On Thursday, Feb. 11, please join us for the next Energy and Environmental Policy Forum, 
which will take place at 1-2:30 pm in the Toyota Auditorium. Dr. Bart Elmore, from the 
University of Alabama, will give a 45 minute presentation and then lead a discussion with 
participants. His talk is titled:  What the History of Coca-Cola Can Teach Us About
Building An Environmentally Sustainable Economy

Summary: Bart Elmore will discuss his research pertaining to the environmental history 
of the Coca Cola Company and how that history might inform the design of an 
environmentally sustainable economy for the future. Elmore’s findings describe the 
tremendous environmental footprint and remarkable ecological appetite of this company 
which operates in 200 countries worldwide, sells roughly 1.8 billion beverage servings a 
day, consumes over 78 billion gallons of water at its bottling plants each year, and 
purchases copious quantities of sugar, caffeine, and coca leaves from tropical 
communities the world over. 

Dr. Bart Elmore is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama, where 
he teaches courses on U.S. and global environmental and business history. He received 
his Ph.D. in history at the University of Virginia in 2012. He is the author of the prize-
winning Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2015) which 
examines the global ecological footprint of one of the world's largest corporations. Elmore 
is also the author of multiple scholarly articles on environmental, cultural, and business 
history, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California - Berkeley before 
joining the University of Alabama.