Tara Lohan: The Coming Crash, Our Addiction to Endless

Growth on a finite planet. If you want to understand how much energy costs, don't look at your electric bill. Instead, get a copy of the new book, Energy, Over-development and the Delusion of Endless Growth. This massive coffee-table book, contains hundreds of arresting images, showing the effects of our energy choices, including oil spills, nuclear accidents, massive solar arrays, tar sands mines, fracking operations, transmission lines, and more. The photos are complemented by essays from leading writers, like Wes Jackson, Wendell Brown, and many others, which put into context our growing energy problems, and what we can do about them. The book is a collaboration of great minds, including editors Tom Butler and George Wuerthner, and contributing author Richard Heinberg. It's also a partnership between the Post Carbon Institute, and the Foundation for Deep Ecology, co-published by PCI and Watershed Media. While the book delves greatly into different energy sources, and their limitations, the heart of the book is really not so much about what kinds of energy we use, but how much. To get a clearer understanding of this, Alter-Net spoke with contributing writer Richard Heinberg, a senior fellow at PCI, and the author of numerous books, including The End of Growth: adapting to our New Economic Reality (June 2011), Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last Energy Crisis (2009) and Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (2007). Tara Lohan: How did this book project come about? I know it started out as a book about tar sands, but then it evolved into so much more. Richard Heinberg: The economy is all about energy. Almost all of our environmental issues relate to energy. Almost all of our environmental issues relate to energy in one way or another. Certainly, climate change does. War and peace, it's all about energy. Upping the energy literacy of the American people, and thought leaders is a pretty high priority. Explain a little bit more what you mean by energy literacy, because I know you talk about that in the book as well. RH: Well, surprisingly few people have really looked at or thought about, or studied what energy is. It's in all our lives. We all depend on it for everything we do, but energy is pretty elusive. You can't hold a jar of pure energy in your hands. Useful energy comes to us in various forms.