“We’re fighting our own war against terrorism. They’re fighting a war to accumulate enough resources so that they can live through the next century with a new kind of energy system,” reveals Stephen Leeb, author of Red Alert: How China’s Growing Prosperity Threatens the American Way of Life.  In this episode of Radio Free Dylan, Stephen describes the ever-growing political and economic power of China, and how their wind, solar and renewable energy development is leaving other countries – especially the United States — in the dust.

“China is spending all the money they possibly can to create and better those particular industries and they’re creating a lot of jobs in the process… The two critical renewable alternative energy industries on this planet are wind and solar and both of them, China has a hammerlock,” says Stephen. “They’re in a war to acquire resources, not just for the sake of depriving the rest of the world of these resources, but to have the resources that they need to build out a new energy infrastructure.”

The United States, he says, will be left playing catch up unless we make a dramatic push for redesigning our national energy infrastructure, affecting not only how we power our country, but our financial and economic future as well.

“We spend a lot of time talking about how we can reduce debt in this country and I think that that’s a very good discussion.  But at the end of the Second World War, we had government debt as a percent of GDP was greater than it is today, but what’s the difference?  The difference was that at the end of the Second World War, perhaps inadvertently, we had created, in order to win that war, we had created an infrastructure that allowed the United States a generation of great economic growth,” says Stephen.

So what’s the solution?  Dylan brings up the theory of “quantum growth” and how it could apply to our energy challenges.  As he puts it, quantum growth is “how insufficient resources can be used for significantly higher outputs, simply by focusing people and technology to solve problems by having a singular, aligned interest.”

As Dylan explains, “in the case of energy, our efficiency is at 34%.  We can reduce our energy dependence without changing our fuel sourcing at all.  And the benefits of reducing our energy use is a defunding of the Middle East, and fifteen other things are affected by it.”

So, what would Stephen like have our elected leaders do?  “I would love someone to get up there and say, “Guys, for the sake of our national security or America… and the income levels and the well-being of your children and grandchildren, this is what we have to do.  We’re in a war today with China.  We don’t know about it.  They do know about it.  And they’re doing everything they can to beat us… We can do at least this well if not better.  We have proved that through history.  We have the greatest country that this world has ever seen.  It would be just tragic to blow it.  So, let’s get, let’s get to work.”

Meg Robertson is a digital producer for DylanRatigan.com.