Richard Heinberg: “The Quest” For Truth

Dec 13, 2012 1:40 PM ET
Richard Heinberg

Audio File

Last year, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and energy consultant Daniel Yergin published his long-awaited sequel to the The Prize called The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. The New York Times called this follow-up “even better… than the first. It is searching, impartial and alarmingly up to date.” The Prize provides readers with an overview of the modern energy industry and posits that peak oil, the premise that the world’s oil supply is being rapidly depleted, is an out-dated theory and that with new discoveries in shale gas, we’ve instead reached a comfortable plateau when it comes to ferreting out fossil fuels from the ground.

 

This week’s guest on Sea Change Radio, Richard Heinberg, an author, a senior fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute and a leading environmentalist, fundamentally disagrees with many of Dr. Yergin’s ideas. And while both The Prize and The Quest are certainly recommended reading for Sea Change Radio listeners, Mr. Heinberg and host Alex Wise discuss why Dr. Yergin’s view of reality differs so greatly from his own.