Join us for the first Baker Center Energy and Environment Forum of the Fall 2015 
semester.  Free & open to the public!

Thursday, September 10, 2015 - 1:00-2:30 pm
Toyota Auditorium, Howard Baker Center

Speaker:  Berrien Moore III, University of Oklahoma & National Weather Center
 
Fossil Fuels and Climate: Humankind’s Faustian Bargain

Environmental concerns today are similar and different from those that catalyzed the first 
Earth Day more than 45 years ago. Water pollution and air pollution led the list then, 
followed by loss of habitat and perhaps species, the concerns were local to regional. 
Today, in many parts of the world, there are similar place-based concerns: shortages of 
clean and accessible freshwater, health threatening changes in the chemistry of the 
atmosphere, severe degradation of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, increases in soil 
erosion, loss of biodiversity, alterations of the coastal zone, and declines in fisheries. We 
now know that human activity has altered significantly the fundamental biogeochemical 
cycle and the planetary carbon cycle with atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide 
(CO2) and methane (CH4) moving into a range unprecedented in human experience. The 
issues are complex and compelling: What do we know? What do we think we know?  
What do we not know? What should we do? What should we not do? How do we undo this 
Faustian bargain?