Start - 7:00 pm

Introduction - André Droxler (Earth Science Dept. & Director of CSES)

1st Presentation - David Leebron (Rice President) "Opening Remarks by President Leebron"

2nd Presentation - Bill White (Mayor of Houston) "Global Warming Solutions & Sustainability Efforts at the City of Houston"

Forum Discussion #1 - led by Amy Myers Jaffe (Associate Director of the Rice Energy Program)

3rd Presentation - Dominique Raynaud (Paleo-climatologist & Glaciologist, IPCC, Senior author) "Past Atmospheric C0₂ and Climate: A Window to the Future"

4th Presentation - John Hofmeister (President Shell USA) "Alternatives Versus Conventional Oil and Gas: What to Expect in the Next 25 Years"

5th Presentation - Neal Lane (Rice professor and former scientific adviser to Bill Clinton) "Can the US Take a Leadership Role on Global Warming Solutions?"

Forum Discussion #2 - led by Amy Myers Jaffe

Closing - Richard Johnson (Sustainability Director at Rice & Associate Director of CSES)

End - 9:30 pm

John Hofmeister

John Hofmeister was named President of Houston-based Shell Oil Company in March 2005. In this position, he heads the U.S. Country Leadership Team, which includes the leaders of all Shell businesses operating in the United States. 

Hofmeister became President after serving as Group Human Resource Director of the Shell Group, based in The Hague, The Netherlands.

Prior to joining Shell in 1997, Hofmeister served as Vice President, International Human Resources, for AlliedSignal (now Honeywell International), based in Hong Kong. He joined AlliedSignal in 1992 as Vice President of Human Resources for its aerospace business.

From 1988 to 1992, Hofmeister was employed with Northern Telecom, where he became Vice President of Human Resources in 1990.

Hofmeister began his career in 1973 in the international marketing and sales department of the General Electric Lighting Business. During his 15-year career with GE, he held a variety of marketing, manufacturing, and human resources positions in five GE major businesses, including locomotives, telecommunications, factory automation and electric motors.

Hofmeister earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from Kansas State University. During his career, he has lived and worked in North America, Europe and Asia. He is a member of the Department of Energy’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technical Advisory Committee and a member of the Board of Directors, the Executive Committee and the Policy Committee of the American Petroleum Institute. In addition, he serves on the boards of the Foreign Policy Association, United States Energy Association and the National Association of Manufacturers.

Hofmeister is Chairman of the National Urban League, 2007 Chairman of the Greater Houston Partnership and Chairman of the Resource Development Committee of Jobs for America’s Graduates. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources.

Neal Lane

Dr. Neal Lane is the Malcolm Gillis University Professor at Rice University. He also holds appointments as a Senior Fellow of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, where he is engaged in matters of science and technology policy, and in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Prior to returning to Rice University, Dr. Lane served in the Federal government as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, from August 1998 to January 2001, and as Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and member (ex officio) of the National Science Board, from October 1993 to August 1998.

Before becoming the NSF Director, Dr. Lane was Provost and Professor of Physics at Rice University in Houston, Texas, a position he had held since 1986. He first came to Rice in 1966, when he joined the Department of Physics as an assistant professor. In 1972, he became Professor of Physics and Space Physics and Astronomy. He left Rice from mid-1984 to 1986 to serve as Chancellor of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. In addition, from 1979 to 1980, while on leave from Rice, he worked at the NSF as Director of the Division of Physics.

Widely regarded as a distinguished scientist and educator, Dr. Lane’s many writings and presentations include topics in theoretical atomic and molecular physics and science and technology policy. Early in his career he received the W. Alton Jones Graduate Fellowship and held an NSF Doctoral Fellowship (University of Oklahoma), an NSF Post-Doctoral Fellowship (while in residence at Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland) and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (at Rice University and on research leave at Oxford University). He earned Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1960 and was inducted into Sigma Xi National Research Society in 1964, serving as its national president in 1993. He served as Visiting Fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in 1965-66 and 1975-76. While a Professor at Rice, he was two-time recipient of the University's George R. Brown Prize for Superior Teaching. Dr. Lane has received numerous prizes, awards, including the AAAS Philip Hauge Abelson Award, the AAAS William D. Carey Award, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers President’s Award, the American Chemical Society Public Service Award, the American Astronomical Society /American Mathematical Society/American Physical Society Public Service Award, and many honorary degrees.

Through his work with scientific and professional organizations and his participation on review and advisory committees for Federal and state agencies, Dr. Lane has contributed to public service throughout his career. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for Advancement of Science, the Association for Women in Science and a member of the American Association of Physics Teachers. He serves on several boards and advisory committees.

