Show Notes
Climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, poverty, and inequality are all symptoms of one overarching problem: the way we humans accumulate and use power. If we want to address this problem and reduce the chances of a chaotic collapse of society, we will have to confront our overuse and abuse of power. But first we’ll need to define power (both physical and social) and learn how energy flows through ecosystems and human society. Take a tour of these topics with succinct explanations from renowned energy and sustainability expert, Richard Heinberg, and clarifying stories that feature airplane flights, wrecking balls, charismatic leaders, and other seats of power. For more information, please visit our website.
Transcript
Melody Travers
Welcome to Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. In this series, we explore the hidden driver behind the crises that are upending societies and disrupting the life support systems of the planet. That hidden driver is power, or pursuit of it, or overuse of it, and our abuse of it. I’m your host Melody Travers.
Rob Dietz
And I’m Rob Dietz, your copilot and the Program Director at Post Carbon Institute.
Melody Travers
Join us as we explore power and why giving it up just might save us. Rob, Have I ever told you about the first time I remember flying?
Rob Dietz
No, Lay it on me.
Melody Travers
Well, I was six years old, and young. I don’t even know if it’s the first time I flew. But it’s my first memory. And I know it’s my memory because I was alone. I got all dressed up. And I had a plastic tag around my neck that alerted staff that I was alone. And the flight attendants gave me all the special attention and a little airplane pin that I prize. And they brought me up to the cockpit and I met the pilots. And I remember just staring in awe at all of those buttons.
Rob Dietz
You just wanted to mash all of them, didn’t you?
Melody Travers
Yeah, I did. But I also I felt like I was in this kind of sacred space. I think they asked me if I wanted to touch something. And I was like, no, it’s okay. Like, I didn’t want to screw anything up. And then I remember the moment that the plane took off, and my body was suddenly pressed against my seat. And I started seeing the city below me get smaller and smaller and smaller. And we flew through some clouds, which at the time I really thought were cotton candy. And I was like, Oh my gosh, if I could just stick my head out there, I could get some. And after just two hours of staring out the window we landed and I ran out and my grandma was there at the airport waiting for me. And suddenly she didn’t live across the country, she lived two hours away. And that moment of realizing, well, I didn’t know anything about technology or energy or anything like that but I knew that this airplane was powerful.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, that’s a sweet story. I actually had a really similar experience. My parents were probably at their wit’s end and threw me on an airplane to go visit my aunt alone. Yeah, same deal. They gave me the little pin. But I don’t remember any of that stuff like you’ve got about the power of the plane and like getting mashed into the seat. What I remember is being anxious. And taking a pair of swim goggles with me because I wanted to look like a World War One pilot and wear the little goggles and pretend like I was flying the plane. But like I said, I don’t recall feeling like, “Oh, this piece of machinery is super powerful.” But you know, on the subject of power, I do remember sensing something really powerful. And it was around the time that I first moved to Corvallis, Oregon, which is a pretty small town. And this was back in 2007. And if you remember in 2008, that was the year that President Obama came into office. Well, in the lead up to that there was a big primary battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton. And I guess Oregon was a swing state at the time. So both candidates were campaigning all around the state. And Hillary didn’t come to Corvallis. At least not that I remember, but she sent Bill Clinton to Corvallis. And I actually remember taking my daughter, who at the time was not yet in kindergarten. She was probably three years old, to go see Bill Clinton speak behind the elementary school standing in the bed of a pickup truck.
Melody Travers
Oh my gosh. Oh, so he was right there.
Rob Dietz
Right there. Yeah, I could have probably run up and… well, I probably would have been shot but I could have run up and you know, smacked him in the face or high fived him or you know, whatever I wanted to do. But yeah, it was really amazing. You could get a real sense of how powerful these people were just by the crowd reaction and the there’s kind of like an electricity in the air even though you know, obviously there’s nothing, no electricity actually flowing. You just sense it. And so yeah, this is kind of like what happens when someone super charismatic comes along.
