The New Oil: Energy Demand and Water torrent

Author and journalist Vijay Vaitheeswaran leads a panel of environmental policy experts dissecting the growing concern over water.

They discuss current inefficiencies and new sources of concern, exploring ways to more effectively distribute and use this increasingly precious resource.

Ken Caldeira - Ken Caldeira is the head of the Caldeira Lab at Stanford University, which conducts research to try to improve the science base needed to allow human civilization to develop while protecting our environmental endowment.
David Harrison - David Harrison is a practicing water resources lawyer in Boulder, Colorado, of counsel with the firm of Moses, Wittemyer, Harrison and Woodruff, P.C. He works as a consultant to The Nature Conservancy acting as senior advisor to the Global Freshwater Team, formerly the Freshwater Initiative, of which he was one of the co-founders. In that connection, he leads the strategic group on Ecologically Sustainable Hydropower. He is currently focusing on the application of that approach at several demonstration projects including the YangtzeRiver Basin in China and the ZambeziRiver Basin in southern Africa. In addition, he is working with the International Hydropower Association in examining ways to transform global standards and practices for sustainable hydropower.

Peter Murdoch - Pete Murdoch is a Research Hydrologist with the Watershed Research Group of the US Geological Survey in Troy, New York. Since 1982 he has lead research projects on watershed biogeochemical processes, and the effects of acid rain and climate change on aquatic systems. In the mid-1990s he served as the DOI representative to the White House Committee on Environmental and Natural Resources (CENR), and lead a pilot of a multi-agency collaborative assessment of the Delaware River based on the CENR 'Framework for Environmental Monitoring and Research". In 2004-06, Murdoch served as the DOI representative to an interagency committee that oversees the North American Carbon Program. He now is leading a multi-agency study on the effects of permafrost thawing on the hydrology, energy, and carbon budgets of the Yukon River Basin.

Michael P. Totten - Michael Totten has nearly three decades of professional work in promoting ecologically sustainable economic development at the local, national and international levels. At Conservation International's Center for Environmental Leadership in Business (CELB), he focuses on engaging the business sector in opportunities to shrink the ecological footprints of their operations and products and advising them on ways to take action to offset these footprints with positive steps, such as preserving threatened biodiversity habitat.

Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran - Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran is a global correspondent for The Economist. He joined the magazine's staff as the London-based Latin America Correspondent in 1992. Two years later, he opened its first bureau in that region in Mexico City. He wrote about political, financial and cultural developments in that part of the world until 1997, when he returned to the editorial headquarters in London. As the newspaper's Global Environment & Energy Correspondent, he covered the politics, economics, business and technology involved in those topics from 1998 to 2006.