Post Carbon Fellow Richard Heinberg’s book Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future was one of the seven books on fracking reviewed in the Boston Globe.

From the review:

Richard Heinberg disdains the other side, too, though he’s got a better sense of humor about it in “Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future” (Post Carbon Institute, 2013). “[L]et the metaphor begin!” he says, and rolls out two teams, the first dubbed the “Cornucopians,” who think the natural gas supply could last up to a hundred years, like a horn of plenty. Their philosophy? “There’s nothing to worry about, folks. Just keep driving.” The Cornucopians are selling you snake oil, says Heinberg, thus his book title. But the Peakists (Heinberg’s team) can prove the downward slide is already here; he crunches the stats (or maybe gives the frackonomics?), stressing that the extraction rate stopped growing in 2005, so the peak has passed. All in all, it’s “downright dumb” to keep relying on fossil fuels.