Melody Travers
Yeah, I think that those are good examples of power. But I’ve been wondering like, is there such thing as too much power? And of course, we’ve heard crazy stories about the late dictator of Turkmenistan. Okay, I’m gonna try to pronounce his name. Saparmurat Niyazov that was,
Rob Dietz
That’s exactly how I’ve heard it, okay, yeah, the 1000s of times…
Melody Travers
My accent was right on. Nailed it. Anyway, but he decreed that his face needed to appear everywhere. So every clock, every wristwatch, I think there was like a giant gold statue of him. Definitely, like a megalomaniac. But, you know, he used his power that way. I would say that’s maybe at the point of too much power.
Rob Dietz
Slightly self-centered, I guess.
Melody Travers
Yeah. And then there’s physical systems, right. So when there’s raw power flowing in the electrically charged system, in the clouds, we get lightning striking thunder, it can be really destructive.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Well, I don’t know about you. I feel like I see it all around me. I’m not sure I think about it in these terms of maybe too much power. But now that you’re talking about it, and it feels that way, like, for me, probably one of the biggest markers of us overexploiting would be when you look at what’s happening to biodiversity and the way that humanity’s way of living on this earth, where we’re basically taking away opportunities from all the other species. So yeah, I mean, everywhere you go, you can see these effects. And I don’t know… it kind of reminds me of that quote, I don’t know who said it, but you’ve got that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So you have to wonder, yeah, maybe humanity’s heading towards that absolute end of the scale.
Melody Travers
Yeah. Okay. We’ve been talking about power. Obviously, this podcast is about power. Um, I think we have an intuitive understanding of what power is, but how would you define power?
Rob Dietz
Oh, well, yeah, don’t put me on the spot or anything. Because I’m a physics guru. Actually, I have some engineering in my background. So it’s kind of embarrassing. I don’t think I can give you a good technical definition. Like if I think of power, you can think of everyday stuff like, oh that muscle car is powerful, or what’s that guy, Hafthor Bjornsen? He’s able to deadlift over 1000 pounds. Like, that’s some power for a human or… Oh, I’m thinking of like… I remember one time I was walking down the street, and there was this really amazing scene of a wrecking a building. And they were actually doing it from above. So it was weird, the walls were already off. And in this big crane would lift a wrecking ball way up in the air way above the top of the building, and then it would drop it. And it would bash through the floors in this building. And I just stood there in awe of how much power this this wrecking ball had and like sparks would fly off when it hit and all this debris would go fall it was I was there for an hour just watching the demolition of this building.
Melody Travers
I remember spending hours and hours and hours building sand castles as a kid. And the best part was stomping them. Right from above.
Rob Dietz
You were the wrecking ball.
Melody Travers
I was the wrecking ball.
Rob Dietz
I’m sorry. Again, this isn’t definition. It’s more like you know it when you see it. But I was just a little kid when Mount St. Helens erupted. And I wasn’t part of the scene. But when you look at photos of that, and read the stats of what happened, and it’s just like, it is awesome how much power that volcano released in a very, very short timeframe.
Melody Travers
Yeah, and I think what’s kind of remarkable is that I don’t think it’s just a trick of our language. But there were so many different types of power examples. And so I think, I think that’s where I struggle with the definition right? How do we equate mountain St. Helen, with seeing, you know, Bill Clinton in the back of a pickup and, you know, flying and, you know, that’s natural, that’s social, that’s technological like what? What is that thread -that defining quality that makes something power or powerful?
Rob Dietz
Yeah, well, I don’t know about you, but my typical way of going about answering something like that is to find somebody smarter than I am.
Melody Travers
Thank you for the layup, Rob. Yes, to start this journey into what power is, we definitely need an expert to get us on some common ground. And so I’m going to talk to our in house expert on power, Richard Heinberg. So, stay with us. Richard Heinberg is one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of fossil fuels and a respected advocate for the shift to a renewable energy economy. He’s an accomplished author of 13 books, including power limits and prospects for human survival on which this podcast is based. I was first introduced to Richard through post carbon Institute’s Think Resilience course. This free online course is designed to help people start doing something about climate change in their own communities. I was immediately struck by his ability to break down complex, nuanced topics and explain them in accessible, digestible ways. Little did I know that we would have so many passions in common, including our great love for classical music, exploring big questions and raising hens. I’m so excited for the opportunity to pick his big brain throughout this series.
Melody Travers
Hi, Richard. Hi, Melody. So Rob and I were just talking about power, the technological power of flight, the charismatic power of politicians. We even talked about charged particles creating lightning. And yeah, we had all of these examples, this intuitive knowledge of what power is, but we really struggled to concretely define it. And so I was wondering if we could start very basic, with some definitions of what power is, what binds all of those things together?
