Welcome to Left Out, reality-based independent radio on WRCT 88.3FM, and on the worldwide web at leftout.info. Left Out discusses the news from a perspective left out of the mainstream media. Left Out is co-hosted by Bob Harper and Danny Sleator. Today's program is produced by Matt Hornyak. Listeners are invited to call the program at (412) 268-WRCT (9728), or to send email to bob@leftout.info.
Two important events coming up soon:
Codepink Pittsburgh and State Senator Jim Ferlo present an articles of impeachment teach-in and town hall meeting. Learn about The Center for Constitutional Rights' case for impeachment: why it is necessary, what's at stake, and what you can do about it.
Wednesday, July 19, 7pm - 9pm
Union Project - Grand Hall 801 N. Negley Avenue
Highland Park
ACLU Town Hall Meeting on Abuse of Power: Join the ACLU and your fellow citizens for a town hall meeting about the ongoing abuse of executive power - and what we can do to fight back. Panelists:
Greg Nojeim
Associate Director and Chief Legislative Council
ACLU Washington National OfficeDoug Shields
Pittsburgh City Councilman, Co-Sponsor of
anti-PATRIOT Act ResolutionThomas Farrell
Former U.S. Attorney, partner at Reich, Alexander, Reisinger and FarrellThursday, July 20th, 7 p.m.
First Unitarian Church
605 Morewood Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA
Today on Left Out we played a speech given early this year by Richard Heinberg. The speech was produced and distributed by Alternative Radio, and can be obtained here. Heinberg recently published The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, which is available in paperback from Amazon.com.
The following blurbs were copied from Amazon's listing of the book.
Richard Heinberg, from Santa Rosa, California, has been writing about energy resources issues and the dynamics of cultural change for many years. A member of the core faculty at New College of California, he is an award-winning author of three previous books. His Museletter was nominated for the Best Alternative Newsletter award by Utne in 1993.
Book Description:
The world is about to run out of cheap oil and change dramatically. Within the next few years, global production will peak. Thereafter, even if industrial societies begin to switch to alternative energy sources, they will have less net energy each year to do all the work essential to the survival of complex societies. We are entering a new era, as different from the industrial era as the latter was from medieval times.
In The Party's Over, Richard Heinberg places this momentous transition in historical context, showing how industrialism arose from the harnessing of fossil fuels, how competition to control access to oil shaped the geopolitics of the twentieth century and how contention for dwindling energy resources in the twenty-first century will lead to resource wars in the Middle East, Central Asia and South America. He describes the likely impacts of oil depletion and all of the energy alternatives. Predicting chaos unless the United States-the world's foremost oil consumer-is willing to join with other countries to implement a global program of resource conservation and sharing, he also recommends a "managed collapse" that might make way for a slower-paced, low-energy, sustainable society in the future.
More readable than other accounts of this issue, with fuller discussion of the context, social implications and recommendations for personal, community, national and global action, Heinberg's updated book is a riveting wake-up call for human-kind as the oil era winds down, and a critical tool for understanding and influencing current US foreign policy.
Here are links that Heinberg mentions during his talk: