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Notes

Chapter One: The End of the Industrial Age

1
. My summary of Hubbert's work is primarily based on –Deffeyes 2003, Duncan 1993, and Heinberg 2003.

2
. Rather 1979 summarizes these views.

3
. See the summary of oil production in Deffeyes 2003 and Williams and Alhajji 2003.

4
. See, for example, the discussion in deMoll 1977.

5
. For example, see the discussion in Ramage 1997, pp. 289–90.

6
. Heinberg 2003, pp. 115–6.

7
. For example, Heinberg 2004, pp. 62–75.

8
. Hirsch et al. 2005.

9
. See, for example, Neff 2007.

10
. For the National Academy of Sciences study, see Brierley et al. 2007.

11
. Ramage, 1997, pp. 12–13 and 68.

12
. Nature's successful fusion reactor is, of course, the sun, which produces the vast majority of its heat and light by nuclear fusion.

13
. Data for this calculation are from National Agricultural Statistics Service 2003, National Corn Growers Association 2007, and Shapouri et al. 1995.

14
. Ramage 1997, p. 69.

15
. For the optimist's case, see Heinberg 2003, pp. 142–46. For the pessimists, see Odum 1996.

16
. Harrington 1970, p. 6.

17
. See Webster 2002 for a good summary of the Maya collapse.

18
. Data on Maya diets is from Reed 1998.

19
. Hanson 1995.

20
. Reed 1998.

21
. See the case studies in Tainter 1988.

22
. The Olduvai theory was originally published in Duncan 1993.

23
. Orlov 2008 for a good description of the Soviet collapse and its aftermath.

24
. According to the 2005 UN Human Development Report, for example, rates of child mortality in the United States in that year were on a level with those in Malaysia. See Watkins 2005.

Chapter Two: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

1
. This does not necessarily mean, as some alternative theorists claim today, that the ancient Egyptians had some equivalent of modern technology; precisely no evidence supports that claim, and it's far more likely that the Egyptians worked out some clever way to use their own Bronze Age technology for the purpose. The fact remains that for the last three thousand years nobody has known what that clever way was.

2
. One of these devices was recovered from the remains of an ancient Greek shipwreck in 1901. See Freeth et al. 2006 for a history and reconstruction of the device.

3
. See Drachmann 1963 for information on Hero's steam turbine.

4
. The term “immanentizing the eschaton” comes from Voegelin 1952.

5
. See, for example, Greer 2006.

6
. This is discussed in Jacobs 1988.

7
. Lamy 1998.

8
. See Beyer 1992 and Stone 1993 for the role of apocalyptic myth in contemporary culture.

9
. Toynbee 1956, p. 4.

10
. Danaher 1994 and Stiglitz 2002 document the consistently disastrous results of World Bank and IMF “structural adjustment.”

11
. Catton 1980, pp. 154–55.

12
. Most famous for its involvement with trance channeling and its claim that “you create your own reality,” the New Age movement is extremely diverse, and my comments on its history here are in some ways oversimplified. See Drury 2004, –Hanegraaf 1996, and Kyle 1995 for the history of the movement.