Amanda Little

Biography

Fossil fuels gave rise to America’s industries, our military, our cities, and our digital economy-- to virtually every aspect of our lives. Amanda Little will describe how energy built the American superpower. She has traveled from deep-sea oil rigs to the guts of the electricity grid and the offices of the Pentagon to understand the inner-workings of America's energy system. She will explain why energy has become the single most important issue of our time, and how the shift to a leaner, smarter energy system will rebuild and renew our economy.

Amanda Little will explain how efficiency and environmental strategy are transforming the most powerful businesses in America. For her reporting in Forbes, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, she has interviewed chairmen and CEOs of Walmart (H. Lee Scott and Mike Duke), General Electric (Jeffrey Immelt), Duke Energy (Jim Rogers), GM (Bob Lutz) and News Corp (Rupert Murdoch), and will offer case studies from these companies to illustrate how sustainable practices are spurring innovation and improving their bottom lines.

The energy landscape is changing dramatically. The cost of solar has come down 80 percent in the last five years; the wind power industry will reach nearly $75 billion globally by 2015, with 235 GW installed capacity. New extraction methods are expanding access to oil and natural gas. Innovation is exploding in algae fuels, super crops, electric cars, liquid batteries, zero-energy buildings, and beyond. Efficiency, meanwhile, remains the cheapest, quickest and least polluting way to meet the world’s growing demand for energy. Amanda Little will describe the most exciting innovations on the horizon in clean-tech and energy efficiency, presenting a portrait of this changing energy landscape.

Climate change is becoming a powerful driver of innovation. The movement to mitigate climate change is growing rapidly on a global scale, and harnessing the internet and social media to drive industrial nations toward cleaner, smarter, more efficient ways of producing and consuming energy. As a professor at Vanderbilt University, Amanda Little has investigated the strategies and tactics of the rising generation of climate activists, she will explain how these young agents of change are using the internet and social media to build a powerful, tech-savvy and dynamic global movement.

Americans are energy-obese. We consume more energy than people in any other developed country, about twice as much per capita, on average, as Britons. Amanda Little will share radical new ideas about energy efficiency, explaining how we can cut the fat from our national energy diet and build a leaner, stronger, smarter, more innovative economy and protect the environment at the same time. This presentation expands upon the concept Amanda Little presented in her New York Times op-ed, “Making Every Oil Calorie Count”: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/opinion/09Little.html?_r=0