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Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice - Event
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September 2014

"A Cubic Mile of Oil" Adult Forum
When: Sunday, September 28 2014 @ 12:15 pm - - 02:00pm
Event Type: Sponsored Events
Contact: Kay Brown (kay_b@uucpa.org)
Where: Unitarian Universalist Church Fireside R
505 E. Charleston
Palo Alto 94306
Description: A Cubic Mile of Oil: Let's Get Real with Energy

PRESENTER: Dr. Ripudaman Malhotra, co-author of book with this title.

A Cubic Mile of Oil is a call for an informed public debate on energy, arguably the biggest challenge we face. The book is a citizen's guide to energy and it makes all the technical discussion accessible and relatable. The current global consumption of oil (about 86 million barrels a day) amounts to 1 cubic mile per year. The world uses another CMO worth of energy from coal, three-quarters of a CMO from natural gas, and smaller amounts from nuclear, hydro, wood and other sources.

By the middle of this century, the global energy demand is expected to rise to somewhere between 6 and 9 CMO. Where are we going to get the energy from? The debate about energy supply has often been portrayed as a tension between the moral imperative of protecting the environment or preserving the economic interests of the energy industry. This simplistic view misses the tougher challenge that we face in balancing the tension between protecting the environment and the moral imperative of providing adequate affordable energy to people around the earth so they may lead healthy productive lives. It is going to take CMOs of energy to alleviate that scourge. Unless our solutions are able to scale to the level of a CMO/yr, we would be just nibbling at the edges.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER: Ripudaman Malhotra is Associate Director of Chemical Science and Technology Laboratory in SRI’s Physical Sciences Division. He is an organic chemist, with a Ph.D from UCLA, and has worked extensively, though not exclusively, in the area of energy. In 2005 he, Hewitt Crane, and Edwin Kinderman co-authored A Cubic Mile of Oil: The Looming Energy Crisis and Options for Averting It, published by Oxford University press in 2010.