Locus Focus on 02/04/13

ENERGY:
Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth

During the month of February, Locus Focus presents a series of programs inspired by a new book from the Foundation for Deep Ecology and the Post-Carbon Institute: ENERGY: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth. ENERGY takes an unflinching look at the systems that support our insatiable thirst for more power along with their unintended side effects. From oil spills, nuclear accidents and mountaintop-removal coal mining, to natural gas "fracking" and renewables, ENERGY illustrates that every source of energy has costs. On this episode of Locus Focus we talk with Richard Heinberg, who has contributed two articles to this collection. We'll talk about the intersection of peak oil and the need for immediate energy conservation, which Heinberg believes may be our only significant option for averting economic, social, and environmental ruin in an energy-constrained future.

Richard Heinberg is the author of ten books including: The End of Growth: Adapting to our New Economic Reality (June 2011); Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (2007) and The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (2003). He is Senior Fellow-in-Residence of the Post-Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil educators. He has authored scores of essays and articles that have appeared in such journals as Nature, The Ecologist, The American Prospect, Public Policy Research, Quarterly Review, Z Magazine, Resurgence, The Futurist, European Business Review, Earth Island Journal, Yes!, Pacific Ecologist, and The Sun; and on web sites such as Alternet.org, EnergyBulletin.net, TheOilDrum.com, ProjectCensored.com, and Counterpunch.com.

ENERGY: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth, a 278-page coffee table tome, is a partnership between the Foundation for Deep Ecology and Post Carbon Institute. ENERGY is edited by Tom Butler and George Wuerthner, and features the writing of more than thirty leading thinkers including Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben and Sandra Steingraber, with a foreword by Douglas Tompkins and introduction by Richard Heinberg. The editors' goal is to help change the national and global conversation about energy—to help it evolve quickly from one of how to grow energy production to one of how to shrink our appetites to fit nature’s ability to sustain itself.