Issue #0

The Energy Glut

climate change and the politics of fatness

Plot

World-wide, over a billion adults are overweight and 300 million are officially obese. The Energy Glut expertly tells the story of energy in society, and places 'fatness' next to climate change, 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 terrifying vision of humans besieged by a food industry that uses sophisticated marketing techniques to sell us mountains of energy-dense food whilst at the same time we are functionally paralyzed with fewer opportunities to move our bodies than ever before and that 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 world we first need to make sense of the systemic processes, and The Energy Glut takes expert first steps in this direction.