Conference Speakers


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October 30th

Dan Plesch is a Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. He was educated at Nottingham and Bristol Universities and has a BA in History and a qualification in Social Work. In 1987 he founded the British American Security Information Council (BASIC), in Washington, DC, and directed the Council until this year. His research and policy advocacy experience includes: arms control and conflict prevention measures; the European code of conduct on arms exports; the adoption of measures on the control of small arms by a range of multilateral institutions; and successive review conferences of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and the NATO Strategic Concept. His own research has also included Western nuclear weapons doctrine, nuclear weapons safety, US-NATO dynamics, and the politics of intervention. He has written for a wide range of publications including The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post. He is one of the few Britons to be asked to testify to the Foreign Relations Committee of the US Senate.

October 31st:
Morning Session

Colin Campbell obtained his doctorate in geology from Oxford University in 1958 and has worked since as a petroleum geologist with companies including BP, Texaco, Fina and Amoco. He was Exploration Manager for Aran Energy, Dublin, in 1978-9. More recently he has been a consultant to the Norwegian and Bulgarian Governments, and to Shell and Esso. In 1998, he and a colleague, Jean H. Laherrère, were largely responsible for convincing the International Energy Agency that the world¹s output of conventional oil would peak within the following decade. He is the author of two books and numerous papers on oil depletion and has lectured and broadcast widely. He lives in Ballydehob, Co. Cork.

David Frowd heads the energy group in Shell¹s Scenarios Team. The department is known as Global Business Environment (PXG) within Shell International Ltd. David has been a member of the Scenarios team since 1998, and was directly engaged in the building of the 1998 and 2001 Global Scenarios. He has also been involved with the building and use of scenarios at the country and business level. His spheres of interest include worldwide hydrocarbon resource assessment, longterm oil prices and OPEC behaviour. He joined Shell as a petroleum engineer after graduating from Leeds University in Mining Engineering. He has worked in several countries including the UK, Gabon, and Peru, usually in economics or commercial posts such as project evaluation, commercial agreements and acquisitions and divestments. David was head of Joint Ventures for Norske Shell, and from 1993 to 1997 was head of Strategy and Planning in The Hague.

John T. McMullan, B.Sc., M.A., Ph.D., D.Sc., C.Eng., C.Phys., F.Inst.P., F.Inst. Energy, is Professor of Physics and Director of NICERT (Northern Ireland Centre for Energy Research and Technology) in the University of Ulster, Coleraine, Northern Ireland. He has been closely involved with energy R&D, technology and policy for 30 years, and his primary research interests lie in the technical and economic assessment and optimisation of advanced power generation and fuel conversion systems, particularly those based on coal, biomass, waste and other renewable energy sources, and including the analysis of their environmental impacts.

His input into energy R&D, development and policy have included membership of the UK Technology Foresight Energy and Natural Environment Panel and the chairmanship the UK Technology Foresight Energy Futures Task Force. He has also been a member of the UK Technology Foresight Zero Emissions Power Generation Task Force, chairman of EC Steering Committee for Clean Electricity and Heat Production R&D and a member of the UK Technology Foresight Task Force on Clean Coal Utilisation. He has published over 270 books and papers.

Ian Hore-Lacy became Head of Communications with the World Nuclear Association in London in 2001. This effectively expanded his previous and continuing role as General Manager of the Uranium Information Centre in Australia, which he has held from 1995. His function is primarily focused on public information provision via the Web. He now splits his time between London and Melbourne. The Uranium Information Centre was set up in 1978 to provide a clearinghouse for information on uranium and the nuclear fuel cycle for electricity generation. He is a former biology teacher who joined the mining industry as an environmental scientist in 1974. He is author of Nuclear Electricity, the sixth edition of which appeared in 2000. It has been probably the most widely used school resource in Australia dealing with nuclear power.

