Questions

Simplified, but not simplistic.

In about a hundred pages for the general reader, the book explains by analogy, knowing that an analogy is a way into the physics, not the physics itself. The further reading gives the full treatment.

No. The physics does not change, whatever you believe about the climate.

The book asks what energy system the laws of physics, and the state of our finances, will allow. The energy in a kilogram of diesel, the land a wind farm needs and the cost of storing power are the same for everyone, whatever their view of the climate.

Yes – and that is the point.

I spent over twenty-five years in the oil and gas industry. That gave me expert knowledge of the energy system on which every other depends. Wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and power lines are all built from steel, cement and plastics, and making those still depends on fossil fuels. Anyone who wants to judge a replacement for that system needs to understand it first.

The book’s figures are referenced to their sources. Judge the argument on the evidence.

I hold master’s degrees in petroleum engineering and in energy economics.

My petroleum engineering degree is from Heriot-Watt University and my energy economics degree from the University of Dundee, where my research measured how optimistic official estimates of remaining oil reserves are. I first trained as an electrical engineer.

The book’s figures are referenced to their sources, so readers can check them for themselves.

Only if you leave out the cost of keeping the lights on when they stop.

The headline price covers power made when the wind blows or the sun shines. It leaves out the backup, storage and grid needed to supply power when it is wanted. The book argues that the full system cost of every generating technology should be published every year – a principle central to Dieter Helm’s Cost of Energy Review (2017).

They are improving, but from far behind.

A typical lithium-ion battery stores about one megajoule per kilogram; diesel stores 44. The best battery Vaclav Smil could cite in 2024, at 500 watt-hours per kilogram, held a twenty-fourth of the energy of the same weight of petrol. For a car, that means a heavier vehicle and a longer stop. For a ship, an aircraft or a combine harvester, it is a barrier.

Peak oil always meant peak cheap oil. That has happened.

Conventional crude production has been on a plateau since 2005. Shale filled the gap, paid for with near-free borrowed money after 2008, from wells that decline steeply after their first year and must be replaced by continuous drilling.

Hydrogen is a carrier, not a fuel.

There are no commercial hydrogen wells. Hydrogen has to be made, using more energy than it gives back, and most of it today is made from natural gas. It can move energy about; it cannot supply it.

In the West, yes – by political choice, not physics.

Countries that build to standard designs in steady programmes, such as South Korea and China, build nuclear plants far faster than the West, at between a sixth and a quarter of the price. The difference is regulation, not engineering.

The idea is a century old, and its author won a Nobel prize.

In 1926 Frederick Soddy, Nobel laureate in chemistry, argued that real wealth is physical and runs down, while debt is a number that grows at compound interest without limit. Global debt now stands at about $365 trillion (Institute of International Finance, September 2026). The book’s point is that every dollar of it is a claim on future output, and therefore on future energy.

No. The book ends with a plan.

It separates the decline we cannot avoid, as oil depletes, from the decline that policy imposes on top of it. It closes with a seven-point blueprint to remove the second and manage the first.