The Big Fix: Environment

Our theme is energy and the environment, with a focus on ideas to improve energy efficiency by redistributing costs, not increasing them. Suggestions include planting local vegetation instead of grass, folding car taxes and insurance into vehicle registration and putting solar technology in roads. Our guests are Bob Inglis, director of the Energy and Enterprise Initiative at George Mason University, and Joe Romm, a senior fellow at American Progress.

Guests:

Bob Inglis, Director of the Energy and Enterprise Initiative at George Mason University is passionate about free enterprise solving our energy and climate challenge. He served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Science Committee. Mr. Inglis represented Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina, from 1993-1999, unsuccessfully challenged Democratic U.S. Senator Fritz Hollings in 1998, and returned to Congress in 2005. In the turmoil of the financial crisis he lost his bid for re-election in the South Carolina Republican primary in June 2010. He then became a resident fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University and taught at Duke University before launching the Energy and Enterprise Initiative.

Joe Romm is a Senior Fellow at American Progress. He oversees the blog ClimateProgress.org, which was named one of Time Magazine's Fifteen Favorite Websites for the Environment in 2007. In December 2008, Mr. Romm was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for "distinguished service toward a sustainable energy future and for persuasive discourse on why citizens, corporations, and governments should adopt sustainable technologies." Mr. Romm served as acting assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy during 1997 and principal deputy assistant secretary from 1995 through 1998.