The most recommended fossil fuels books

If the goods and services that we enjoy in America today all had to be provided by human muscle power, we would each, on average, need roughly 150 people working full-time for us. Instead, fossil fuels do the work. The good news: coal helped end the horrors of slavery. The bad news: we’re all now utterly dependent on an energy system that’s destroying the world and the survival prospects of future generations. In many ways, we have become slaves to the fossil fuel regime, and Nikiforuk explains how. This book deserved far more attention than it received when published in 2012.

Yurgin is the grandmaster of global energy politics, starting with his seminal, The Prize, and most recently The New Map. The latter is an amazing sweep of where global energy markets are heading, which takes into consideration the shift away from oil, gas, and coal to green or alternative sources of energy. His outlook is that the transition to a carbon-lite world is going to be much bumpier and more time-consuming than many people wish for, considering the issues of climate change, economic realities, and geopolitics. An insightful and excellent read.

I read this book to stay true to my commitment, inspired by John Stuart Mill, to always make an effort to understand the strongest against your own convictions (a key reason for always including Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom in my political philosophy courses). Like most progressives in the 70s, I was part of the anti-nuclear movement, not just opposition to nuclear weapons, but to nuclear power as well. I did not expect this book to radically shift these commitments—but it did. Not the first one, but the second. I realized on reading this book that I had not thought seriously about these issues in decades. The issue of climate change was not on the table in those days, and I had not paid much attention to the development of nuclear power since then. The issue today is too urgent to ignore. Looking at the evidence presented in this book… show more.

The story of climate change over millions of years up to the present when burning fossil fuels is heating our planet and threatening not just the survival of human society but the intricately linked ecologies of the natural world. Australia is already feeling the effects, with worse droughts, terrible fires, repeated coral bleachings on the Great Barrier Reef, and escalating species extinction. Flannery writes brilliantly about the impact of humans on nature, and also on what we can do, individually and collectively, to avert catastrophe.

As a non-scientist, I love reading books written by scientists in language that the rest of us can understand. This is one of the best – and it addresses many of the most urgent questions scientists will keep worrying about through the 21st century, about the interaction between oil production and use, the atmosphere, the oceans, and freshwater systems. Catherine Gautier writes in a clear, accessible style. She is well aware that we can not fence off the study of physical phenomena such as climate change and contamination of water sources from the study of society, economics, and politics.  

To understand our present plight with climate change we have to get our minds around the history of steam power, and why it came to dominate and supersede wind and water, despite its equal horsepower and greater expense.

Malm’s study is brilliant and while it focuses on labour relations moreso than race the reader only has to think of cotton and slavery, and wool and the colonial frontier to build in the global implications for the transition to steam power. 

I find reading this book like sitting with a wise friend who gently tells you you’re making a big mistake, but you can still fix it, and it can be OK.

Recent climate policy has gone off the rails with the idea of “net zero,” a sleight-of-hand that makes it look much easier: We don’t actually have to stop emitting; we can just offset emissions by removing them from the atmosphere later to pay back the debt. Yeah, right. This is true in theory but deeply problematic in practice: risky, and prone to error and deception. Some emissions can continue to be offset by removals to get to global net zero or net negative. But the current net-zero bandwagon, with everyone pretending their emissions can continue, is dangerous madness.

Buck brings her clear insight and ruthless honesty to this deeply confused area. She gently holds the popular delusions up for… show more.

Enough science to understand the problem and see that the solution is eminently doable. But it's really about politics, how the fossil fuel industry and its paid lackeys are blocking climate action, but in a new way. The old climate war was straight-up science denial. Since that won't fly anymore, the industry has retreated to its fallback position: acknowledging that climate change is real but finding ways to defer action by deflecting responsibility on consumers or dividing the movement against itself, like vegans vs meat-eaters. Once we know the con, we can avoid it and push for real climate solutions by the government that will keep fossil fuels in the ground and build clean energy capacity as quickly as possible.

In order to have socialism, we need to have a planet on which to be socialists—preferably a planet that isn’t constantly on fire or under water from climate change. So we need to convert our energy systems from fossil fuels to renewables like solar and wind, but as Ashley Dawson argues in this great book, we can’t afford to then let energy corporations start owning sunlight and air the way they do oil and coal. 

People’s Power introduces us to the age-old idea of commonly owned natural resources and looks to modern examples from around the world where cities, towns, and countries and pioneering ways to make the “energy commons” a reality.

Barak’s history of fossil fuels in the Middle East and the colonial extraction and incursion of British corporations throughout the region hugely clarifies the interdependence of imperialism and fossil fuels.

We’re shown how coal's imperial infrastructure presaged the geopolitics of oil causing recurring war, violence, exploitation, and more recently climate change. This powerful book thoroughly convinced me that the history of Empire is indelibly a history of carbonisation.