"The Second Half of the Age of Oil now dawns ... it is a devastating development because it implies that the oil-based economy is in permanent terminal decline, removing the confidence in perpetual growth on which the Financial System depends ... This in turns leads to the conclusion that the World faces another Great Depression." - Colin Campbell, 2007

Could we be heading towards economic meltdown in the face of the triple challenges of the credit crunch, climate crunch and energy crunch?

A new group calling itself The Green New Deal has put forward a policy package that aims to address this triple crunch. Their inaugural report looks at how the UK and US recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s and also draws important lessons from Britain's Wolrd War II experience, oil-crunched Cuba in the 1990s, as well as the New Economics Foundation (nef)'s work on well-being.

Could The Green New Deal form the basis for a broad new alliance outside the traditional party structures that would bring the financial sector back under proper control, create jobs and lay the foundations of a new low carbon society?

We dedicate this week's programme to an interview with one of the report's authors, Andrew Simms, who is also policy director of nef.

The Green New Deal can be downloaded from www.neweconomics.org

The other members of The Green New Deal team currently include The Guardian newspaper economics editor Larry Elliott, former head of the Jubilee 2000 debt relief campaign Ann Pettifor, former directors of Friends of the Earth Tony Juniper and Charles Secrett, Chairman of Solar Century Jeremy Leggett, co-director of Finance for the Future and Director of Tax Research LLP Richard Murphy and Green Party members Colin Hines and Caroline Lucas MEP.