Richard Heinberg
Sure, yeah. Well, in English, the word power has to do a lot of work in some other languages, there are different words for different aspects of what we call power. But in English, it’s all one thing. And in some ways that’s confusing and in some ways, it actually I think, is helpful in seeing the connections between things. I mean, at the most basic physical level, power is, well, a physicist would define it as the rate of transfer of energy. And that sounds technical, but it’s like really important and really, really basic, because energy is everywhere. It’s in everything we do everything we experience. So we can measure the rate of energy transfer in, for example, watts. Like, how many watts is your computer? Or how many watts is your…
Melody Travers
Lightbulb?
Richard Heinberg
Electric car? Yeah. Or with horsepower, you know, we talk about cars having so many horsepower, well, that is it, that is a measure of the rate at which you can transfer the energy in gasoline into motive power of the car, of course, actually, that you’re losing some of that energy to heat and tires, rubbing against pavement, and so on friction. But nevertheless, the basic concept is there and it’s pretty simple. But we use energy to do things like with the car, or the light bulb, you know, we expect to get some service out of the energy that we’re using. So we often use the word power to describe the ability to do something like the power of flight or the power of thought, or the power of speech or something like that. And that’s really, in many ways, the most intuitive and basic definition.
Melody Travers
So you said the transfer of energy to so if I can think back to high school physics, energy doesn’t disappear. It just changes form. Is that correct?
Richard Heinberg
Yeah it’s when we’re doing something with energy, that we notice it that it makes a difference. You know, if energy is being stored, then you can measure that energy in other ways. But when it’s actually doing something, that’s when we start talking about power. But you know, that’s not how we normally use the word power, in its kind of every day conversation. Usually when we talk about power, we’re talking about social power. So if, if power is the ability to do something, social power, is the ability to get somebody else to do something. And in history, we’ve found ways of obtaining more and more social power, ways of getting other people to do things and one of the main tools of social power is money. You know, if you have enough money, you can get other people to do all kinds of things. But that’s just one of the primary tools of social power. Another is weapons. And still another is communication technologies that we use to communicate with sometimes millions of people at the same time. And using psychology, social psychology, it’s possible to design messages to change other people’s thinking, to get them to do things. One example of that, that’s everywhere around us is advertising. You know, we’re trying to get other people to buy a particular product. And so millions of people spend their work lives trying to craft messages, to get other people to do specific things along those lines.
Melody Travers
Yes, but this note that has been coming up on my phone alerting me if you want this life, this is the thing. This is how you should use your purchasing power. And there’s a lot in the American society, as a consumer society, that you are what you buy.
Richard Heinberg
Yep. So these two kinds of power, the physical power, the ability to do something using energy, and social power, the ability to influence other people. In some ways, they’re two different things. But I think it’s also important to understand that they’re connected, you know, we don’t have social power, without the power of energy and energy transfer, it all really comes back to I mean, ultimately, it comes back to ourselves, and how they’re deriving energy from the environment and how they channeled that energy, all the way up through evolution, to where we are today.
Melody Travers
Yeah, I think at this time, looking at the physics and physical type of power and the connection to weapons really makes sense to me, you know, forcing somebody to do something because of a physical threat, and that fear of transference of energy, right? That they’ll use their physical power against you. But what’s so weird about human beings is that we live now in I think, one of the least violent times from a weapons and war perspective. But we have transferred some of that power into a different type of violence or a different type of manipulation, which I think really started with the Cold War, right? We were like, oh, nuclear power, okay, that’s too far, we don’t want to do that. So then people had to come up with other ways to get people to do things. And now, like you said, with money with media, social media is a new, you know, it’s just a new form of media, but we just keep evolving different ways to express that power.
Richard Heinberg
Right. Yeah, we’re power junkies, you know, and we’re not unique in that regard. Other organisms seek to get power as well. But we humans have found so many ways of getting and using power to get what we want. And in some ways that makes us just a marvel of evolution. And I think we’re, you know, we’re justifiably proud of ourselves and in terms of our amazing abilities to do things, you know, landing spacecraft on other planets, and, you know, figuring out the origin of the universe and power of mathematics, the power of ideas, the power of artistic creation, you know, we’re, we’re amazing. But at the same time, we’ve got all these power dilemmas. And that’s what I, you know, that’s what really led me to write the book.
