Energy, the Environment, and What We Can Do

Our heavy reliance on fossil fuels is causing two serious problems: global warming, and the decline of cheaply available oil reserves.

Unfortunately the second problem will not cancel out the first. Each one individually seems extremely hard to solve, and taken together they demand a major worldwide effort starting now.

After an overview of these problems, we turn to the question: what can we do about them?

Talks and Lectures You Might Also Like

Innovating to Zero

The American Denial of Global...

Personalized Energy

How to Green the World’s Deserts

wald0
This guy stutters and stumbles over his words quite a bit, and sounds bored with his own presentation at times. He has a lot of good solutions to talk about I think, and he has broken the numbers down in such a way as to really make the parameters of the issue at hand clear. The one thing i think he over looked though when he is talking about putting a higher price on fossil fuels is the effect it would have on the average person buying gasoline. People like myself that live in rural areas with no public transportation, don’t have much money to spend on a hybrid car or some new technology, and have to travel at least thirty miles round trip to even get groceries don’t have much choice but to use a gas operated car to survive. What am I to do when gas gets so expensive that I can not afford to live? Not to mention the effect higher gas prices have on the prices of food and other neccessities. Unless you offer people like myself an alternative means of getting from point a to point b higher gas prices will do nothing but bankrupt us.
http://twitter.com/hhv Heather
Dr. Baez’ blog, Azimuth, is the place to go for further insight, both into his interests, and into the science behind climate change. He is by training a mathematical physicist, well respected in both fields. This talk at Google was quite a technical challenge as well. All that aside, Dr. Baez is very astute, approachable, and an able educator. As with other talks here, I urge you to consider that it has not been edited, and is (obviously) not the same as seeing him actually giving the talk to an audience.
@wald0, you can find Dr. Baez on G+ to ask him for his thoughts on those issues, and I encourage you to do so – they are valid ones of which I would enjoy discussion.