I am a seasoned speaker, adept at presenting complex issues with colourful yet balanced prose. I regularly appear on television, radio and podcasts, speak before professional and academic audiences, and have taught energy technology, science and journalism at both the high school and university levels.
Television
France’s leading cable news network dedicated a year-end debate to Energy in 2013. Part One focused on the what, why and why nots of fracking to produce shale gas and shale oil. Part Two backed out to consider the fate of nuclear and renewable energy in a ‘fracked’ world awash in cheap oil and gas. Joining me were former UNEP director Rajendra Shende, Green Party economist Agnès Michel, and French petroleum lobbyist Jean-Louis Schilansky.
Radio
PRI’s The World called in 2012 for local perspective on a controversial oil pipeline designed to export crude from the Alberta tarsands. Not the Keystone XL project that was then complicating President Obama’s agenda, but one of two Canadian pipelines proposed to pump diluted bitumen through remote wilderness area to the British Columbia coast. The broadcast explored the politics, the environmental implications and the economic imperative — escaping U.S. petroleum refiners’ market power over Canadian oil producers.
More radio:
KUOW The Record, 2021: Cascadia’s climate future
WBUR Here and Now, 2011: Can Human Activity Cause Earthquakes?
WBEZ Worldview, 2018: A World Without Adequate Energy for Computing
Live
In the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdowns and the subsequent shutdown of Japan’s entire fleet of reactors, Japan faced a serious power supply gap. One month after the earthquake I was at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering explaining Japan’s balkanized power grid along with Greg Reed, Director of their Power & Energy Initiative and Dan Sullivan, an executive engineer for Mitsubishi Electric Power Products.
Peter Fairley 