Melody Travers
That’s a perfect transition, because I was wondering, okay, so we talked about all these different types of power I can hear the passion in your voice. But on this journey, what did you feel like was missing from the literature? Or what were the questions that you were exploring that you felt like? These have not been fully explored or really answered by other thinkers?
Richard Heinberg
Well, to me, it really all comes down to three really, really fundamental basic questions. And I’ve spent my whole adult life thinking about and trying to understand the questions themselves and what the answers might be. And well, let me jump in question number one: how has homo sapiens… You know, we’re just one species out of millions on this planet. But how have we become powerful enough to disrupt the Earth’s climate, and to threaten the mass extinction of all these other species? I mean, that’s some sizable power. There’s no other organism on the planet that can claim the ability to do the kinds of things that we’re doing. So how has this happened? And this turns out to be a story of evolution, of how we’ve developed the ability to command more and more physical power using tools, using energy sources other than food I mean, other organisms don’t they don’t even make bonfires, you know, much less use fossil fuels, or all the other amazingly complicated and, and virtuosic ways we have of capturing and using energy. But social power also has its role to play in how we have become so powerful as to basically change the planet, because social power enables us to work together. And so instead of just a few human beings scattered across the surface of the Earth, each working independently to get as much food and living spaces they could, we have millions, billions now of human beings working together in complex social systems that enable us to, you know, build economic systems and technological systems that can transform raw materials into consumer products into a food system, a transportation system and all the rest. Other organisms can’t do that. Not just because they don’t have the physical power, but also in most cases, they don’t have the social power, either.
Melody Travers
Yeah, this question has been haunting me as well. I’ve been involved in sustainability for many years now. And I have a really great relationship with my grandfather. And I said, you know, years ago, I’m getting into sustainability. And he didn’t really know what that was. And I said, you know, human beings are changing the climate and something where he’s really come around is, you know, at the beginning, he said, I’m not sure about this whole climate change thing. You know, he’s a skeptic. So in a way, he’s a very smart man. But he goes, you know, I’m skeptical that it’s really changing. Maybe this is just a phase. And then, you know, years and years have gone by and, and he goes, Okay, well, now, I think the climate is changing, but I’m just not sure that human beings have anything to do with it. And so for me, I thought, okay, this is some progress. But it’s been a real challenge to point to the right things to explain the right things to say, not only is this happening, but I think human beings are the catalysts for this. And I think that’s a major leap for a lot of people because in some ways, we have a lot of hubris as human beings, but it also feels like a lot of hubris to even think that we could have that impact. But I always try to point to these examples. I go, you know, grandpa, he grew up on Long Island, and they had great clams there. And as a kid, he would go clamming, you could just go out and pick up clams or oysters. And he told me the story of at one point, they needed sand. Somebody needed sand, and they got the rights to dredge the sand near his home. And they dredged all the sand but they also dredged all of the clams. And I go grandpa, remember, you told me that story. Human beings did this, and there’s no clams anymore?
Richard Heinberg
Yeah. And that’s happening everywhere. You know, I mean, even if you take climate change off the table, there have been some studies just in the last few years of just how many birds there are in the world, compared to observations maybe 50 years ago, or how many insects and you know, we’ve reduced the numbers of nonhuman animals by something like 60, 70% in the last 50 years. I mean, that’s extraordinary. And you look for the causes of that and they all come back to human beings, whether it’s pesticides or land use or climate change plays a role in that. But again, even if you take climate change out of the discussion, we are having an enormous impact on the rest of the biosphere. You just can’t get away from it.
Melody Travers
Ah, yeah. Okay. So that’s a big topic. People, I think, dive deeply into for the rest of the series. The last thing I wanted to say about that question, and the way that you phrased it, that really struck me was picking out you know, not human beings, not people, but saying Homo sapiens, right, like we really are just one species, we are one animal, and I think the whole western tradition has been about, we are rational. And so we are different. We are not governed by our impulses. We know what we’re doing.
Richard Heinberg
And we were a special creation. Yes, the deity, like where God created the plants and animals. And then he created Adam and Eve, you know, so we are just in a completely different category from all these other organisms. You know, if you do that, it makes it harder to understand where these special abilities that we have where they came from, because it’s really only in the context of evolution that any of this makes sense.
Melody Travers
What was your second burning question?
Richard Heinberg
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Second burning question. Okay. So why have we human beings developed so many ways of oppressing and exploiting one another? Okay. So, like I said, earlier, when we use the word power, in ordinary conversation, usually we’re talking about social power, you know, some people are just super famous, they’re like trendsetters, and that’s a certain kind of social power, or certain people are really, really rich, like Jeff Bezos, or somebody like that, who has hundreds of billions of dollars, I mean, you know, as more money than a million people could use over the course of a lifetime. Just incredible amounts of wealth. And then other people can command perception, they’re masters at using communication technologies, or shaping public opinion, through writing or imagery or the use of communication technologies. These are different forms of social power. And in some ways, you know, we stand in awe of people with a lot of social power. And in other ways, we’re constantly convetching about how they have too much power. And we’re really wary of people who have too much power. I mean, you look back in history at totalitarian leaders like Hitler and Stalin, and people like that, who had, you know, absolute social power. And, you know, we don’t want that to happen again, that’s really scary stuff. Or we think it’s really unfair, that some people have so much wealth when other people are so, so poor, that they’re maybe even at the point of starvation. So social power is as a source of a lot of questions, but I just summed it up in this one in this one question, why, and how have we developed more than any other creature on the planet, these ways of oppressing and exploiting each other?
Melody Travers
Those were great examples. I was also thinking about how that was kind of on an individual level, you know, these individuals with great power. But I think there’s also an end you talk about this in the book, the sort of structural power, and the way that we structure power relationships, and for kind of a dumb example, but anybody who’s been an intern, at not a great company, you know, hopefully your interns learn a lot. But my friend, when she graduated college, she got this super great internship. I won’t say the company, it was very competitive. And she spent weeks running around New York City delivering packages. And she goes, what do you guys do when you don’t have interns to deliver this stuff? And they go, oh, we just use couriers. And she was like, what? Why am I here and she quit the internship. That’s what was supposed to be a really positive thing for her. And again, this is like a very small example of exploitation but the principle of an internship is to educate the people that will someday be working there, to help them grow and evolve into their careers and I just thought, what a terrible way to exploit a 20 year old who’s trying to start their life.
Richard Heinberg
You know, our modern way of life is full of conveniences. And of course, some of us enjoy more of those conveniences than others. But chances are anybody who’s listening to this podcast right now have at least the technology to be able to do that with whether it’s a computer or smartphone or whatever. And, you know, just take that object and start to trace it back to where it came from, how were the resources extracted, who transformed those resources into sub-assemblies, and who put those sub-assemblies together in the finished product, and who sold it, who designed it. And there’s systemic exploitation, economic exploitation, embedded at pretty much every stage of that whole process. And that’s just one example. But look around us, and it’s everywhere, systematic exploitation of other human beings. I mean, it’s not unique in nature, my wife and I have chickens, and they’re just a tiny flock of chickens, you know. And they have a little hierarchy, they have a pecking order, right? Where one chicken is at the top of the pecking order. And she can peck the others, and another chicken, who’s at the bottom of the pecking order, and anybody can peck her. So you know, there’s a lot of indignity and poor Mimi, who’s at the bottom of the pecking order, even though she’s this wonderful chicken, you know, she has to live with this. But compared to what human beings do to each other, this is insignificant, this level of exploitation, we human beings have taken this kind of hierarchical way of organizing ourselves that exists in other places in nature. But we’ve taken that, and we’ve developed it to an art form to an extreme that has never been seen before, anywhere in nature.
Melody Travers
Okay, so we’ll dive into that in this podcast, the heavy topic, but I think a really, really, really important one. And to lay out a little bit of hope, I think, in the why are we doing this, we’re talking about it, to look at the problem in the face. But also, I think in there is the assumption that this is one way that we’ve been operating, but it’s not the only way. So I want to talk to you a lot more about how we might change course.
