First 3 signed book winners!

A Theory of Everyone will be released in the US on Oct 31

Hi Lab,

The first 3 winners of a signed copy of A Theory of Everyone have been shipped! The winners were:

1. Greg Coleman (UK)

2. Isabela Granic (Canada)

3. Mikael Shields (UK)

I’ll be drawing another 3-4 winners next week and 3-4 more the week after. After release, I may continue the competition.

A Theory of Everyone made an appearance in last weekend’s Sunday Times: There’s a reason for all these wars: minerals will decide who rules next

Drowning in cheap oil, we in the West forgot a simple truth: empires are built on energy

Lots of relevant sections from the book, like:

In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore uses the analogy of a frog placed in tepid water whose temperature is slowly raised to illustrate our disregard for the warning signs of a changing climate. It’s a clever analogy that’s almost certainly wrong. Animals have powerful instincts to survive in precarious and danger-filled environments. As soon as the frog becomes uncomfortable, it will leap out. In the same way, humans are not oblivious to the changes happening around them. We can feel in our bones that something is wrong. Like the frog, we are trying to make the leap.

The problem is not that we don’t notice the warning signs, it’s that we don’t know what to do about it. As excess energy falls, life becomes harder. As the challenges posed by climate change, such as large influxes of people, weaken our institutions, our societies fracture and it becomes difficult for us to realize the role of energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution, and how together these laws have created us and our civilizations. The resulting anger and frustration can make our societies ungovernable, and we may lose faith in the fairness of our systems and in each other.

As energy return on investment and energy availability continue to fall to precipitous levels, our civilizations are quickly losing the excess energy necessary to overcome the danger we find ourselves in. This may sound dire, but history has shown us that every major civilization has been crushed by a falling energy ceiling – as their space of the possible shrunk, they were defeated by forces both outside and within.

For paid subscribers, here’s the introduction to Part 2: