The Empty Tank

In The Empty Tank, Jeremy Leggett, an internationally renowned geologist and energy entrepreneur who spent the 1980s working for Big Oil, sounds the alarm about an unprecedented crisis.

The oil topping point–the day half of all the world’s oil is used up–will be reached, by many calculations, sometime soon. In fact, it may already be upon us. When the financial markets realize what’s happening, an economic crash and soaring energy prices will result. The entire global marketplace we all inhabit will crack and crumble.

Oil companies and governments don’t want you to know this. They have been covering up depletion, while stoking addiction and holding back alternatives. Leggett shows how major energy producers have been exposed providing false information about climate change and underground reserves.

He describes how governments collude with private enterprise and one another to keep the global economy hooked on oil. And he explains the science behind oil extraction, demonstrating with unimpeachable expertise why the well is indeed running dry a lot faster than we think.

Written with verve and eloquence, The Empty Tank explains how we became addicted to oil and why that addiction is leading us toward disaster. Yet Leggett also points the way forward. All the technology we need to get off the road to disaster is already at hand. A new Manhattan Project for energy can save us if we can wake up and confront the problem directly, as this important book urges us to do.

"Among the shelf full of books on the oil situation that have been published in the last year or so, (this) is far and away the best."

-Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute

What’s it all about? ... tough titles made simple by David Shukman

THE EMPTY TANK by Jeremy Leggett

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

OIL, gas, hot air and the global energy crisis, according to the explanation on the front cover. Delving into the nightmare scenario of mankind sleepwalking to global disaster, this book focuses on two related dangers: how we’ll run out of oil far sooner than we think and how burning what’s left of it will warm our planet to a catastrophic level. The central contention is that the oil industry is in a state of denial about the size of its reserves. The scandal over Shell’s distortion of its real figures is said to be the tip of the iceberg. And the conclusion is stark: that we’re all using the black stuff at a far faster rate than geologists are finding new deposits, and that as soon as the truth gets out there’ll be panic in the markets, soaring prices and a mega-crash. It’s scary.

SO IS IT READABLE?

YES, though towards the end some sections lapse into lists of points. But the writing is always clear and conveys complicated but important technicalities in very accessible terms.

DAVID SHUKMAN is environment & science correspondent for BBC News

Daily Mail, 18 November 2005

"Just in time to capitalize on the twin disasters of Katrina and high gasoline prices comes this jeremiad on the cataclysmic end of the fossil-fuels era. Geologist and ex-Greenpeace official Leggett, author of The Carbon War, argues incisively that oil production has peaked, with dwindling supplies and soaring prices in the offing. Worse than the possibility that the world cannot cope, he feels, is the threat that it will cope all too well by burning more coal and coal-derived synthetic fuels, thus exacerbating atmospheric carbon dioxide build-up and global warming. This will lead the planet down 'the road to horror,' illustrated in a sketchy montage of the usual environmental doomsday scenarios: rising sea levels, extreme weather, famine and war. Leggett, who runs a renewable energy company, proffers a boosterish brief for renewable energy sources like solar and wind power as the only solutions to the crisis. His rather shallow treatment of energy options extols such dubious green nostrums as ethanol, bio-mass (i.e., crop-burning) and hydrogen power while dismissing nuclear energy, but doesn't provide the kind of meticulous accounting of costs, benefits and disadvantages such assessments demand. Leggett derides fossil-fuel apologists as fundamentalists convinced they will be Raptured before the environment implodes; his own visionary coda prophesies economic collapse and the rise of fascism before humanity is finally saved by renewables, which will bring peace, localism and deserts abloom with fields irrigated by desalinization plants. A little alarmism is called for when discussing energy and the environment, but these issues also deserve a more thorough and sober account of the choices we face than Leggett provides." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Jeremy Leggett spent the 1980s in the service of Big Oil, as a geologist and faculty member of the Royal School of Mines in London, and the ’90s as top campaigner for Greenpeace International; he has spent the ’00s as a leading alternative-energy activist and entrepreneur. He is the author of The Carbon War. Leggett is a recipient of the U.S. Climate Institute’s Award for Advancing Understanding, was named by Time magazine as “one of the next generation of young leaders” for his work on renewable energy sources, and is currently CEO of one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the United Kingdom. He lives in London.