Richard Heinberg
Well, that gets us to our third question, which in some ways is the most important one. And that is, is it possible for us to change our relationship to power in order to avert you know what looks right now, like it could be an ecological catastrophe, this century of unprecedented scope, and at the same time, reduce the kinds of social inequality that we were just talking about, which, again, are leading us to a kind of social precipice where we’re looking at the possibility of political economic collapse. Again, this century, you know, things are not going well, for us human beings right now, if you really zoom out and take a take a good look. So how do we, is it even possible to change our relationship with power? I mean, this is a serious question. There are a lot of people who are pretty cynical about how things are going. And they say, well, we human beings are just power crazy. And there’s nothing that will turn us away from wanting more and more power. So we’re just destined to hit the wall, there is no way we’re going to scale back our carbon emissions or do something to reduce economic inequality, if that means taking money away from billionaires, it’s just not going to happen. Well, is that true? I wanted to test that and see, does it happen elsewhere in nature, that species find ways of limiting their own power so that they can persist longer and avoid collapse of their ecosystems or their populations and whatever? So that’s, in some ways, that’s the most important question that I address in the book.
Melody Travers
Yeah, that gets down to it. And I want to get into those examples of other species because I think human beings like to what is it it’s like selective referencing you know, we’re, we’re just animals when it’s our will to power or whatever, but we’re not just animals when it’s something that doesn’t go with our ideas about ourselves. I think going forward looking at those motivations, are we just motivated by power? I guess is my other question.
Richard Heinberg
Yeah. Well, certainly we are.
Melody Travers
What else are we motivated by? Might we have other values? Exactly, yeah, even more motivating, right?
Richard Heinberg
So seeing some of the context, in terms of how we came to this precipice, you know, in where we are now in the 21st century. And then looking at that, in the broader biological context, I think that can be really useful. And seeing these crises that whether it’s climate change, or economic inequality, seeing these as problems of power, and then looking at how power works, how social power works, how physical power works, I think it’s helpful in suggesting maybe some common strategies for dealing with these problems. If in fact, these are problems with power, and I’m willing to make a pretty strong argument that they are, then shouldn’t we try to understand power better? When I first started looking into power, I realized, even though I’ve been thinking about it for years, I hadn’t been thinking about it very clearly, or very systematically. I think if we do that, a lot of things become clearer. And it becomes easier to see, well, you know, if we’re going to solve these problems, these are the kinds of things we’re going to have to do.
Melody Travers
Yeah, and I think in this series, we’ll be exploring these things again, and in that systematic way that you were talking about, and for me, at least reading your book, and the conversations to get this series going. And I’m sure we’ll learn a lot more along the way, this information has really shifted the way that I look at the world. And I believe that if more people understood it, we might all have a better chance of, you know, surviving or, you know, hopefully thriving. Yeah, I think, to me, it seems like a lot of our values are just out of whack. Those hierarchies of power, who has power, what the drives are, that are precipitating these crises, it doesn’t seem to be making the most amount of people happy, give people time with their friends and family, get them the opportunity to create beautiful things. And when I talk to my friends, when I talk to my family, those are the things where their eyes light up -shouldn’t those be the things that we that we put our energies towards. And perhaps there’s a way to shift towards that; the power to commune, to be with each other.
Richard Heinberg
Power is a good thing. It’s not that power is a terrible thing. But it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. And so it’s important to be able to see when there’s too much power in a system, and then to know what to do about it. And I’m hoping that the book and this podcast will help us do that.
Melody Travers
Me too. Thank you so much Richard. I’m so excited for our next conversation.
Richard Heinberg
Me too, Melody.
Melody Travers
Power is everywhere. Take a few minutes to notice your surroundings. Are you in a climate controlled environment? Did you eat something today from a different corner of the globe? Look around at the objects around you. How did they get there? Take a few seconds to recognize and appreciate the power surging all around you. Notice. We will leave you with a reminder that we are not alone on this planet. Here is the great orchestra in my urban backyard (Sound of aircraft getting louder.) Oh here comes an airplane.
For a more in depth account of the genesis, evolution, and adaptations of power, check out Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival at your local library, or get a personal copy to scribble in the margins. But beware, you can’t unsee humanity knocking hard against our limits to growth on this finite planet. Are you ready to confront power?
This podcast is hosted and produced by me, Melody Travers and Rob Dietz. Richard Heinberg is our resident expert. The music is by Robert Labaree, Special thanks to Clara Winter. This is a program of Post Carbon Institute. Learn more at postcarbon.org.
