[Peakoil] Review of the second edition of Dmitry Orlov's "Reinventing Collapse"

[Keith Thomas]

The Energy Bulletin has published a review of the second edition of Dmitry Orlov's "Reinventing Collapse". Here are the final paras of the review:

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-06-17/review-reinventing-collapse-–-revised-and-updated-dmitry-orlov
-----------------------------
Keith Thomas
www.evfit.com
-----------------------------
Orlov also foresees a melding of the official economy and the criminal one that would compel increasing numbers of people to engage in criminal activity and thus become targets of persecution by the authorities. He describes how during every economic collapse there emerges another, informal economy based around recycling remnants of the waning one—and many of its occupations involve defacing property (i.e., “asset stripping”), administering violence (aka “private security consulting”) and trafficking drugs and alcohol.

The author is deeply worried about nuclear waste, the fate of the prison population.... Nuclear waste poses the gravest threat since it remains radioactive for so incredibly long. Orlov warns that future generations will be unable to deal with it and that its radiation will spread across horrifyingly vast stretches. As for the prison population, he fears that hordes of dangerous criminals will go free in a general amnesty once we lack the resources to keep prisons running.

The updates in this edition are mostly energy-related. For example, when the first edition came out in 2008, experts still couldn’t say the exact year of peak conventional oil production. But they now have enough of a rear view to tell that it happened in 2005, and Orlov notes this in the new book. The past couple of years have also seen an accelerating trend called the land export effect, which is the tendency of oil exporters that are past their peak production rates to cut exports rather than supplies to their domestic populations. Orlov addresses this development as well in the new book, interpreting it as a sign that oil supply shortfalls will be far worse than even the pessimists expect.