A Pocket Guide To

Energy

The practical guide to why energy policy is failing and how to get it right

No email required. No paywall. This argument needs to be read, not sold.

You can't boil an egg in a swimming pool. There's plenty of energy in the pool — but it's too spread out to do anything useful. That single fact explains more about the state of energy policy than a thousand government reports.

In this short, sharp book, Richard Lyon — petroleum engineer, data scientist, and energy economist — strips the energy debate back to the physics. What he finds is alarming: the fossil fuels are running out, the proposed replacements can't do the job, and the people in charge don't understand the science well enough to know.

But this is not a counsel of despair. There is a way through — if we stop wasting what remains on systems that can't work and start building the one that can.

The argument in five sentences

Every successful energy transition in history moved to a denser, more concentrated source.
The proposed transition reverses this — replacing concentrated energy with diffuse energy — for the first time in history.
The fossil fuel endowment that must fund any transition is depleting faster than any official projection admits.
The $25 trillion of imaginary money created since 2008 masked this depletion by mobilising oil that the market had correctly rejected as too expensive.
An honest energy policy would protect the remaining endowment and fast-track nuclear — the only proven technology that moves up the density ladder.

What's inside

Part I The physical rules every energy source must obey — energy density, power density, and the thermodynamic floor

Part II What all this energy is actually for — steel, cement, ammonia, plastics — and why they can't be electrified away

Part III The depleting inheritance — what is happening to the fossil fuels themselves

Part IV Why the proposed solution won't work — the storage problem, the mineral hunger, and the replacement treadmill

Part V Three escape hatches tested — efficiency, hydrogen, and green growth — and why none of them works

Part VI Following the money — what happens to a financial system built on perpetual growth when energy contracts

Part VII What comes next — nuclear, a seven-point blueprint, and why it is not too late

Get the book

100 pages. Paperback. Written to be read in a single sitting and passed to someone who needs to understand why the current path leads nowhere.

Download free PDF Amazon UK — £9.99

The PDF is the complete book. The paperback is for people who prefer paper — or want to give it to someone who does.

About the author

Richard Lyon is a petroleum engineer and data scientist. His career spans oil field operations, energy economics, and the mathematics of finite resource extraction. He holds an unusual combination of domain knowledge: he understands how the dominant energy system actually works, how markets price energy, and where the standard economic models break down when confronted with thermodynamics.

The book is the foundation. The conversation continues.

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