October 31st:
Afternoon Session

David Elliott is Professor of Technology Policy in the Faculty of Technology at the Open University and Director of the OU Energy and Environment Research Unit. He trained initially as a nuclear physicist and worked for the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell and the Central Electricity Generating Board in Bristol. At the Open University he has been looking at energy policy issues and in particular at renewable energy policy. He is co-ordinator of the Network for Alternative Technology and Technology Assessment (NATTA) and editor of its journal, Renew. See http://eeru.open.ac.uk/NATTA/rol.html

Malcolm Slesser graduated in chemical engineering and worked in the oil, synthetic fibres and nuclear industries before taking up a post at Strathclyde University, where he eventually became Professor of Energy Studies. He has taught in the USA and Brazil, and was for three years head of systems analysis with the European Commission in Italy. He retired to an honorary position at Edinburgh University in 1981 and for seventeen years led a research team in Natural Capital Accounting, fulfilling many contracts, and teaching many foreign and native post-graduate students. He is currently chairman of the Resource Use Institute. He has published ten books, over thirty refereed papers and many articles. He is a well-known mountaineer and Arctic explorer.

Olav Hohmeyer is an economist by training. He studied in the USA (Tougaloo College, Miss.) and in Germany, where he graduated from the University of Bremen in 1980 and received his PhD in economics from the same university in 1989. After two years of research work at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, he joint the Fraunhofer-Institute for Systems and Innovation research in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he did research in the field of energy and environmental economics and policy for 11 years. He is well known for his work on the ŒSocial Costs of Energy¹. Since 1983 he has co-ordinated and lead national and international research projects first as a senior researcher and later as deputy head of two different departments of the institute. From 1994 to 1998 he was head of the Department of Environmental Economics and Management of the European Centre for Economic Research in Mannheim, Germany, where he was responsible for more than fifty research projects. More recently he has worked on new policy instruments to combat global climate change. He was appointed professor at the University of Flensburg in July 1998.

David Fleming read History at Oxford from 1959 to 1963, and then worked in manufacturing (textiles), marketing (detergents), advertising and financial public relations, before taking an MBA at Cranfield in 1968. From 1977 to 1995 he practised as an independent consultant in environmental policy and business strategy for the financial services industry. He edited a manual on the formation and management of investment funds in the Former Soviet Union, which was published in 1995. He was the Ecology (Green) Party's economics spokesman and press secretary between 1977 and 1980. It was at this time that he started to develop the concept of his forthcoming book The Lean Economy. In order to research the economics underlying the concept he took an MSc in economics at Birkbeck College, University of London in 1983 and a PhD in 1988.. He was Honorary Treasurer and then Chairman of the Soil Association, the UK's leading advocate of organic farming, between 1984 and 1991. He has been a regular contributor to County Life, and has published in Prospect and other journals, and in the academic literature. He was editor of The Countryside in 2097, published in 1997, and gave the 2001 Feasta lecture.

November 1st:
Morning Session

Kevin Healion is from Rosenallis, Co. Laois. He studied biotechnology in Dublin City University and environmental engineering in Trinity College Dublin. He is presently completing studies in adult and community education at NUI Maynooth. He worked initially as an environmental consultant, specialising in sewage sludge management and techno-economic analysis of renewable energy production from wood. Now living in Borrisoleigh, Co. Tipperary, he teaches environmental management on the National Diploma and Degree in Rural Development at the Tipperary Institute. His project and research work is focused on the development of bioenergy, particularly wood fuel and anaerobic digestion. He is the current Treasurer of the Irish Bioenergy Association (IrBEA), and Secretary to the COFORD Wood for Energy Strategy Group.

Dr. David Crane holds degrees in Environmental Chemistry, Parallel Computing and Ecological Economics from the University of Edinburgh. He has worked with environmental simulation modelling for over ten years, and has consulted to the European Union, the Australian CSIRO and to private utility companies. He worked closely for many years with the Centre for Human Ecology in Edinburgh, and remains a Fellow of that organisation. He is currently based in Bristol where he divides his time between simulation modelling for sustainability and Information Technology consulting.

