Be it solar panels or biofuels, everybody has their own favorite solutions for fixing the climate which are invariably based on new technologies that are "almost here". But greenhouse emissions need to be reduced substantially now! How can we get the quickest and biggest bang for our buck in reducing emissions? With new “supply-side” technologies to provide more energy, or by targeting grimy fossil-fuel power plants which run our society? What is greener: an electric car speeding down on the turnpike, or the power plant in the stinking refinery complex next to the turnpike near Newark airport?
In this seminar, we will first get past the level of most media energy pundits by understanding the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour. Then we will cut through the groupthink and analytically evaluate pluses and minuses of various energy solutions and policy proposals. We will also figure out why the most efficient transport from New Brunswick to Washington DC is also the cheapest (it is not Amtrak), why Europeans guzzle only half as much energy as we do in the US (it is not because the US is a large country), and why hitching our wagon to specific climate solutions is hazardous to the climate.
About Sunil Somalwar
Prof. Sunil Somalwar does experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland to understand what our universe looked like right after its big-bang origin. That elegant universe somehow led to the present-day environmental mess. So he peddles, without license, ideas in economics and policy sciences which might extract the universe from this mess. He initiated some of the earliest undergraduate climate/energy classes and seminars at Rutgers and is a recipient of several awards for his educational and scientific contributions. He is an active environmentalist, and a co-founder of "Saving Wild Tigers".