Hell and High Water

This morning on Exploration, Michio Kaku speaks with physicist Joseph Romm, author of Hell or High Water, about the effect of global warming. Later, he’ll chat with Travis Bradford on his latest tome, Solar Revolution.

About the guests:

Joseph J. Romm (born June 27, 1960) is an American author, blogger, physicist and climate expertwho concentrates on methods of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming and increasing energy security through energy efficiency, green energy technologies and green transportation technologies. In December 2008, Romm was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In March 2009, Rolling Stone magazine named Romm to its list of “100 People Who Are Changing America”. In September 2009, Time magazine named him one of its “Heroes of the Environment (2009)“, calling him “The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger”.

Romm is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he writes and maintains their climate blog, Climate Progress. In 2008, Time magazine named Romm’s blog one of the “Top 15 Green Websites”. In 2009, Thomas L. Friedman, in his column in The New York Times, called Climate Progress “the indispensable blog”, and in 2010, Time included it in a list of the 25 “Best Blogs of 2010”. Romm also writes regularly for several energy and news websites.

In the 1990s, Romm served as Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy. Romm has published several books on global warming and energy technology. Technology Review wrote that his December 2006 book, Hell and High Water, “provides an accurate summary of what is known about global warming and climate change, a sensible agenda for technology and policy, and a primer on how political disinformation has undermined climate science.” Romm’s 2010 book, Straight Up, released in April 2010, is a selection of his blog postings since 2007.

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Travis Bradford is an adjunct professor of management at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and is the president and founder of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, a nonprofit organization focused on harnessing the power of the business sector to develop cost-effective and sustainable solutions in technologies, including energy, water, food, and recycling. “Having traveled in more than 40 countries, I realized that access to some clean, sustainable resources was available nearly everywhere, and that harnessing them was a matter of applying the right technology when it became available at the right price,” said Bradford of what drew him to his field of research. “Change is hard, until the conditions are right-then change is easy.”

Bradford is also currently the managing partner at Atlas Capital Investments, LP, a global hedge fund dedicated to investing in sustainable technology companies in energy, water, food, and materials. Previously, he served as partner, vice president, and senior analyst for Steel Partners II, LLC, in New York; deal principal, senior analyst, and operational consultant at the Holding Capital Group in New York; and statistical and financial analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta before he began teaching at Chicago Booth in 2008.

Bradford has lectured on finance, entrepreneurship, and alternative energy economics at Columbia University, Duke University, New York University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University. His published works include Solar Revolution: The Economic Transformation of the Global Energy Industry, published by the MIT Press, and “Private Equity; Sources and Uses” in the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance. In his most recent publication, Solar Revolution, Bradford argues that solar energy will become the best and cheapest choice for energy over the next 20 years and describes how this change will evolve.

Bradford earned a bachelor’s degree in finance magna cum laude from Georgia State University in 1992 and an MBA in 1996 from the NYU Stern School of Business with distinction in finance, management, and international business. In 2006, he received a master’s degree in public administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.


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