Politics

John Bunzl is the founder of the International Simultaneous Policy Organization (ISPO). He spoke to GPM's Dave Room about Simultaneous Policy and how it could be used to address global scale problems that cannot effectively be dealt with on a national basis.

Pat Murphy of Community Solution talks on camera with GPM's David Room about Agraria, the community solution to peak oil. Also discussed is how Cuba survived peak oil and how their experience will compare with that of the United States.

"Sweden is to take the biggest energy step of any advanced western economy by trying to wean itself off oil completely within 15 years - without building a new generation of nuclear power stations."

The notion that Iraq was invaded to prevent the development of weapons of mass destruction, or to combat terrorism, has long been discredited. But a growing consensus believes that Iraq’s oil was surely a prime reason for US actions. However, author William Clark argues convincingly in Petrodollar Warfare that the rationale for intervening was not just for control of the oil fields, but also for control of the means by which oil is traded in global markets.

UK Comedian Robert Newman talks to GPM's David Room about America, peak oil and comedy.

"Every fall, BusinessWeek polls economists and investment firms for their estimates of how the American economy will do the following year. It then tabulates a consensus forecast based on the mean for each economic data category. Just for the fun of it, I did my own projection of GDP, unemployment, inflation, the price of oil, and a number of other economic statistics for 2005. The results were published in January of 2005... Most of my readers believed my scenarios were much too pessimistic. As it turns out, my forecast was too optimistic. And that raises a big red flag for the world economy."

Jason Bradford, host of "The Party's Over" on KZYX-FM in Mendocino, CA, talks to Brian Czech, President of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy and author of "Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train."

Edward Schreyer, former Governor General of Canada and current NDP candidate in Manitoba, speaks candidly about the energy crisis and his return to politics with GPM's David Room.

"This is a matter of imminent emergency and necessity, to get on with the job of putting in place wind turbines, hydroelectric turbines and biodiesel plants... ethanol too, for that matter. And all this we have to do increasingly, and we have to get on with it... we have spun our tires these past 8 years now with the Kyoto protocol. The government of Canada has apparently got some kind of self satisfation out of saying it signed on... I keep asking after a thousand and one press releases, what has actually eventuated in the building of anything- and the answer is virtually nothing. In fact we've gone from bad to worse with natural gas consumption, and depletion therefore, of natural gas and oil."

Robert Hirsch, PhD and senior energy program advisor at Science Applications International Corp (SAIC), on peak oil: "This problem is truly frightening. This problem is like nothing that I have ever seen in my lifetime, and the more you think about it and the more you look at the numbers, the more uneasy any observer gets. It's so easy to sound alarmist, and I fear that part of what I'm saying may sound alarmist, but there simply is no question that the risks here are beyond anything that any of us have ever dealt with. And the risks to our economies and our civilization are enormous."

Just after the Congressional hearing on peak oil, Congressman Tom Udall (D-NM) talks with David Room of Global Public Media on the topics of natural gas and oil depletion and global warming, suggesting a cap-and-trade program to combat the problems.