Post Carbon Fellow Richard Heinberg’s book Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels was reviewed in an op-ed in The Republican.

From the article:

It’s no secret that contemporary civilization, in all its many aspects (factory assembly, transportation, construction, agriculture, trips to Disney World and MGM casinos etc.), depends massively if not entirely on the energy derived from carbon-based fossil fuels. Without coal, oil and natural gas, contemporary human society could not evolve and will end tragically and chaotically should anything abruptly compromise access to the energy derived from these fuels…

Following a similar logic, Richard Heinberg points out that: “Before the advent of fossil fuels, agriculture was our main energy source, and the average net gain from the work of energy production was minimal.” In 1947, Anthropologists Fei Hsiao-tung and Chang Chih-I actually measured peasant style energy yields in the Chinese village of Luts’an, noting that 50 calories of net output were gained for every calorie of effort in the fields…