VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Jan. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- President Bush is expected to make energy issues a prominent feature of his forthcoming State of the Union speech in which he may relax his 6-year long refusal to deal with global warming.
"Listing the polar bear as an endangered species is a signal that the problem of global warming is finally achieving greater visibility in the White House," said Julian Darley, Post Carbon Institute President. "Is the President finally ready to ask Americans to get serious about both sides of reducing C02 emissions: tough measures to cut our demand for oil, natural gas, and coal, coupled with a massive expansion of investment in renewable energy sources like wind and solar?"
Post Carbon Institute Fellow Richard Heinberg warned that we should be skeptical about what the president proposes: "Just because the president says some energy source is good doesn't make it good," Heinberg said. "For example, a big push for coal-to-oil technologies might eventually reduce petroleum imports, but it would only worsen the problem of global warming. And the nuclear power industry claims there are no CO2 emissions connected with nuclear power, which just isn't true if you take account of the processes of plant construction and fuel production. We can't forget the more than 50-year failure to dispose of nuclear waste, and uranium is getting more scarce and expensive. Since all of the energy supply alternatives have problems, we need much more focus on conservation"
Post Carbon Institute is a leading organization in research and public education on the implications of Peak Oil (and natural gas) and higher world oil prices, especially in relation to the related threat of global warming. The organization's Relocalization Network program hosts a grassroots network of 140 grassroots groups worldwide that work on reducing energy consumption and increasing local production of renewable energy.
Representatives of the Post Carbon Institute are available for comments and reactions to the energy proposals in the State of the Union.
Julian Darley, Post Carbon Institute President is the author of High Noon for Natural Gas: the New Energy Crisis (2004), and co-author of Relocalize Now! Getting Ready for Climate Change and the End of Cheap Oil (forthcoming in 2007) .He has appeared as a speaker at energy conferences in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Richard Heinberg is a Post Carbon Institute Fellow and faculty member at New College of California. Heinberg is the award-winning author of seven books dealing with global warming, oil depletion, and peak oil, including The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies; Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World; and The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism, and Economic Collapse. Since 2002, he has given over 200 lectures on oil depletion on four continents.
Post Carbon Institute