Lawrence Staudt received a B.Sc. and M.Eng degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the USA. He worked as engineer and engineering manager of Enertech, a wind energy company involved in the California wind farms in the 1980s. He came to Ireland in 1985, doing research toward a Ph.D. for Enertech at University College, Dublin. During this time Hurley Staudt Associates carried out the first wind energy survey of Ireland. He worked for the Electricity Supply Board for nine years working in the area of power station control systems, and during this time was a founder director of the Irish Wind Energy Association (IWEA) and a vice president of the European Wind Energy Association. He left ESB in 1998 to become the first chief executive of the IWEA, a post he held for three years. He subsequently spent one year with Airtricity in the area of wind farm development, before taking up his present position as a lecturer in engineering at Dundalk Institute of Technology where he is involved in the development of its Centre for Renewable Energy He is a co-director of Celtic Wind Turbines, and holds a patent for an aspect of small generator technology.

November 1st:
Afternoon Session

Nuala Ahern is the Green Party M.E.P. for Leinster. She was first elected to the European Parliament in 1994 and re-elected in 1999. She entered politics in 1991 when she was elected to Wicklow County Council. During her term of office she has been Vice-Chair of both the committee on Industry, External trade, Research and Energy and of the Petitions committee. She is also a member of the Culture committee.

She became involved in politics through community action in Wicklow to prevent sewage pollution in the sea. She is a founder member of the Irish Women's Environment Network, which has made important contributions to the removal of toxic products from the home. She is a longterm anti-nuclear campaigner, beginning with the campaign against a nuclear power plant in Carnsore Point, Co. Wexford in the late 1970s. She grew up in the Cooley peninsula of North Louth which is very close to the plutonium reprocessing plant in Sellafield on the west coast of England. She is an active anti-Sellafield campaigner. She joined the Green Party in 1989 and was a founder member of the Wicklow Greens.

Andy Gouldson (BA, MSc, PhD) has lectured in environmental policy within the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics since 1995. He is also a member of the LSE Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation.

His research focuses on the nature of the relationship between industrial development and the environment and on the influence of different forms of policy and regulation. At the broadest level, his work on the theory of ecological modernisation considers the nature of industrial progress and the ability of modern societies to recognise and respond to the side-effects of continued economic development. He has also worked extensively on environmental policy and regulation where his research has examined the impact that different forms of policy can have on the environmental and economic performance of large and small firms and on the development and diffusion of new technologies. This work has emphasised the origins and influence of different regulatory styles, the existence of various barriers to innovation in regulated firms and the need for policy to establish imperatives, incentives and capacities for change if new technologies and techniques are to be more widely adopted.

Most recently, he has examined the influence that access to information, gained particularly through community `right to know¹ legislation, can have on the relations between regulators, industry and stakeholders in the field of environmental risk regulation. He has also been working with the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency to develop methodologies for Regulatory Impact Assessment.

He is Editor of the journal European Environment and is co-author of the book Environmental Management and Business Strategy (with R. Welford - Pitman Publishing, 1993). His latest books are Regulatory Realities (with J. Murphy - Earthscan, 1998) which examines the implementation and impact of environmental regulation in the UK and the Netherlands and Integrating Environment and Economy (with P. Roberts -Routledge, 2000) which assesses the relations between economic and environmental policies and plans at the local and regional levels.

Anne Trotter is Manager Transmission Accesss Planning at ESB National Grid, where she is responsible for completing the planning studies and analysis associated with transmission connections. She graduated from Trinity College Dublin with an honours degree in Electrical & Microelectronic Engineering in 1990. She joined ESB in 1990 and worked in Distribution Department, Dublin Region and Southern Region before joining National Grid in May 2001.

