 Speech Topics
Building Our Energy Future: Innovation for the New American Century
With a sense of destiny and a desire to create a web of transportation connecting the nation, Congress funded the transcontinental railroad. A hundred years later, President Eisenhower created the interstate highway system; in between, Teddy Roosevelt dug the world’s most massive canal to connect two oceans. With global competition, individual prosperity and better stewardship in mind, Andy Karsner offers a strategy to fund innovation, deploy technology and build out our energy infrastructure with the same ambition of our forefathers. Karsner describes how to best invest in unprecedented, innovative energy solutions with a sense of national purpose. Karsner helps audiences understand these concepts:
· What current solutions exist to substantially address our economic, security and environmental challenges
· Why the attention to profitably investing in deploying technologies and scaling infrastructure must be dramatically increased
· How commercializing and financing energy technology and infrastructure will dominate global energy conversation
· What we can expect from a new era of global leadership leading to productivity gains and emissions reductions, as we increasingly evolve toward domestic clean energy sources
The Environmental Debate Is Over: The Essential Public/Private Partnership
After wasting years arguing whether or not the environment was suffering, government, corporate America and citizens are uniting to simultaneously heal our wounded environment while eliminating our addiction to oil. Accomplishing this feat may well be the greatest challenge of the century. Countless conservation and environmental groups have been beating the environmental drum for decades and are now poised to leverage their talent, members and resources to move the country forward. But what precisely is required from the private and public sectors? In this revealing, high-level presentation, former Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alexander Karsner shares with audiences his views on the following concerns:
· What the new president must do to solve the energy and environmental threats
· How his experiences as part of the Department of Energy relate to progress on the huge task at hand
· How he believes the private and public sectors must work together in a new, comprehensive way to blend environmental and economic goals
A Moral Imperative: Ending the Addiction to Oil and Preserving the Environment
The convergence of threatened national security interests, economy woes and an endangered environment demand a policy and corporate shift from the incremental change of the past to what Alexander Karsner calls “transformational disruption.” The U.S. and global addiction to oil must cease. Heralded by the Wall Street Journal as one of the few policymakers to sound the energy alarm, former Assistant Secretary Karsner challenges audiences not only to embrace research and development for a broad spectrum of alternative fuels, but also to collectively develop a sense of urgency as the global energy demand escalates. In a carefully crafted presentation tailored to your audiences’ needs, Karsner defends the following assertions:
· Why the complex topic of efficiency should be a top-line theme in the energy dialogue
· Why an urgent investment in all alternative fuels – including solar, wind, hydrogen and cellulosic – is an essential part of the conversation
· Why we must simultaneously move away from the expectation that government will unilaterally solve the energy crisis and urge elected officials to embrace a holistic approach to what Karsner calls the “moral imperative of our times.”
About Andy Karsner
Global thought-leader and renowned expert on innovation and economic transformation, energy, technology, policy and capital markets, Andy Karsner emphasizes the key role of innovation for economic competitiveness, global security and environmental sustainability.
As U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy for Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Karsner was America's top efficiency regulator and managed the 2 billion dollar technology office responsible for commercializing new energy sources and presently discharged with disbursing most of the US government's unprecedented "green stimulus."
As an experienced corporate executive and dynamic energy entrepreneur, Andy Karsner led with innovation by example. He has gained global perspective over his 20-year career successfully developing energy infrastructure, collaborating with the most prominent players in global industry in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Friedman singled out Karsner for his "unrivaled breadth and knowledge of energy financing" in his most recent best selling book Hot, Flat and Crowded. The Wall Street Journal recently dubbed him "the wolf in the henhouse" for his unrelenting efforts to keep Washington focused on the role of energy security in the global economy.
Karsner was a principal diplomatic contributor to the new climate change framework presently being negotiated to move beyond the Kyoto Protocol. He is also credited with driving landmark bipartisan consensus and legislation supported by Presidents Obama and Bush, which underlies the current U.S. energy policy framework. Karsner both informs and entertains with unique experience, current and useful insights, authority and passion on the imperative to urgently transform our economy to a more competitive, clean and secure future.
Karsner is the CEO of Manifest Energy group, and serves on the boards of Applied Materials, Conservation International, University of Chicago's Argonne National Laboratory, the Automotive X Prize Foundation and is a Distinguished Fellow at the Council on Competitiveness. He has received top honors from the U.S. Energy Association and the Alliance to Save Energy, the President's Award from the U.S. Green Building Council, and was recently knighted by the King Carl Gustav of Sweden.
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