Energy in an insecure World.

• Author: Dunn, Seth
• Position: Book Review

Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Peter Hoffmann, Tomorrow's Energy: Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, and the Prospects for a Cleaner Planet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

The events of fall 2001 revived a dormant debate in the United States over energy security and the tangled web the nation weaves between oil consumption and foreign policy. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid's book Taliban, boosted to bestseller status, detailed the U.S. government's initial support of the radical Taliban movement as a means to accessing the alluring oil and gas reserves of Central Asia. Pre-attack interviews with Osama bin Laden suggested that the oil-related U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia after the Persian Gulf War had in no small measure motivated his holy war on America. Editorials in Business Week, The Economist, and the New York Times expressed anger that addiction to Saudi oil was muffling U.S. criticism of the royal family's repressive regime. Most of this commentary assumed that the underlying problem was dependence on oil imports from politically unstable regions. Less attention was devoted to the question of whether petroleum itself had become a blessing-turned-curse for th e early twenty-first century's sole superpower.

Against this backdrop, Kenneth Deffeyes's book Hubbert's Peak has unintended but excellent timing. Nature-writing readers may remember Deffeyes as John McPhee's colorful guide and mentor in Annals of the Former World, McPhee's masteful ode to North American geological history. Today a professor emeritus at Princeton University, Deffeyes proves as entertaining an author as he was a subject, cutting to the chase in the opening paragraph: "Global oil production will probably reach a peak sometime during this decade. After the peak, the world's production of crude oil will fall, never to rise again.... The slowdown in oil production may already be beginning; the current price fluctuations for crude oil and natural gas may be the preamble to a major crisis."

The title of Deffeyes's book, and the intellectual underpinning of his argument, refers to M. King Hubbert, the geologist who in 1956 predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s. Hubbert's prediction was roundly rejected, both within and without the oil industry. But in 1970, U.S. oil production began to fall--validating the geologist and the dimple-like curve that underlay...