Climate Change meets Peak Oil
mega-problems needing local bottom-up solutions
JEREMY LEGGETT speaks, Monday 4 June, 7.30pm, Assembly Room, Lambeth Town Hall.
Outside the current White House and a dwindling band of
contrarians who have now lost even their funding from ExxonMobil, climate change
is perceived as a dire threat, Many at the top of the business world now accept
it can wreck the global economy if left unmitigated.
Peak oil – the prospect of
an unexpected topping point in global oil production within the next few years –
is a related but different problem. Only a minority, though a growing and
authoritative one, believe it is a significant threat. If they are right,
however, this problem is also capable of wrecking the global economy, so
oil-addicted have we allowed it to be become.
The interesting thing is that both
mega-problems have the same solutions: a fundamental transformation of the way
the world uses energy, and a global mobilisation of a kind for which we have no
remotely similar precedent. Will it happen, or are such thoughts
delusional? Much will depend on the proactive actions 
of
communities.
Jeremy Leggett is the author of The Carbon Wars and Half Gone and is the director of solarcentury, the country's biggest suppliers of solar panels, based in Waterloo.
We have copies of Half Gone – oil, gas, hot air and the global energy crisis, normally
