About Us – Atlanta Fifty Forward
The Atlanta region has gone global as we continue to lead the nation in population growth, welcoming almost 150,000 new residents each year from all corners of the globe. While this is certainly something to boast about, our position as an international destination means that we now have a new set of challenges we must meet if we are to compete in the global marketplace.
“Fifty Forward: Metro Atlanta Futures Forums” will help frame the discussion of how this region will respond to these global challenges. How these world-wide trends of an ever-expanding and intertwined global economy, technological innovations, developing alternative sources of energy, to name only a few, will affect the issues we deal with here daily is critical to our long-term survival. We hope to spark these discussions through a series of “Futures Forums” over the next two years.
ARC and other community partners will host a series of forums to frame these big ideas and bring the community together to develop action plans. These plans will serve as the basis for ARC’s more “routine” long- and short-range planning efforts.The first forum will discuss sustainability and how we can meet the needs of today without compromising our children and grandchildren’s ability to meet their needs. This means green-friendly building, using renewable and alternative fuels, conservation of land and water – it means becoming better stewards of the environment.
For 60 years, ARC and its predecessor agencies have thought about and planned for the future. Now more than ever we need to look beyond our typical planning and geographic horizons and develop a concrete vision for the Atlanta region’s place on the global stage.
Are we going to be a lead actor, or just someone in the audience watching it happen?
December 11, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Our dependence on imported and dirty energy sources is responsible for many of the most difficult problems we face today. Most experts believe Mexico, one of our primary oil suppliers will switch from being an energy exporter to an importer within five years: (see article here)
Some experts believe our drought may be aggravated by climate change and want to create a national climate change intelligence estimate. In all these things we are doing nothing on the scale required, according to Dr. Robert Hirsch and others. Our work on our website at Ga Tech foresaw this problem ten years ago. Our research identified Space solar power as the alternate energy best able to address both our energy and related environmental issues. The Pentagon’s National Space Security Office has completed their excellent and important interim review of SSP. (The review is here).
As one of the 170 experts in that study and chair of the Business Case Analysis section, we had identified the key legislation some years ago. We call it the Sunsat act which has been drafted here.
The future is approaching much faster than we think. America and Atlanta are unprepared for the transformation that must take place toward clean baseload energy and away from dirty and imported energy sources. We can lead the way with millions of new jobs generated by this transformation.
I will be chairing an invited workshop on SSP for a Pentagon alternative energy conference next month in Washington (Jan 8-10) and would love to share and compare thoughts either before or after then.