Meeting of the Minds Conference: The Innovations We Need for More Sustainable Cities
What Can Technology Do Over the Next 10, 20, 30 Years? with speaker Pravin Varaiya, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley.
The presentation is followed by a Q&A session.
Meeting of the Minds is a two-day leadership conference convened by the University of California, Berkeley College of Environmental Design, with the support of Toyota. The conference focus is on the new technologies, emerging urban designs and cleaner fuels.
Bio
Gordon Feller
For more than 25 years Gordon Feller has been building partnerships around urban environmental and urban transport issues that link private sector, public sector, independent sector and academia.
As CEO of Urban Age Institute he advises governments, foundations and multinational companies on urban sustainability issues. "Urban Age Magazine" was founded inside the World Bank in 1992; an international non-profit - with program activities in Asia, Africa and Europe - was spun off nearly 10 years later.
More than 400 of Gordon's articles, commentaries and editorials have appeared in 100+ magazines and newspapers. In periodicals ranging From the Financial Times of London to TIME and Fortune, Gordon has been arguing for a new and more holistic to seemingly intractable environmental, transport and energy issues.
Feller holds a Bachelors Degree, cum-laude, from Columbia University and a Masters Degree in International Affairs from Columbia University, also cum-laude. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was the recipient of numerous fellowships and scholarships, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student, including: Dean's Fellow at Columbia; NY State Governor Lehman Fellow at Columbia; Ripon Society Fellowship honoring US Senator Mark Hatfield (R: Oregon); Club of Rome Fellowship; German Marshall Fund Fellowship; and Wallach Fellowship at Columbia.
Pravin Varaiya
Pravin Varaiya is Nortel Networks Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley. From 1975 to 1992 he was also Professor of Economics at Berkeley. From 1994 to 1997 he was Director of the California PATH program. His research is concerned with communication networks, transportation, and hybrid systems.
Varaiya has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Miller Research Professorship. He has received two Honorary Doctorates, and the Field Medal and Bode Prize of the IEEE Control Systems Society. He is a Fellow of IEEE, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science. He is an editor of Transportation Research--C. He has co-authored 300 technical papers and three books, including Structure and Interpretation of Signals and Systems (with Edward Lee), published in 2003 by Addison-Wesley.
We can get off most fossil fuels within 20-30 years if we put a concerted effort into solar, wind, fuel cells, electric cars, algae biofuels, and new nuclear technologies.
We also need a new national smart power grid to move electricity.
We can use a carbon tax on fossil fuels to pay for it, and it'll provide millions of JOBS that can't be exported.
Europe & China are ALREADY doing this and America will lose out in future green energy technologies, if we don't.
We owe it to our grandchildren.