Born in Oklahoma City in 1938, Dr. Lane earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of Oklahoma. He is married to Joni Sue Lane and has two children, Christy Saydjari and John Lane, and four grandchildren, Allia and Alex Saydjari, and Matthew and Jessica Lane.

David Leebron

David W. Leebron became the seventh president of Rice University in Houston, Texas, and a member of the School of Social Sciences faculty as professor of political science on July 1, 2004. Rice is one of the country’s premier private research universities and home to the top-rated Shepherd School of Music, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, and other highly ranked engineering, natural sciences, humanities, and architecture schools.

Upon his arrival at Rice, Leebron began engaging faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community members in a dialogue on the opportunities and challenges that the university faces in the coming decade and beyond. His Call to Conversation produced a strategy, the Vision for the Second Century, which calls for Rice to grow in size and scope, including significant increases in its research endeavors and international collaborations. Leebron also has led a wide-reaching program to engage the faculty and students with the city of Houston through the Passport to Houston and extensive community engagement programs.

A native of Philadelphia, Leebron is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he was elected president of the Law Review in his second year. After graduating in 1979, he served as a law clerk for Judge Shirley Hufstedler on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles. In 1980, he taught torts as acting assistant professor of law at the UCLA School of Law. In 1981, he joined the New York firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, where he specialized in corporate law. He became a faculty member of the New York University School of Law in 1983 and also served as director of the International Legal Studies Program. In 1989, Leebron joined the faculty of Columbia University School of Law, and in 1996 he was appointed dean and named the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law. Leebron also served as a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and Comparative Law in Hamburg, Germany, and as the Jean Monnet Visiting Professor of Law at Bielefeld University.

Leebron has authored a textbook on international human rights and written numerous articles on issues of international trade, human rights, and corporate finance. He is a member of the New York State Bar and an inactive member of the Hawaii and Pennsylvania bars.

Leebron is a member of the Carter–Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform, the Jacobs University Bremen Board of Governors, the Harvard Law School Visiting Committee, Greater Houston Partnership Board of Directors and the board of directors of IMAX Corp. He also serves on the centennial committee for Tongji University in Shanghai, China. In 2006, Leebron was presented with the Commandeur de l’Ordre National du Mérite by the French Ambassador to the United States, Jean-David Levitte, on behalf of French President Jacques Chirac.

Leebron is married to Y. Ping Sun and has two young children, Daniel and Merissa.

Dominique Raynaud

Dr. Dominique Raynaud is research Director at CNRS, the main research institution in France. He is one of the lead authors of the last IPCC report (2007). He has been and currently is also the coordinator of several international ice drilling projects, such as the 6th European framework Project EPICA-MIS, a research program dedicated to paleo-reconstruction and integrated climate analysis through marine and ice core studies.

Dominique Raynaud earned his PhD in Geophysics at Grenoble University ( France). He served, for six years, as Director of the Laboratory for Glaciology and Environmental Geophysics (LGGE), a joint lab between CNRS and the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble. He has been the leader of the French group, which provided the well known CO 2 and CH 4 atmospheric records covering the last 420,000 years and obtained by analyzing the composition of air bubbles trapped in the Vostok ice core (central Antarctica). Those data sets were used as one of the most dramatic and unequivocal figure used by former vice president Al Gore in his documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” to convince large audiences around the world that human activities are drastically changing our environment. Dominique Raymaud testified in several occasion in front of the US Congress and Senate committees and the German Parliament about greenhouse gases, past and future climate changes.

Bill White

Mayor White's leadership has brought Houston together, as shown by his overwhelming re-election to a third term. He uses business practices every day at City Hall to improve service and get things done.

He has aggressively attacked our community's most difficult challenges, such as investment in neighborhood drainage, reform of municipal pensions, holding the line on property taxes with rate cuts and increased senior exemptions, attacking crime hot spots and even faster removal of stalled vehicles to reduce wrecks and traffic congestion.

Americans witnessed Mayor White's hands-on management style when he helped lead Houston's competent, compassionate response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Now in his third term, Mayor White is accelerating work to revitalize our City's most neglected neighborhoods, with foreclosure and hundreds of new housing starts on thousands of abandoned properties. He also initiated a program to weatherize thousands of homes in older neighborhoods, saving homeowners an average of 20 percent on their electricity bills.

In addition, Mayor White has aggressive programs to enforce pollution laws, reduce the flooding impact of new developments, raise high school graduation rates, and encourage more flexible working hours.

Before serving as mayor, White built one of the region's most successful businesses. Previously he served as Deputy Secretary of Energy of the United States, where he helped diversify national energy supplies and saved taxpayers billions of dollars with management reforms. Earlier in his career, he helped build and manage one of the nation's most successful law firms.

For decades Mayor White and his wife Andrea have helped lead numerous charitable and civic organizations. The Whites are parents of three students and attend St. Luke's United Methodist Church.