Dr. Owen Wilson is Manager, Group Health, Safety and Environment with the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) and has been involved in the environment and energy area at national and European level for over ten years. He is a member of the Emissions Trading Advisory Group and Inventory Data Users Group which were set up under the National Climate Change Strategy. He is a member of the Energy and Climate Change Group of the World Energy Council and of the Environment and Sustainable Development Committee of Eurelectric, the representative group of the electricity industry in Europe. He is also a member of the Industrial Board Queen's University Environmental Science and Technology Research (QUESTOR) Centre, which supports applied scientific research and is a Director of Conservation Volunteers Ireland. He has written and co-written papers and reports on environment and energy.

Declan Flanagan is responsible for trading and regulation within the airtricity Group. In this role he is responsible for pricing and forecasting, contract management and relations with regulatory bodies in the various markets in which airtricity is active. Before joining airtricity in 2000 he worked in Energy and Environmental Policy with the Irish Business and Employers Confederation and before that as a consultant in the utilities sector. airtricity is currently developing renewable energy projects in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland and is a leading player in the area of green credits, both through the Renewable Energy Certificate (RECs) scheme and the UK Renewable Obligation.

November 1st:
Evening

Jackie Carpenter BSc CEng MIMechE FRSA is Director of Energy 21 and the current President of the Women¹s Engineering Society. She went to an all-girls school and studied pure maths, applied maths, physics and chemistry at A level. She took a degree in Mechanical Engineering at University College London and worked in a variety of engineering companies for several years. At age 25 she began a career break and raised two daughters, with motherhood as her main occupation for eight years. She returned to work as assistant to the Chief Engineer at a small Johnson and Johnson factory and then joined Vickers (which later became Brown and Root) where she worked for nine years. She started at Vickers as a junior project planner and became a chartered engineer and a senior project manager managing multimillion-pound projects within a few years. Eventually she became the most senior woman engineer in the company and was transferred to London as a member of the UK and Europe strategy team. She has had a great love and respect for the natural world sincde her schooldays and has spent many hours working as a volunteer in nature conservation. The Rio conference in 1992, which set the scene for sustainable development, was a great inspiration and in 1993 she decided to set up her own business and became a consultant in renewable energy. Increasing opportunities to develop more appropriate technologies, in harmony with nature, led her to become part of a team which set up a charity, Energy 21, whose mission is "to generate a greater awareness and understanding of renewable energy". She is now Director of Energy 21 in Stroud, Gloucestershire.

November 2nd:
Morning Session

Bernard Rice works at the Teagasc Crops Research Centre at Oak Park in Carlow where he is Acting Head of the Crop Production and Engineering Department. He is a mechanical engineer, and has worked on farm machinery, crop storage and production and utilisation of energy on farms.

Folke Günther, M.Sc., has a background as a field biologist and as a farmer as well as his university career. He has worked eight years as a lecturer in Human Ecology at Lund University and is a Ph.D. student at Dept. of Systems Ecology, Stockholm University. The title of his thesis is 'Ecological Adaptation of Human Settlements'. One of the conclusions from this work is that ecological adaptation is a good way to attain sustainability. He is also involved with ecological engineers and permaculturalists working on biological water purification.

Dr. Werner Zittel was born in Munich in 1955 and took a diploma in Physics at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in1982. His thesis was on nuclear reaction theory. He was awarded a doctorate in Physics by the Technical University, Darmstadt, in 1986 His thesis was on laser fusion. From 1982 to 1987 he worked at the at Max-Planck-Insitute for Quantum Optics doing design studies for solar pumped laser devices. Since 1989 he has worked at L-B-Systemtechnik GmbH, Ottobrunn, Munich, a small strategy consulting company focussed on sustainable energy and transport strategies. LBST is a founding member of the European Business Council for a Sustainable Energy Future, which acts as business NGO at climate negotiations to promote the enforcement of the Kyoto protocol and to support "climate friendly" policies and technologies. He has been concerned with greenhouse gas emissions ­ particularly methane ­ by industry, scenarios for introducing renewable energy, the analysis of fossil fuel depletion and introduction scenarios and the infrastructural requirements of a hydrogen based energy economy.

