Here are the books. The first is "America 2100: After Fossil Carbon". It is a moderately long textbook, available in printed form at amazon.com and other sites. If you want to check out the Preface and Introduction, it is here. For a full page view, click on the funny little icon at the bottom right of the linked page.
The idea behind the following shorter books is to provide you with easy to read background to help you get started thinking through our future without much fossil carbon energy. You should be able to decide what is a good idea, or a bad one, without having to depend on experts whose incentives you cannot know.
The first short book is "America 2100: The Rise and Fall of Fossil Carbon". This book is to convince you that the coming fossil carbon decline is real. It depends heavily on the work of retired French oil geologist Jean Laherrere. I consider him the successor to the pioneers William Jevons and M. King Hubbert, who both first explored the consequences of exponentially increasing extraction of finite resources.
Subsequent books are on future replacement energy and issues that I think are related to the task of creating replacement energy sources for our nation. One of these is "The Replacement Energy Problem" exploring the vast scale of our task to replace present fossil fuel energy.
The books in the series, as I mentioned, are intended to be short and readable, but with endnotes containing more technical information. Eventually, I hope that they will get you started analyzing "replacement energy" options on your own.
The first book here, "America 2100: After Fossil Carbon", is the current version of the textbook from a course I taught at the University of Minnesota. This is available as an iBook (iPad only, red cover). The iPad version is somewhat better quality than the PDF that is posted here. A large format printed textbook version with a blue cover is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and lulu.com as of February, 2016.
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This short book, "The Rise and Fall of Fossil Carbon", is a summary of work by many people on the subject of the long term decline in fossil carbon, starting with the decline in crude oil that is refined to our vital gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel.
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This short book, "The Replacement Energy Problem" explores the role of fossil carbon energy and what we will need to replace in the future.
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This one is very short, on two grand projects--the first transcontinental railroad and the interstate highway system. For their time, these were the premier peacetime national efforts. We will see other grand projects in the decades to come.
This book is a brief account of the future of nuclear fission energy. We once had lots of fossil carbon energy and nuclear reactors were not really necessary. Without fossil carbon, fission energy may become a viable option again.
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There is little discussion of exactly how the future grid will look, when it needs to be robust and also incorporate energy storage, due to intermittent wind and solar power. This is a very preliminary view of the situation.
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This is a short and pessimistic view of the future of wind energy.
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This is another short pessimistic view, this time of the future of solar energy.
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