"People have to realize that this is not a shock, it's a permanent set of conditions that we have to adapt to," he said. "I think that's a lot easier sell than when I first started articulating this message eight, ten years ago."
But unlike many previous peak oil books, which typically don't get much past "we're in big trouble," Mr. Rubin's conclusions are refreshingly optimistic. His world of the oil-starved future, at least for Western societies, looks a lot like the bygone years of our fond memory, where people work and vacation nearer to home, eat locally grown foods and buy locally produced goods, and suburban sprawl is replaced by revitalized cities.
"I think it will really restructure the economy in ways that people haven't even begun to imagine," he said. "But I think, ironically, it's going to be a return to the past ... in terms of the re-emergence of local economies."
SHOOT: Looks like afascinating read.
"I never asked for permission and they never gave it," Mr. Rubin said in a recent interview. "I had a choice. I could continue doing a job that I thought I had been reasonably successful at for the past 20 years, or I could publish my book. For me, it was a no-brainer," he said.
So what was so important that walking away from a two-decade career at CIBC was a "no-brainer"?
Only his prophecy of how ever-higher energy costs will fundamentally change the way each and every one of us live our day-to-day lives - from where we work to what we eat to where we lay down our heads at night, and everything in between.
Mr. Rubin has taken his long-standing forecast that inevitably declining production and rising demand will send oil prices inexorably higher - over $200 (U.S.) a barrel by 2012 or earlier, just for a start - and imagines how the world will have to change to adjust to such a reality.
"This book is not about how to make money. It's [about] how you change your life," he said. |
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