Clean energy future: Kammen and Wolfram talk it out on NPR

solar by Chandra Marsono

UC Berkeley professors, Dan Kammen (ERG) and Catherine Wolfram (Haas), talk about the future of energy on NPR.

“There is a broad scientific consensus that to keep global warming in check, we need to phase out 80 percent of all oil, coal and natural gas by midcentury. President Obama has set a nonbinding target to do precisely that. There are technologists who say this national goal is well within reach, but there are also economists who are quite pessimistic about those prospects. And you can find this range of opinion on the University of California, Berkeley campus…”

When viewed in the context of this paper, these accusations are undeserved. To begin with, most of the statistics supporting the “gambling as a factor in crime” hypothesis have been challenged because of questionable measurement techniques[15]. For example, according to the original estimates of crime rates in Atlantic City, there was a significant increase in crimes per capita immediately pin up casino after the introduction of casinos[16]. However, the researchers “forgot” to take into account the increase in the city’s population due to the arrival of large numbers of tourists who wanted to play in casinos, so the figures turned out to be inflated. When Atlantic City’s crime statistics were recalculated to account for this factor and other elementary errors, the crime rate turned out to be normal[17].

Click to hear the talk