Dr Ian Roberts: 'The Energy Glut' in six minutes

Filmed at The Bright club - At the Wilmington Arms, Rosebery Avenue.
http://www.brightclub.org/
The Energy Glut is published by Zed books • http://zed-books.blogspot.com/2010/08/energy-glut-politics-of-fatness-in.html




World-wide, over a billion adults are overweight and 300 million are officially "obese", more than 3,000 people die every day on the world's roads and global warming and war threaten our survival as a species.

The Energy Glut tells the story of energy and how our abuse of fossil fuel energy links all of these public issues as manifestations of the same fundamental planetary malaise. This exciting new book argues that the pulse of fossil fuel energy released from the ground after the discovery of oil not only started the process of catastrophic climate change, but also propelled the average human weight distribution upwards.

The author presents a frightening vision of humans besieged by a food industry that uses sophisticated marketing techniques to sell mountains of energy-dense food to those who are "functionally paralysed", with fewer opportunities to move our bodies than ever before.

We see why the accumulation of body fat is a political, not a personal, problem. This insightful new work offers and appraises for the reader a set of personal and political de-carbonising strategies, but to "tread more lightly on our world" we first need to make sense of the systemic processes, and The Energy Glut takes expert first steps in this direction.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• energy
• glut
• obesity
• oil
• car
• traffic
• pollution
• climate
• change
• carbon

[bejw88]

Humour almost as bad as mine, but an excellent book - very easy to read, controversial ideas powerfully put that, as Dr Roberts says, you won't hear in the media or from our politicians.