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Title:
Energy Futures and City Life
Speaker:
Professor Graeme Lang (Professor (retired), Department of Asian and International Studies, City University of Hong Kong)
Date:
November 15, 2016
Time:
12:00 nn – 1:00 pm
Venue:
Room 201, 2/F, May Hall, The University of Hong Kong (Map)
Language:
English
Enquiry:
(Tel) (852) 3917-5772
(Email) ihss@hku.hk
Most major cities now depend heavily on fossil fuels, which have transformed urban life over the past 150 years, and facilitated globalization of the world economy. But those fuels are rapidly being depleted, and will be mostly unavailable or uneconomical later this century (oil, gas) and the early 22nd century (coal). For most cities, renewables cannot fill the gap, even with greater energy-efficiency. There are no magic technological solutions. It is not too soon to discuss the implications of these inevitable transitions for urban planning, land use, education, and urban activism. The talk aims to stimulate this discussion.
Graeme Lang taught for 24 years at the City University of Hong Kong, retiring as a Professor in the Department of Asian and International Studies in 2014. At CityU, he developed and taught courses on “Energy, Environment, and the Future”, “Globalization and the Environment”, and “Environment and Society in Asia”. Most of his earlier work was in the sociology of religion (including The Rise of a Refugee God, [1993] co-authored with Lars Ragvald, Social Scientific Studies of Religion in China, [2011], co-edited with Fenggang Yang, and Building Temples in China, [2015] co-authored with Selina Chan), but he has turned more to environment-and-resources issues for the past 15 years, with articles on deforestation in China and Southeast Asia, food security for cities in China, eco-city developments in China, and related topics (also co-editing the Routledge Handbook on Environment and Society in Asia, [2015], with Paul Harris).
