, M Schneider, A Froggatt	Nuclear Reactor Hazards: Ongoing Dangers of Operating Nuclear Technology in the 21st Century http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/nuclearreactorhazards.pdf	2005
Richard Wolfson	Nuclear Choices: A Citizen's Guide to Nuclear Technology	1993
	Infrastructure New energy sources must maintain the infrastructure we built when oil had EROEI of 40-100
Charles Hall et al.	Hydrocarbons and the Evolution of Human Culture 20 Nov 2003 Nature 426, pp. 318–22	2003
Brian Hayes	Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape	2005
Kate Ascher	The Works: Anatomy of a City	2005
ASCE	American Society of Civil Engineers Report Card for America’s Infrastructure. 2005	2005
Env Protection Agency	The Clean Water and Drinking Water Infrastructure Gap Analysis. 2002. Office of Water	2002
	Politics Why it's so hard to find a way out of our situation: the Human Political Animal
Joel Bakan	The Corporation The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power	2004
Stanton Glantz	Tobacco War: Inside the California Battles	2000
Marion Nestle	Food Politics How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health	2003
Jack Doyle	Taken for a Ride: Detroit's Big Three and the Politics of Pollution	2000
James C. Scott	Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.	1998
	Human Ecology Why it's so hard to find a way out of our situation: homo sapiens in nature
Steven A. LeBlanc	Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage	2003
William Catton	Overshoot	1982
Mathis Wackernagel	Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth	1995
Tim Flannery	The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australian Lands and People	2002
Judith Shapiro	Mao's War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China	2001
Michael Williams	Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis	2002
Tim Flannery	The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples	2001
	Resource Allocation
David Landes	The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor	1998
Jared Diamond	Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies [Pulitzer Prize winner]	1999
	Population