Carbon Shift ─ How Peak Oil and the Climate Crisis Will Change Canada (And Our Lives)

"We are now so abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in fifty-five million years ago, and if it does, most of us, and our descendants, will die."
-James Lovelock, leading climate expert and author of The Revenge of Gaia

"I don't see why people are so worried about global warming destroying the planet - peak oil will take care of that."
-Matthew Simmons, energy investment banker and author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy

The twin crises of climate change and peaking oil production are converging on us. If they are not to cook the planet and topple our civilization, we will need informed and decisive policies, clear-sighted innovation, and a lucid understanding of what is at stake. We will need to know where we stand, and which direction we should start out in. These are the questions Carbon Shift addresses.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down, argues that the two problems are really one: a carbon problem. We depend on carbon energy to fuel our complex economies and societies, and at the same time this very carbon is fatally contaminating our atmosphere. To solve one of these problems will require solving the other at the same time. In other words, we still have a chance to tackle two monumental challenges with one innovative solution: clean, low-carbon energy.

Carbon Shift brings together six of Canada's world-class experts to explore the question of where we stand now, and where we might be headed. It explores the economics, the geology, the politics, and the science of the predicament we find ourselves in. And it gives each expert the chance to address what they think are the most important facets of the complex problem before us.

There are no experts in Canada better positioned to explain the world that awaits us just beyond the horizon, and no better guide to that future than this collection of their thoughts. Densely packed with information, but accessibly written and powerfully timely, Carbon Shift will be an indispensable handbook to the difficult choices that lie ahead.

David Hughes is a former senior geoscientist with the Geological Survey of Canada

David Keith is Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment, University of Calgary

Jeff Rubin is Chief Economist, Chief Strategist and Managing Director, CIBC World Markets

Mark Jaccard is professor of environmental economics in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

William Marsden is an investigative reporter and author of Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't Seem to Care)

Jeffrey Simpson is a Globe and Mail national columnist and author, with Mark Jaccard, of Hot Air: Meeting Canada's Climate Change Challenge

With a foreword by Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress and What is America?


From the Hardcover edition.

Thomas Homer-Dixon was born in Victoria, B.C., and holds a Ph.D. in political science from MIT. He is currently the Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo. His first book, The Ingenuity Gap won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.


From the Hardcover edition.