Charles Komanoff: The Real Energy Crisis and the Way Out

The onrushing climate crisis is overturning decades of conventional wisdom on energy. Our problem isn’t that oil and other fuels are too expensive: it’s that they’re not expensive enough.

Streetblog’s own Charles Komanoff, an iconoclastic economist and committed environmental activist, will outline an equitable, progressive approach to solving the climate and energy crises without bankrupting the poor and the middle class.

Charles Komanoff:

• internationally known energy-economist and transport-economist
• environmental activist in New York City
• deconstructed the disastrous economics of nuclear power as author-researcher and expert witness for states and municipalities across the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s
• “re-founded” NYC’s bike-advocacy group Transportation Alternatives in the 1980s
• co-founded pedestrian-rights group Right of Way in the 1990s
• wrote or edited the landmark reports:
  • Subsidies for Traffic
  • The Bicycle Blueprint
  • Killed by Automobile (pdf)
• co-founder of Greening a Block and co-author of its feasibility study
• wrote his visionary oil-saving report, Ending the Oil Age after witnessing at close range the traumatic events of 9/11

A math and economics graduate of Harvard, Komanoff lives with his wife and two sons in lower Manhattan.