The Energy Glut Climate Change and the Politics of Fatness

by Roberts, Ian; Edwards, Phil

• ISBN13: 9781848135178
• ISBN10: 1848135173
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-10-15
• Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Summary

World-wide, over a billion adults are overweight and 300 million are officially obese.The Energy Glutexpertly 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, andThe Energy Gluttakes expert first steps in this direction.

Author Biography

Ian Roberts is Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Fat people fat populations
We are what we eat but how much matters
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
Money makes the wheels go round
Reclaim our homes
Reclaim our streets
Cuba and the era of the bicycle
Contraction and convergence
A better world