The Crash Course (eBook)

CHRIS MARTENSON, PhD (Duke), MBA (Cornell), is a former Vice President at SAIC, worked for Pfizer, and created the viral video series, The Crash Course, which has been viewed by millions of people and translated into 4 languages. He is a world-class communicator and dot-connector, a sought-after writer and speaker, and is the host of the online resilience community at peakprosperity.com.

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction ix

Part I How to Approach the Next Twenty Years 1

1 The Coming Storm 3

2 The Lens: How to See the Future 7

3 A World Worth Inheriting 11

4 Trust Yourself 14

Part II Foundation 21

5 Dangerous Exponentials 23

6 Problems versus Predicaments 38

7 An Inconvenient Lie: The Truth About Growth 42

8 Complex Systems 47

9 Our Money System 55

10 What Is Wealth? (Hint: It's Not Money) 69

Part III Economy 75

11 Debt 77

12 The Great Credit Bubble 90

13 Like a Moth to Flame: Our Destructive Tendency to Print 100

14 Fuzzy Numbers 109

15 Crumbling Before Our Eyes: The Story of Concrete 118

Part IV Energy 123

16 Energy and the Economy 125

17 Peak Oil 141

18 Shale Oil 160

19 Necessary but Insufficient: Clean Energy, Nuclear, and Coal 166

20 Why Technology Can't Fix This 191

Part V Environment 199

21 Minerals: Gone with the Wind 201

22 Soil: Thin, Thinner, Gone 211

23 Parched: The Coming Water Wars 219

24 All Fished Out 226

25 What Do You Mean We're Running Out of Sand? Strange but True 231

Part VI Convergence 233

26 Where Have All the Insects Gone? Silence of the Lamps 235

27 The Bumpy Path to 2030 238

Part VII What Should I Do? 247

28 The Good News: We Already Have Everything We Need 249

29 Closing the Book on Growth 257

30 What Should I Do? 260

31 Build Up Your Capital! 270

Appendix 291

Notes 293

Index 303