November 2nd:
Afternoon Session

Michael Doran joined Rural Generation Limited in 2001 as is business development manager. In 1983 he was the founder partner in a multi disciplinary firm of surveyors, architects and project managers with offices in Northern Ireland and in the Republic. He left the practice in 1998 to work as an Interim Manager specialising in business start-ups, business development and turn arounds. He is a Chartered Surveyor and a member of the Association of Project Managers.

Charlie Pinney was born in Dorset in 1950 and educated at Eton and Nottingham University where he studied both Zoology and Philosophy. Between 1969 and 1979 he farmed 250 acres in Dorset using draught horses. In 1974 he founded the Western Counties Heavy Horse Association. In 1975 he introduced the Ardennes breed to Britain and opened the stud book. He devised the "Heavy Horse Handling Course" for the Agricultural Training Board which became adopted nationally. He still runs training courses in heavy horse use both privately and for agricultural colleges. In 1979 he founded Carthorse Machinery to design and manufacture horse-drawn farm machinery. The business won the Prince Philip Cup for the PINTOW chassis system at the Royal Show in 1996.

Between 1982 and 1986 he was a member of the "History with a Future" project committee evaluating current and potential uses of draught horses. He is a member of the Joint National Horse Education and Training Council Heavy Horse Committee and National Verifier for the NVQ Heavy Horse module and National Standard Setter for the Road Driving Assessment.He has written extensively in the technical press on horse farming.In 2000 he moved to a 600-acre organic mixed farm in Scotland to continue developing new horse machinery.

Tom Woolley is Professor of Architecture at Queens University, Belfast and Director of the Centre for Green Building Research. He has been involved both as a practising architect and as a teacher and researcher in environmental building design for much of his career. For the past eight years he has concentrated on looking at the impact of the building industry on the environment and this has led to the publication of the Green Building Handbook. This work emphasises the importance of the toxic and damaging impacts of conventional materials on the eco system and human health as well as issues such as energy.

A founder member of the UK Ecological Design Association and a member of the committee of the Association of Environment Conscious Builders, he is also a member of the International Board of the Ecological Building Network and the advisory board of the European Green Building Network. He has chaired the Northern Ireland Building Regulations Advisory Committee for the past four years and is a consultant on the Design Advice Towards Greener Buildings Scheme. He is involved in architectural practice with Rachel Bevan Architects carrying out new ecological projects, work with rural community groups and historic building renovation.

Richard Douthwaite was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, in 1942. He worked as a journalist in Leeds, Oxford and London before studying economics at the University of Essex and the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica. He set up and managed a boatyard in Jamaica on behalf of the island's fishing co-ops before spending two years as Government Economist in the British colony of Montserrat. He has lived in Westport, Ireland, since 1974 and he and his wife Mary ran their own manufacturing and mail-order business there with twelve employees for ten years. He then went back to journalism, specialising in business, financial and environmental matters to do with the West of Ireland.

His book, The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet, was first published in 1992 and was re-issued in an extended and up-dated second edition in 1999. A major section of his other major book, Short Circuit (1996) deals with the ways that communities can adopt to make themselves less dependent on supplies of fossil energy.

He has made a special study of rural sustainability and researched and located the bulk of the material for the Certificate in Sustainable Rural Development course offered by the Department of Adult and Community Education, NUI, Maynooth. He is a founder of Feasta and is co-editor of its publication, the Feasta Review. He has acted as economic adviser to the Global Commons Institute (London) for the past ten years, during which time GCI has developed the Contraction and Convergence approach to dealing with greenhouse gas emissions which has now been backed by a majority of countries in the world, most recently the UK. He is currently working on a voluntary basis with groups in Mayo and Donegal on a project that should lead to widespread community investment in wind turbines.



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