Events

Physics Colloquium-Solving Today’s Environmental Challenges: A Physicist’s Perspective as a Recent Congressional Fellow

Time: Mar 25, 2016 (03:00 PM)
Location: 236 Parker - snacks in 200 Allison at 2:45 pm

Details:

Bob Bartolo, Ph.D.
AAAS Executive Branch Fellow
Office of Fusion Energy Sciences

Defining and solving hard problems is what physicists do, what we teach to our students, from a cylinder on an inclined plane, analyzing complex data, to describing the behavior of an ideal gas. Solving societal problems involve many additional complexities and constraints. Some of the most challenging societal problems of our time center on addressing the environmental impacts of burning fossil fuels and finding clean, abundant, sources of energy. This talk views possible approaches and solutions to these problems from the perspective of a physicist who decided to leave the bench to try to affect change as a congressional fellow working on Capitol Hill for a year. Some of the themes to be discussed center on what it’s like to work on Capitol Hill as a fellow, the political process and challenges of regulating greenhouse gas emissions, legislation to promote the use of clean vehicles (electric cars and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles), pending energy legislation currently stalled in the Senate, and possible roles of the academic community as constituents.