Leonardo Maugeri is Group Senior Vice President, Strategies and Development, for the Italian energy company Eni, the sixth-largest publicly listed oil company in the world.
"Maugeri's authoritative, well-written assessment of the global oil
situation relates so well to the current energy predicament that it
belongs in most academic and public library collections. With
knowledge and experience in developmental strategy for a major
international oil company, Maugeri provides a lively, insightful
perspective to the history and condition of the world petroleum
industry. A specific argument is carried through the book: the
world is not running out of oil--there is more than enough oil in
the ground. Sequences of oil scarcity and overproduction are shown
to be more related to economics and politics than to geology and
technology. The 21 specific chapters are encompassed in two
principal parts: "A History of an Unreliable Market (and the Bad
Policies It Prompted)" and "Misconceptions and Problems Ahead."
Appendixes deal with oil consumption and with the production and
reserves of specific countries and major oil companies. As a
library holding for students of political science, economics,
science, and technology, this book should be shared with its
antithesis, Kenneth S. Deffeyes's Beyond Oil: The View from
Hubbert's Peak. Well footnoted; extensive bibliography; thorough
index. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through
faculty."-Choice
"Are we running low on oil? After a slew of books by pessimists,
here is a convincing counterargument by an oil company analyst.
Maugeri explains that the industry has been scarred by recurrent
periods of over-production. The major players' resulting
cautiousness probably makes current estimates of reserves very
conservative., if prices continue at today's levels we can expect
aggressive investments in exploration and technology to yield
enormous extra supply."-Harvard Business Review
"Maugeri leverages his insider's knowledge to cast doubt on those
who argue that oil reserves are dwindling or that geopolitical
concerns have rendered the future of oil production too unreliable
to be viable....Ýr¨ecommended for academic libraries....Ýo¨f
interest to public libraries."-Library Journal
"Believing calls for economic independence from oil to be an
insupportable "overdramatization and sterile overreaction to oil's
cyclical behavior," Maugery seeks to counter the "trap of
catastrophism" that he sees as infiltrating the public discussion
as deeply as the George W. Bush administration. He sets out to
debunk these fears by describing this cyclical behavior through the
history of the oil industry and similarly recurrent fears about oil
shortages, fears that would produce a damaging American
interventionist policy in the Middle East, as he suggests."-SciTech
Book News
"Maugeri minimizes the threat of blackmail by oil-producing
nations, and he dismisses fears that the world is running out of
oil. Environmentalists and those who demand reliance on alternative
renewable-energy sources will dispute many of his assertions.
Still, this is a valuable effort to explain the issues."-Booklist
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