Jeff Rubin – författare

In an urgent follow-up to his best-selling Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller, Jeff Rubin argues that the end of cheap oil means the end of growth. What it will be like to live in a world where growth is over? Economist and resource analyst Jeff Rubin is certain that the world''s governments are getting it wrong. Instead of moving us toward economic recovery, measures being taken around the globe right now are digging us into a deeper hole. Both politicians and economists are missing the fact that the real engine of economic growth has always been cheap, abundant fuel and resources. But that era is over. The end of cheap oil, Rubin argues, signals the end of growth--and the end of easy answers to renewing prosperity. Rubin''s own equation is clear: with China and India sucking up the lion''s share of the world''s ever more limited resources, the rest of us will have to make do with less. But is this all bad? Can less actually be more? Rubin points out that there is no research to show that people living in countries with hard-charging economies are happier, and plenty of research to show that some of the most contented people on the planet live in places with no-growth or slow-growth GDPs. But it doesn''t matter whether it''s bad or good, it''s the new reality: our world is not only about to get smaller, our day-to-day lives are about to be a whole lot different.

As the price of oil falls, bestselling author and economist Jeff Rubin takes us to the epicentre of the bursting global carbon bubble, and dares us to imagine a new engine for growth that does not run on oil.For a decade, the vision of Canada''s future as an energy superpower has driven the country''s political agenda, as well as the fast-paced development of Alberta''s oil sands and the push for more pipelines like Keystone XL across the continent to bring that bitumen to market. Anyone who objects to pipelines and tanker-train traffic, north or south of the US border, is labeled a dreamer, or worse--an environmentalist: someone who puts the health of the planet ahead of the economic survival of their neighbours.     In The Carbon Bubble, Jeff Rubin compellingly shows how an economic vision that rests on oil is dead wrong. Changes in energy markets in the US--where domestic production is booming while demand for oil is shrinking--are quickly turning the oil dream into an economic nightmare. Like U.S. coal stocks, the share values of oil-sands producers have been drastically reduced by falling fuel prices and are increasingly exposed to the world''s efforts to reduce carbon emissions.     Rubin argues that there is a lifeline to a better future. The very climate change that will leave much of the country''s carbon unburnable could at the same time make some of Canada''s other resource assets more valuable: its water and its land. In tomorrow''s economy, he argues, Canada won''t be an energy superpower, but it has the makings of one of the world''s great breadbaskets, as everything from the corn belt to viniculture heads to higher latitudes. And in the global climate that the world''s carbon emissions are inexorably creating, growing food will soon be a lot more valuable than mining bitumen.

Soaring oil prices caused four out of the last five recessions. They caused the current recession. And they will cause the next one. Expensive oil costs us more than just money. It costs jobs, homes and in the long run it is going to radically alter the way we live. For if cheap oil is the fuel that keeps the machinery of globalisation in motion, then expensive oil has the same effect as pouring diesel into an unleaded tank. Everything stalls; the engine fails. Oil prices will rise again in the coming years, as this utterly convincing insight into our collective future argues. And as oil prices fluctuate wildly, our society will change dramatically, and for good. From the homes we live in and the cars we drive to the food we eat and the places we work, our daily lives and global economy are going to be transformed. But while this new, smaller world will take some getting used to, it will also open our eyes to a more localised and ultimately more liveable way of life.