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Energy, People and Climate 
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Although the world has entered an economic recession, the fundamental challenge remains – finding enough energy to meet the needs of an expanding world population and doing so without doing more damage to the climate. The time for achieving this is very short and every resource at our disposal will be needed. For the immediate future we have little choice but to continue to use fossil fuels but we must find ways of immobilising their greenhouse gases. For the longer term, how much can we realistically expect from renewables? What new technologies are needed? Is there a role for nuclear energy? How highly do we value energy security and what are we prepared to pay for it?
Lord Oxburgh served as chairman of The Shell Transport and Trading Company until its unification with Royal Dutch Petroleum. He is a member of the House of Lords and a graduate of the Universities of Oxford and Princeton. He has taught geology and geophysics at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and was a visiting professor at Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology and Cornell University.
Lord Oxburgh has been a member of the Science and the Engineering Research Council, the Natural Environment Research Council, and the Advisory Council for Science and Technology. From 1988 to 1993, he was chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence and, from 1993 to 2001, Rector of Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine. He a member of A*star (Advisory Committee on Science, Technology and Research for Singapore), a Fellow of the Royal Society, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Foreign Member of the US Academy of Sciences. He is currently Chairman of D1 Oils, Falck Renewables, blue-ng and an Advisory Board Member at Climate Change Capital.
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November 4th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
[...] world which need to be curbed in order to keep C02 emissions under control (I was at a different lecture by Ronald Oxburgh in Bristol since where he regularly referred to the population explosion around the world and [...]