The Energy Glut

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 worldA" we first need to make sense of the systemic processes, and The Energy Glut takes expert first steps in this direction.

ISBN 1848135181   Pages 208 ISBN13 9781848135185 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 227 Publisher Zed Books Ltd   Published in London Imprint Zed Books Ltd   Height (mm) 198 Format Paperback   Width (mm) 129 Publication date 16 Sep 2010   Spine width (mm) 15 DEWEY 363.7   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

		Introduction: The fat planet		1
1		Fat people and fat populations		10
2		The motorization of movement		26
3		Food and the petro-nutritional complex		48
4		Money		66
5		Contract and converge		89
6		The era of the bicycle		101
7		Reclaiming our neighbourhoods		117
8		Reclaim your home		132
9		A better world		147
		References		167
		Index		176

'Ian Roberts presents a refreshingly novel and objective look at two of the biggest Public Health challenges of this century - obesity and climate change - and the inescapable link between them. No longer is obesity a "lifestyle condition" or a problem of greedy, sloth couch potatoes. It is an inevitable consequence of our globally oil-dependent society. Read on and you should be convinced enough to reclaim your life... and your planet' - Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, MD, President, Royal College of Physicians

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