137 - Time for Choices (Energy, Sustainablity and the Human Future)

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Episode #137 - Time for Choices (Energy, Sustainablity and the Human Future)

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⌚ Sat 19 October 2002  ☻Richard Heinberg, Jerry Mander, Kenny Christiansen, Dan Klein

Download Hour1 Download Hour2The connections between Peak Oil and US foreign policy.

This weekend, more than half a million people in America marched against the Bush Administration's Iraq war plans. Evident in the speeches made at demonstrations in Washington, San Francisco and dozens of other cities and towns across the nation was an understanding that the motivations for the Bush war had more to do with controlling access to, and the price of fossil fuel energy than some concern about weapons of mass destruction or lack of democracy in Iraq.

The governments of every industrialized nation but ours are attempting to grapple with the reduction of greenhouse gases that have already caused climate change and damage to the ozone layer of the planet. But there is another aspect that has not been widely discussed, though it is known to the oil company executives of the Bush administration who meet behind closed doors to formulate US energy policy: It is that is world supplies of fossil fuel are dwindling rapidly. at the same time that world demand for energy to power industrial development is increasing

What we have come to take for granted as the features of modern civiliation exist because of energy, processes and material derived from fossil fuel. As we're going to hear in the first hour of the program, some who have been studying the problem think that decades would be necessary to create an infrastructure that would maintain even some semblance of our present standard of technological sophistication. Without the availability of cheap and potent energy, the continually increasing growth needed to maintain profitable globalized corporate markets will be impossible. The system is therefore both ecologically and economically unsustainable.

Given this situation, the administrations drive to war, the expenditure of billions on weapons manufacturing and the creation of new powers to surveil and control the domestic population becomes dangerously irresponsible as well as sinister. In the second hour we'll take a look at problem solving from the bottom up: the formation of a new electricity cooperative that gives residents of the Fingerlakes the ability to lower costs and support the expansion of sustainable energy production, and a group involved in a multi year international effort to develop an alternative vision to the present plan of global corporate control.
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